How Much Can I Save With a Heat Pump in Nova Scotia – Electric Baseboards

For this example we’re going to be using electric baseboards. If you have oil hot water baseboards or in-floor radiant heat check out this post and video here.

From the previous post we discussed how much the monthly operating cost of an example ductless mini split heat pump is. That cost was about $62 a month.

In our example we were talking about installing a single unit in an area of your home where you spend the majority of your time. For most homes in Halifax metro this is the main floor of your home.

To estimate how much you can save we need to first get an idea of what it’s costing to heat that area of the home now.

Let’s say there are (3) 1000 watt baseboard heaters in that same area of your home which do the heating. That’s 3000 total watts of power needed when your heat is on in this area of the home.

To keep things consistent we’re going to make the same assumptions we made in the previous post and video which is: Your heating source is on 60-70% of the time to maintain indoor temperature.

Let’s do some math!

Calculating Cost to Run (3) 1000 watt Baseboards Per Day and Month

First we’ll determine how many hours the baseboards are on for in a given day.

24 hours a day x 60% of the time your heaters are on = 14.4 hours

Next we’ll figure out how many Kilowatts the three baseboards are using when they’re on. Remember 1000 watts =  1 kilowatt. So when we divide the total number of watts by three we get number of kilowatts.

3000 watts / 3 = 3 Kw

Next we’ll figure out how many kilowatt hours we’re using since this is how NSP bills us for electricity. We multiply the number of hours the baseboards are on by the number of Kilowatts they use.

14.4 hours x 3 Kwh = 43.2 Hkw

Finally we’ll figure out how much that number of kilowatt hours costs us per day by multiplying it by the current rate from NSP for electricity which as of the writing of this post is $0.14947.

42.3 KwH x $0.14947 / Kwh = $6.32 / day

To get an estimate of what these baseboards would cost in a given 30 day month we simply multiply the daily cost by 30 days.

30 days x $6.32 = $189.60

The average cost to heat that same space with the (3) 1000 watt electric baseboards is $6.32 per day or $189.60 per month.

Compare this to the $62.10 we came up with in the previous post and you can see there are some drastic savings to be had!