It’s not every day that a reporter shows up to your house with a calculator and asks you to do some math. But Jose Juste was up for the challenge.
Juste and his family live in a three-bedroom colonial-style home on a busy street in Newburyport. As he sat in his living room, a minisplit — a type of heat pump — hummed behind him.
Because the family heats the first floor of their house with two of these devices, they qualified for the new Massachusetts seasonal heat pump rate and got a break on their utility bills this winter. The discount comes on the distribution charge on their bills, which covers the cost of the poles, wires and substations required to get electricity to homes and businesses…