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Not really, natural gas has immense exposure to geopolitics and the commodity markets: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/what-drives-natural-gas-pri...

There’s also the argument to be made (this has manifested in other countries) that as gas usage wanes and more homes electrify, nat gas costs will increase as the infrastructure costs are spread among fewer and fewer people

Even if we changed the number to $1M, the overall point remains the same

I suspect it's especially bad with new builds, as new builds are a race to the bottom and every subcontractor is fighting to get the lowest bid. The best way to make it cheaper is skip steps, and that hurts in the long run. Sorry you ended up in that situation, crummy experiences like this set the industry back. For what it's worth, the same corrosion could happen with a traditional AC system too (it's not just heat pumps). But the difference is, often those refrigerant lines don't get as hidden on interior walls as the ones for ductless mini-splits do.

Skilled labor in the US is expensive! Most of the install costs come from labor, not equipment. Tens of thousands of dollars is pretty typical for a heat pump installation.

(For what it's worth, the person you're quoting is referencing a whole home system, either ducted or multi-zone ductless. I think you're referencing a single-zone ductless. Those are cheaper, but still are typically $5-10k installed from a licensed contractor in the states)

I think there's some nuance to that, though. Even replacing a furnace + AC in California amounts to tens of thousands of dollars! It's not that heat pumps are expensive, it's that construction work in general is expensive.

When you frame it in terms of percentage of home cost, it actually feels a lot more reasonable. Robert Bean is a pretty respected voice in HVAC, and shared this article a few years ago (https://web.archive.org/web/20150210053806/http://www.health...). The gist is (and this is focused a bit on new construction, so not entirely apples to apples) that you should budget 3-5% of the home's cost for a bare minimum code compliant HVAC installation. When you look at it in that lens, $20k to replace the most complicated mechanical system in a $3M home is less than 1%.

I recently read a piece about the "Cost disease in services" that was really enlightening (https://growthecon.com/feed/2017/05/15/What-You-Spend.html).

"Productivity growth in the goods sector raises the wage in that sector, but also raises the output of that sector. So the ratio of wage to output - a measure of the cost of a unit of output - stays constant over time. Higher wages in the goods sector put pressure on wages in the service sector, so wages rise over time there. But (taking the exteme position) productivity is not growing in services, and so output is not growing. The ratio of wages to output in services - a measure of costs - is thus rising over time. This is the “cost disease of services”."

While I don't think that's all of it, it is a helpful framing of the economics around these dynamics.

There are some companies out there that are truly price gouging. But many are just pricing around the true cost of labor and to run a construction business. I've done a little writing around this topic too: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/pricing-transparency-peeking-be...

Ultimately, I would love to see upfront prices & operating costs for heat pumps both fall. But there are a lot of tough realities baked into the cost of these systems. They are still a very logical choice for most homeowners at the time of failure. Especially with rebate & incentive stacks in many places, a heat pump actually works out cheaper than a new furnace + traditional AC for many homeowners.

That said, I've found that in most cases (assuming you're on the right electric rate plan, that's a whole other conversation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42763695), most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity. Silicon Valley Clean Energy recently did a study substantiating this: https://svcleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/Bill-Impacts-of...