I was watching some news on the cold snap from over here in Ireland and wow! I hope you're all keeping safely warm. It looks like the kind of weather that you'd need to evacuate I'd you had a heating system failure.
We're probably a lot more like the Bay Area of SF in terms of heating and cooling. It's mostly natural gas fired systems, although almost always water filled radiators and it's just not hot or humid enough to ever require air conditioning. Our summer weather doesn't go much beyond 25ºC (77F) and is typically closer to 20ºC (68F) and winter really only very occasionally dips below freezing. It's typically about 7ºC 44ºF on a mid winter day although you could get the odd day around 0ºC 32ºF. You can get the odd plunge down to fee degrees colder than that but it's exceptional.
SF is probably a bit warmer and colder than here. We more like the Pacific Northwest, but without any continental effect at all.
Heatpumps are becoming a bit more widespread but mostly in new build with near passive house levels of insulation and heat capture ventilation and so on.
Anything I've heard about retrofitting heatpumps to older homes here has been pretty negative. You'd usually only do it with a massive retrofit of insulation and windows.
What's looking promising here is high temp heat pumps that use multiple cycles to get the water output up beyond 60ºC so they're suitable as direct replacement for gas boilers heating traditional radiators that ran at about 70 to 80 Celsius.
If you combine those with geothermal wells or shallow geothermal and solar panels they can really dramatically cut bills.
Running simple air to water or air to air heatpumps here seems to generally end up as more expensive than natural gas and gets lousy reviews. The cost per unit of electricity is relatively high and natural gas remains fairly competitive. I'd guess as more and more wind and other renewal electricity comes on stream, heatpumps will become more incentivised.
If you're outside an area with access to natural gas (and most smallish towns seem to be hooked up to it) you'd typically see pressure jet condensing oil (kerosine/gas oil - heavier heating oils aren't used) boiler in newer systems or just traditional non condensing systems in older.
There's some use of LPG bulk storage tanks too and renewables like wood pellets and also rural heat pump systems usually combined with geothermal sources as it's relatively easy to drill a big bore well if your house is in the middle or nowhere.
We're probably a lot more like the Bay Area of SF in terms of heating and cooling. It's mostly natural gas fired systems, although almost always water filled radiators and it's just not hot or humid enough to ever require air conditioning. Our summer weather doesn't go much beyond 25ºC (77F) and is typically closer to 20ºC (68F) and winter really only very occasionally dips below freezing. It's typically about 7ºC 44ºF on a mid winter day although you could get the odd day around 0ºC 32ºF. You can get the odd plunge down to fee degrees colder than that but it's exceptional.
SF is probably a bit warmer and colder than here. We more like the Pacific Northwest, but without any continental effect at all.
Heatpumps are becoming a bit more widespread but mostly in new build with near passive house levels of insulation and heat capture ventilation and so on.
Anything I've heard about retrofitting heatpumps to older homes here has been pretty negative. You'd usually only do it with a massive retrofit of insulation and windows.
What's looking promising here is high temp heat pumps that use multiple cycles to get the water output up beyond 60ºC so they're suitable as direct replacement for gas boilers heating traditional radiators that ran at about 70 to 80 Celsius.
If you combine those with geothermal wells or shallow geothermal and solar panels they can really dramatically cut bills.
Running simple air to water or air to air heatpumps here seems to generally end up as more expensive than natural gas and gets lousy reviews. The cost per unit of electricity is relatively high and natural gas remains fairly competitive. I'd guess as more and more wind and other renewal electricity comes on stream, heatpumps will become more incentivised.
If you're outside an area with access to natural gas (and most smallish towns seem to be hooked up to it) you'd typically see pressure jet condensing oil (kerosine/gas oil - heavier heating oils aren't used) boiler in newer systems or just traditional non condensing systems in older.
There's some use of LPG bulk storage tanks too and renewables like wood pellets and also rural heat pump systems usually combined with geothermal sources as it's relatively easy to drill a big bore well if your house is in the middle or nowhere.
Little Rinnai wall furnace is keeping interior temps decent so far,but if it falls behind,original to house 1951 Payne floor furnace can be lit off.1998 chevy K1500 commuter truck is nearly unstoppable in deep snow with it's "gov-lock"diffs front and rear 
