This is fairly simple, but could be dangerous given your admitted lack of knowledge about electricity. I'm going to give you the broad idea of the steps with just enough detail to convince you to either get help from a knowledgeable friend or hire an electrician. Otherwise it would be too easy to get hurt/killed, or create a fire or shock hazard. You would need to do the following:

1) Identify which breakers control the heaters, and switch off those breakers.

2) Confirm the wires at the heaters aren't energized, and then disconnect them. You would need to know how to use a multimeter properly to do this.

3) Protect the disconnected, exposed wire ends with wire nuts.

4) Uninstall the heaters.

5) Install electrical boxes that will enclose any exposed cable and the wire nuts; you can't simply leave the cable exposed or shove it back in the wall since code requires that such wires can only be terminated in properly sized and installed boxes.

6) You can only avoid doing step 5 if the other ends of the wires are disconnected inside of the breaker box. This is definitely a good way to get yourself killed if you don't have experience working with electricity.

I am absolutely trying to discourage you from doing this alone because several of the steps probably aren't in your skill set, and you don't have the experience to know if you have done them correctly and to code. Please get help with this.

I would encourage you to have an electrician put your electric baseboard heaters back into usable service with a way to separate them from the rest of the electrical panel so that they can be used as a backup during a power failure with a very modest generator. This would be very cheap insurance against pipe freezing especially since all the wires are drawn and your panel has the capacity.

I wouldn’t count on the same to be done with your geothermal heat pump in emergency mode if your backup electrical elements are not staged. You would then need a much larger generator.

We have a geothermal heat pump and electric baseboard heaters in the basement that have not been used in decades. Their breakers are OFF but I would never consider permanent disconnection or removal.

IMPO

SR

@fsq4cw:

You might want to test/inspect electric baseboard heaters in the basement that have not been used in decades.

This are likely to be 240 V circuits. I suggest you hire an electrician to properly terminate unused wiring and cap off unused circuit breakers in the electrical panel. You can then safely remove disconnected wiring and the baseboard heaters.

"Unfortunately, I don't know where they are on the breaker box."

These are 240v circuits. Don't mess with them. You need to know how to remove the wiring from the breakers and the baseboards and it sounds like you aren't comfortable with any of that. It's just a 30 min job for a licensed electrician.

They're unsightly, no reason to keep them in place if no longer in use. Call an electrician to have the job done safely and properly.

Thanks everyone. I have heeded your cautions and we won't try anything ourselves. When we bought this house 40 years ago, the breaker list wasn't complete. I re-wrote a lot of it many years ago, but it still doesn't cover everything. Much of the breakers that were used for all the ceiling heat and/or baseboard heat were given to the Geo compressor, heater, etc. But there are still a couple empty ones that have nothing written beside them. So........thanks to you folks, we won't be even thinking about removing these ourselves. Thanks so much for your guidance!