A typical electric water heater has an efficiency of 95 percent and costs $350 a year to operate at a unit cost of electricity of $0.11/kWh. A typical heat pump-powered water heater has a COP of 3.3 but costs about $800 more to install. Determine how many years it will take for the heat pump water heater to pay for its cost differential from the energy it saves.

Replacing incandescent lights with energy-efficient fluorescent lights can reduce the lighting energy consumption to one-fourth of what it was before. The energy consumed by the lamps is eventually converted to heat, and thus switching to energy-efficient lighting also reduces the cooling load in summer but increases the heating load in winter. Consider a building that is heated by a natural gas furnace with an efficiency of 80 percent and cooled by an air conditioner with a COP of 3.5. If electricity costs $0.12/kWh and natural gas costs $1.40/therm (1 therm = 105,500 kJ), determine if efficient lighting will increase or decrease the total energy cost of the building in summer.

A house that was heated by electric resistance heaters consumed 1200 kWh of electric energy in a winter month. If this house were heated instead by a heat pump that has an average COP of 2.4, determine how much money the homeowner would have saved that month. Assume a price of $0.12/kWh for electricity.

An air conditioner removes heat steadily from a house at a rate of 750 kJ/min while drawing electric power at a rate of 5.25 kW. Determine the COP of this air conditioner.