cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8503579
seize the means of production
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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electricity is comically expensive compared to gas for heating, I understand that some places don't consistently get to -40 every winter, but many places do.
Heat pumps are popular in VT where it does go down to -40 somewhat regularly. Most places still have a backup heat for the really cold days - either wood stove and/or oil.
heat pumps are great and i love the idea, but for places where it gets really cold your right that backup heat is still required.
I’m on oil (and a renter so it’s not like I have a choice) but a friend of mine is on a heat pump and loves it. She has backup heat too, a wood stove and I believe either heating oil or gas. But most of the time she runs the heat pump and the wood stove.
I have electric so if the power goes out it fucks up the climate control. in the winter it's not so bad because our building gets very warm without any heating, but in the summer its killer because you need AC running 24/7 for it to even be habitable, and sometimes you need extra on top of that.
Yeah, sounds like opposite environments. If you want to prep for that, you can buy a battery operated fan from one of the tool companies (dewalt, Milwaukee, etc) plus one or more of the larger batteries and then put it in front of a window with a tub of water and have the fan blow air from outside over the water into the house and it will cools things down.
Doesn't work when outside is humid.
I have one in Wisconsin, and this last week has had a few exceptionally cold days. Those days, the heat pump doesn't go at all, but most days, it does.
Here's what the usage looks like over the past week:
Dark red is the furnace, light red is the heat pump. Green line is outdoor temperature, and you can see we've had some wild swings over the past week. Yellow line is the 71F inside temp. You can see that even on a 25F day (Dec 6), it was predominantly using the heat pump. That tends to be a fairly typical temperature in a Wisconsin winter most of the time.
its picking u some slack that's for sure. are hydro rates fair out there?
Water is $0.0046/gal.
lol.....canadian/american language barrier. we call electricity hydro here. that's what i mean to say. sorry.
Gotcha.
Wisconsin only has a tiny fraction of hydro power. Mostly natural gas, followed by coal:
https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WI#tabs-4
We have solar on our roof, though obviously that's very limited in the winter.
yeah the reason we call it hydro here is because it connects to hydro dams which we have alot of, but we also have alot of natural gas and then some nuclear reactors as well (Im not far from one)
Fwiw, heat pumps are not comically expensive in operation. They also work in the north of Sweden, so I'm sure that any issues with low temperature operations have been hammered out by now.
I understand that installation can be prohibitively expensive in some markets still though, but this is a problem that can hopefully be addressed.
Sweden has some of the cheapest electricity in all of Europe thanks to all that hydro.
This year my final electric bill was ~ 25 c/kWh. Gas was ~ 8c/kWh (both after distribution costs, and funnily enough for electricity I pay amongst other things a fee to subsidize other people's solar panels' negative impact on the grid).
Not "comically expensive" but to be cost-effective a heat pump must average a COP of at least 3.1 (which is possible in most climates with a decent enough HP), so it's not yet a "jump on it first chance you get" kinda deal because it will take many years to recoup the initial investment. And people remember last year's winter where the electric costs were more than doubled; gas prices tend to fluctuate much less. This makes heat pumps even more of a very long term investment for people who can afford very large surprises in their power bill... Or who have excess PV generation capacity in the winter (that requires a very large house).
Gas is on the way out but all the political sabotage of electricity prices in Europe (nuclear phaseout, asinine financial regulations and fake competition with useless middlemen, misfiring PV legislation meaning PV owners are being subsidized by everyone else, etc.) means it will take a very long time before HP costs drop enough for people flock to replace their existing gas heater with a heat pump.
the other problem is that the electricity is less reliable than the gas (currently here).
Yeah, but gas heat still requires electricity, so that argument is not a great one, though repeated often.
Plus you can add a generator and reverse that advantage, as well as batteries. If you have an EV with a large battery that allows power out, that can be used as a good short-term solution.
An issue for sure, but one that can be remediated by the distributed nature of local renewable production and energy storage - something that gas by its nature cannot do.
-40 sounds insane. There are very few major cities with such cold temperatures. Outside of such extreme locations, heat pumps are very competitive to gas heating if not simply cheaper.
Welcome to North Dakota friend. :(
-50 mean in Oymyakon in january. -67.7 record low.
Yes I totally understand that there are cold places on earth, but I feel like few here understand the meaning of the term major city./s
More seriously I am sure that 90 percent of the world’s population lives in areas where heat pumps are the most efficient method of heating/cooling.
Yes.
Welcome to VT. We have heat pumps but also backup heating sources.
-40 regularly? Yes, sounds like Yakutsk.