Heat pumps and mini splits in Barkley

The houses in Barkley

Barkley is one of the newest parts of Bellingham: single-family homes on platted subdivision streets, townhome rows, and four- and five-storey apartment buildings clustered around the village core. The detached houses are two-storey with a slab-on-grade or shallow crawlspace, engineered trusses, and a mechanical closet on the main floor. Insulation levels and window packages are the best of any neighborhood on this list, which shows up as a genuinely small heating load.

What is probably heating yours right now

Almost everything here was built with a natural gas furnace and a full duct system, and a fair number already have an air conditioner sitting on the pad beside the house. The apartments and some of the townhomes run electric baseboard or wall units instead. So the rebate answer splits by building type on the same street: baseboard units may qualify for the PSE conversion rebate, and the gas-furnace houses do not, because Bellingham’s gas comes from Cascade Natural Gas rather than PSE.

What makes a Barkley install different

The ductwork is already sized for forced air and the electrical panel is modern, so a ducted heat pump goes in about as cleanly as it ever does — often on the existing lineset penetration and pad if there was an AC condenser there. What slows Barkley jobs down is paperwork rather than pipe: many of the subdivisions and every one of the townhome rows has an association with rules about where mechanical equipment can sit and how loud it can be at the property line. Get the placement approved before we order, and pick a unit whose published sound rating you can point to.

Sizing for 19°F

Every Bellingham address shares the same code design temperature — 19°F at station Bellingham 2 N, colder than Sea-Tac's 24°F. What differs street to street is the envelope. A 1910s one-and-a-half storey with knee walls and original single glazing carries a very different load from a mid-2000s two-storey built to a modern code, even at identical square footage. That is why we run the load rather than multiplying square feet by a constant.

We know the streets

If you are near Barkley Village, the Barkley Boulevard trail network, Bellingham Golf & Country Club, we have worked nearby. Ask and we will tell you honestly what we have run into on that side of town.