Yes, they work here. And the reason is a single number that almost nobody brings up on an estimate.
Your neighbour isn’t lying to you. Somebody’s heat pump did leave them cold. But “heat pumps stop working when it gets cold” is a statement about a temperature, and the temperature that matters is the one your house actually sees in January. In this region, that number is mild enough that the whole question mostly dissolves.
Let’s go through it properly, because you’re about to spend real money and you deserve to understand what you’re buying.
The number the argument turns on
Heating equipment is sized against something called the winter design temperature. It’s the cold-weather benchmark a system is expected to keep up at, not the coldest it will ever get, but the temperature the design has to handle as a normal condition.
For Vancouver and Richmond, the National Building Code of Canada 2020 puts the winter design temperature at -7°C. Across the rest of our service area it ranges from -7°C to about -10°C, colder as you move east and uphill. A home in Coquitlam or the upper parts of the North Shore is designed to a slightly colder condition than one in Ladner.
Now hold that against the places heat pump horror stories usually come from. -7°C is not Winnipeg. It isn’t Edmonton, Calgary, Prince George or northern Ontario. Those places have design temperatures far colder than ours, and a heat pump there is a genuinely harder engineering problem. If your neighbour’s story came from a relative in the Prairies, or from something they read that was written for a national audience, it was answering a different question about a different climate.
Metro Vancouver’s winter is mostly wet, grey and hovering a few degrees either side of freezing. That is close to the easiest heating climate in the country for this equipment.
“Rated capacity” is published, not promised
Here’s the part that should settle it for you. A cold climate heat pump’s heating capacity at low outdoor temperatures is a published figure from the manufacturer. It’s in the technical documentation, in a table, at specific outdoor temperatures.
So when we specify a system for your home, we’re not hoping. We take the design temperature your house sits at, we look at what the equipment produces at that temperature, and we compare it to what your house needs. Both sides of that comparison are numbers on paper.
Yes, a heat pump makes less heat at -5°C than it does at 5°C. That’s real physics, and anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling. But “less heat” and “not enough heat” are different statements. A cold climate unit chosen against our design temperature has capacity in hand at the coldest part of a normal Metro Vancouver winter. The old reputation comes from an earlier generation of equipment and from much colder places, and it stuck around longer than it deserved.
So what actually went wrong at your neighbour’s house?
Almost every heat pump that disappoints a homeowner here failed for one of a small number of reasons, and none of them is the outdoor temperature.
It was sized wrong. Both directions cause problems. Undersized, and it can’t keep up on the coldest week. Oversized is the more common and less obvious failure: the unit satisfies the thermostat fast, shuts off, then starts again a few minutes later. That’s called short cycling, and it wears equipment out while delivering worse comfort. The City of Vancouver’s own multiplex electrical guide makes the same point about oversized heat pumps short cycling, which is worth noting because that document has no equipment to sell you. We’ve written more on that in why you shouldn’t oversize a heat pump.
The ductwork couldn’t carry the air. A heat pump delivers supply air, the air coming out of your registers, at a lower temperature than a gas furnace does. That means it moves more air to deliver the same heat. Ductwork that was adequate for a furnace can be marginal for a heat pump, and the symptom is rooms that never quite get there.
It was set up as though it were a furnace. Heat pumps are happiest running long and steady at a low output. Set back the thermostat five degrees overnight and demand it all back at 6 a.m. and you’ll spend the morning on backup heat wondering why it feels weak.
Nobody ever calculated what the house needed. If the sizing came from a rule of thumb and a glance at the old equipment, the number was a guess. Our post on what a heat load report actually is walks through what a real calculation involves, and my friend’s heat pump doesn’t heat their home goes deeper into diagnosing a system that’s already in.
A heat pump that was sized to the load, connected to ductwork that can carry the air, and set up to run the way it wants to run is a very different machine from the one in the story you heard.
Rain matters more here than cold
This is where our climate gets genuinely interesting, and where a post written for Ohio would be wrong.
Any heat pump running in cold weather collects frost on the outdoor coil, because the coil is colder than the outside air and moisture condenses on it. To clear it, the unit runs a defrost cycle: it briefly reverses, warms the coil, melts the frost, then returns to heating. Perfectly normal. You’ll hear it, you may see steam off the outdoor unit, and it lasts a few minutes.
Our winters are damp. Lots of moisture in the air at temperatures right around freezing is exactly the condition that produces frost, so heat pumps here defrost more often than they would in a dry cold climate. That’s not a fault, it’s the machine doing its job in a coastal climate. But it does mean two things are worth caring about.
First, drainage. Melted frost has to go somewhere, and the outdoor unit needs to sit up off the ground on a stand or pad with clear space underneath so meltwater drains away instead of pooling and refreezing at the base of the coil.
Second, placement. Not tucked under a low deck, not boxed into a narrow sideyard with no airflow, not where a downspout empties onto it. A unit that gets good air and drains properly handles a Metro Vancouver winter without drama.
Do you need to keep the gas furnace?
Short answer: not for capacity reasons. A properly specified cold climate heat pump can carry a Metro Vancouver home through winter on its own. We install all-electric heat pumps here as normal practice, not as an experiment.
There are still good reasons some homeowners choose a dual fuel system, which pairs a heat pump with a gas furnace that takes over at the coldest end:
- The existing furnace is relatively new and in good shape, so keeping it costs little.
- You want a second heat source available if the power goes out, and your furnace can run on a generator or transfer switch.
- Your electrical panel makes an all-electric setup awkward, and dual fuel avoids that work for now.
Worth knowing before you decide: rebate eligibility isn’t the same across these choices. Heat pump and ductless mini split installs can qualify under CleanBC Better Homes, and heat pumps can qualify under BC Hydro’s rebate as well. Dual fuel systems, furnaces and boilers do not qualify under CleanBC. Amounts and eligibility rules change, so check the CleanBC Better Homes and BC Hydro program pages for current terms rather than taking a number from anyone’s blog, including ours. If you’re currently heating with electric baseboards, ask about the BC Hydro rebate specifically, since it’s available at any income level.
Dual fuel is a legitimate choice made for legitimate reasons. It just isn’t the fix for a problem our climate has.
If you’re collecting quotes
Ask each company what design temperature they used for your address, and ask what the equipment’s rated heating capacity is at that temperature. Both answers exist on paper. A company that can give them to you has done the work. A company that changes the subject has told you something too.
When you’re ready, you can book a free, no-obligation assessment or call us at (778) 800-8868. Our starting prices are published, so you can get a sense of where prices start before anyone comes to your door.