Heat pumps and mini splits in Puget

The houses in Puget

Puget is tract-era Bellingham on the slope between Lakeway and the Sehome ridge — three-bedroom ramblers and split-entries built to a handful of repeating plans, with attached garages and daylight basements where the grade allowed it. Framing is conventional, floors sit over crawlspaces or basement slabs, and the original aluminium windows are still in place on a lot of them. Because the plans repeat, the load calculation for one house tells you a great deal about the next.

What is probably heating yours right now

This is original-electric-furnace territory. Many Puget houses were built all-electric with a resistance air handler in the garage or a utility closet feeding sheet-metal ducts, and a meaningful number are still running that same equipment fifty-odd years later. Bedrooms in the non-ducted plans are on baseboard. Either way you have electric resistance heat, which is the qualifying existing system for PSE’s $1,500 conversion rebate — $2,400 if you qualify for Efficiency Boost.

What makes a Puget install different

Replacing an electric furnace with a ducted heat pump in Puget is one of the best-value projects in the city: the duct system, the return, the 240-volt feed and the electrical capacity are all already there, so the money goes into equipment rather than infrastructure. What we check first is the duct system itself, because a resistance furnace tolerates high static pressure and a heat pump does not — leaky boots and undersized returns will show up as poor performance in February if nobody looks. The split-entry plans need the air handler orientation planned around the low basement header, and on the sloped lots we keep the condenser pad above the runoff line.

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 the Lakeway Drive corridor, Bayview Cemetery, Puget Street, we have worked nearby. Ask and we will tell you honestly what we have run into on that side of town.