Editor’s note: My company, Vayu, installed a new heat pump HVAC system for Jimmy earlier this year as part of the California Heat Pump Group Buy. If anyone was primed to electrify, it was Jimmy. He put solar on his roof in 2002, built his own electric Porsche in the early 2000s (seriously, he was on CNN, it’s super cool!), and co-founded the Citizen Air Monitoring Network in Vallejo.

He’s the kind of person you’d expect to have a heat pump already. Yet, he spent a year and a half (!!!) collecting heat pump bids, debating whether to replace his furnace that still worked, and watching the federal tax credit expire while he decided.

That's exactly why I wanted to share his story. Getting a heat pump is a big decision, and feeling stuck is normal, even for early adopters! Jimmy's experience is a great snapshot of what gets people unstuck. I've reproduced it here with his permission, with only light typo fixes.

My old HVAC system, a 4-ton Trane, was installed in 2003. It was loud, inefficient, and an electricity hog.

Our house was built with an electric kitchen, so no gas stove, and the water heater was replaced in 2019 with a heat pump hybrid. The clothes dryer is also electric.

Therefore, the furnace was our last gas appliance. I knew that eventually we would go all-electric and get rid of the small but annoying PG&E monthly gas charges whether you use gas or not. And during winter months when the heater fires up, the gas bill was very high.

Although the Trane AC and furnace were pretty reliable with only a couple of issues in its ~22-year life, I had the feeling that it was going to fail sooner or later.

One thing I knew - I wasn’t willing to go through the trouble and spend money to repair an old, inefficient unit, and will surely opt to replace with heat pump, rather than repair.

However, I didn’t want to get caught in an emergency situation, such as HVAC failing in the middle of a heat wave, or during a winter cold snap, with installers fully booked. That’s when one makes rushed and costly decisions, a scenario which I wanted to avoid.

On the other hand, there’s this compelling argument of driving it until the wheels fall off.

What a dilemma.

For sure I wasn’t going to do a like kind replacement when the time comes. In fact, our home warranty insurance carrier offered a preemptive furnace replacement program and sent out their chosen contractor. Not appealing at all. An expensive, low-efficiency unit was proposed, which I promptly declined. They didn’t want to do a heat pump either.

I sought out bids for heat pump HVAC from several installers over a year-and-a-half period, including companies that I know locally, and those that promoted aggressively on the internet.

I wanted to take advantage of the federal tax credit, as well as available local rebates or incentives. Most rebates worked through installers, and were not very transparent. In fact, there was no 100% guarantee that rebates were not fully spoken for.

Bids I received were overpriced, in my opinion. One vendor had a nice low bid, but the unit might not qualify for federal credit because of efficiency insufficiencies. Then the One Big Beautiful Bill rolled along, and so did analysis paralysis. My inaction allowed the potential $2,000 tax credit to expire at the end of 2025.

Be afraid. When you see their internet profile with dozens of employees and sparkling new trucks, to me it means big overhead, expenses that will be passed on to the consumer.

Then I met Shreyas in a series of online meetings with the Bay Area Air District’s Implementation Workgroup for small appliance conversion.

That was my introduction to the group buy concept, and I followed his online presence diligently.

I got in touch with him, explained my situation, and he understood where I was coming from. No pressure.

I invited Shreyas to come over to assess the situation, because my house has some peculiarities.

First, we’re located in a maritime microclimate next to the water, and it is protected by hills on 2 sides.

Second, early last year we completed insulation projects on the house envelope by putting stucco over the existing engineered wood siding and replacing all windows with energy-efficient ones.

The result, many Goldilocks days where inside is neither too hot nor too cold, reducing the need for air conditioning or heat.

Shreyas did his measurements and calculations, and what surprised me most was the proposal for a 2 ton unit. As mentioned earlier, my existing unit was 4 tons, and all the other vendors defaulted to proposing 4 tons as well. He was confident with his calculations, and it eventually made sense to me. This very same house if located in a different microclimate, like Concord or Vacaville, will likely need 4 tons. He used his tools to not rely solely on old rules of thumb using square footage alone to size the unit.

The price Vayu proposed was budget-friendly. Not only that, they made me aware of a rebate provided by an energy consolidator, Marin Clean Energy. Fortunately, we’re located in one of their service areas, and I was able to switch from PG&E to MCE.

We’ve been approved for the rebate, and the 3rd party processor is backlogged, but it should be here in a few weeks. All thanks to the diligence and hard work of Sara Conklin, Customer Operations Manager at Vayu.

With the new heat pump in place, we were able to get PG&E to remove the gas meter and cap the gas line.

Mission accomplished.

No NOx home.

Electrical consumption of both the outside unit and air handler is minuscule compared to the old HVAC unit. I know this for a fact, because my electrical panel is equipped with Emporia Vue, monitoring practically every circuit in the house.

The Heat Pump unit was installed with an intelligent thermostat, which made it easy to program it to behave consistently with the way heat pumps should. It is best to just set your comfort level and let the heat pump do the work, preventing stressful stops and starts the way a conventional system would.

As I write this on a cold, rainy morning, the heat pump is running in heat mode, pulling 863 watts, and the air handler is on variable speed, currently pulling 84 watts. That’s heat for the entire house. In comparison, that’s a lot less than the old space heater that uses 1,200 watts to heat my small office.

In conclusion, I’m very happy with the choice I made and with having participated in the California group buy program.

Jimmy's path to an all-electric home started with a "Don't get mad, get even" attitude after the 2000–2001 California electricity crisis, when rolling blackouts hit and electric rates skyrocketed.

In late 2002, he installed a small 2.1 kW rooftop solar system, put in by a company that cut its teeth building off-grid systems in the Mendocino and Humboldt mountains. It went live with PG&E approval in early 2003. 2.1 kW was all they could put on his limited rooftop, considering the technology at that time.

When the house needed a new roof in 2019, the aging panels were inefficient and no longer code-compliant. So Jimmy pulled an owner-builder permit with the city, bought equipment directly from a solar wholesaler, and had a friend (a lead installer for a solar contractor) install a new system in one weekend. He saved roughly 50% versus traditional quotes and more than doubled his output with newer panels and micro-inverters, while keeping his original, grandfathered PG&E interconnection agreement. The old panels found a second life powering water pumps for a community garden.

More recently, Jimmy adopted plug-in solar a full year before California's SB 868 (the Plug and Play Solar Act) took effect. He sourced brand-new panels on Craigslist and chose equipment with the safety features and certifications the new law required.

He's now finishing an "El Niño Proofing" project: LiFePO4 batteries, charged by standalone solar panels (with a standby gas generator as a last resort), that keep his refrigerators, internet, and mesh system running in the event of extended power outages. The same batteries provide power to three hydroponics systems, weather and air monitors, Home Assistant, a security camera, and the lights and fans in his toolshed.

Long before electric cars went mainstream, Jimmy converted his Porsche to electric, a project that drew attention from the local press.

Watch the conversion video below, or browse his build blog.

Jimmy is a co-founder, Treasurer, and board member of the Citizen Air Monitoring Network, which has received grants from the Bay Area Air District and the California Air Resources Board, among others.

Working closely with the UC Davis Air Quality Research Center, the group has deployed "Aggie Air" volatile organic compound monitors throughout Vallejo, along with CARB-funded black carbon monitors that measure vehicle exhaust in strategic areas of the city.