However heat pumps just don’t seem to make any sense, and the more marketing materials I read critically, the less convinced I am of their practicality, nor the integrity of the vendors - if they work similarly to air conditioning units or refrigerators why do they cost 20x as much as those devices?

A refrigerator cools a fairly small volume with excellent insulation, which allows it to use a fairly small compressor running at a single speed. This is cheap.

The big differences between typical air conditioning units and heat pumps are:

• they’re set up to move heat both ways (eg: both heating and cooling) which requires a tiny bit of additional hardware
• They often have a more substantial compressor to handle the larger temperature difference associated with colder temperatures
• They’re a lot more likely to be a system intended to support the whole home instead of a single room
• People care about efficiency, which has variable-speed systems getting installed
• There’s a lot of demand for them right now, and limited supply

I can see how that could happen for some homes. Worth doing the calculation though, since it can be cheaper if the pipes are adequate.

The big reason somebody might want air to water is that it enables a low-cost retrofit of an existing heating system which uses water to distribute heat. Definitely not what I’d choose if designing from scratch, but I can see how it makes financial sense in a lot of homes.

And yes, induction is amazing, but there are a whole bunch of people who have been marketed into treating gas stoves as their personal identity.

He’s not mentioned of being one of them; just all the people around him. I figure he types in the address by hand to check in.