Title is not really accurate: 1. Electricity is not free in Germany, it's actually expensive; and 2. Germans do heat their homes.
Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
191–200 of 397 posts
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not the OP, but share his views. I wash my clothes in the washing machine, then hang them to dry, that's all there is to it. It takes time (about a day) and some space for the clothes hanger in a rather small apartment, but that doesn't bother me.
Thank you. But how do you hang wet clothes and not ruin your floors? Sorry if I sound stupid. American apartments aren't set up for this and I would rather handle it this way and I've had challenges.
If your washing machine spins your clothing at 900-1400 RPMS, it should be simply wet, but not dripping wet.
Never saw a drop on my floor.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heat pumps vary widely in efficiency based on temperature and you don’t mention what you are using. It isn’t just efficiency but size. A heat pump that can work on the occasional very cold day is impractical.
Modern air pumps work with good efficiency even down to around -15c which is a rare temperature for post global warming world.
Aren't air pumps less power efficient then ground ones?
Also, is it possible for air pump to heat a liquid in pipes?
I mean can I have air pump that provides heating to the floor?
If the floor is warm then body thinks it is warm.
I know air pumps only as air conditioners and they just blew warm air around, which is not that comfortable if you are just where the warm wind blows :)
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#194I'm rather a noob in the topic, but I've been reading in recent months about energy market and it seems like a collective insanity in the light of the climate crisis. - In most(whole?) Europe, electricity used by trains is taxed higher than jet fuel used by planes (legacy measure from decades ago which was meant to boost air market; of course now it's hugely difficult to change it) - Germany went strongly into renewa…
Nuclear wouldn't have been a feasible solution in Germany in the long run, because it is just too expensive. You may argue that the shut down of running plants was premature, but nuclear subsidies eclipsed those of renewables by quite a margin. Building new reactors isn't easy, France is struggling with it for example, although I don't think their strategy is bad.
> you can never reach 100% renewables
partly true, partly wrong, depending on your infrastructure and topology, but there are other options to satisfy a CO2 neutral base load than nuclear.
CO2 emission are actually dropping, although far too slow to call it healthy.
The per capita output is somewhere in the middle of industrial first world countries. Sometimes better than countries employing nuclear power, sometimes not. I think the effect is sometimes overestimated. It may be better than coal, but it should be noted that newer coal plants replace older ones that are more inefficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#195I recall talking to some europeans and they said they like their driers, which only half dry clothes (they put them up on a line to finish) but use less energy. It's some sort of virtue thing, I guess.
Advertising is far ahead of you: the driers have a feature to keep the clothes just damp enough for perfect ironing. The same driers have A+++ energy ratings, because progress. They carefully avoid hinting at a connection between these two because the virtuous ones are not in the market for a drier.
And most appliances reach their A+++ rating by including a special "Eco" setting(s) that in practice many users opt not to use in their daily routines.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#196Using electricity to heat buildings should be one of the last steps to take, after almost everything else using energy is renewable. Electricity is a precious form of energy, while heat is primitive. Converting in both directions is not lossless, so you want to keep the precious form. The author makes it seem like that the negative prices are constant, which is not the case. Germany also does not have 100% renewable…
I don't know why you are downvoted because this is pretty correct. Electricity is the most valuable form of energy that currently should only be used for heating in exceptional cases if no alternatives are present.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#197I recall talking to some europeans and they said they like their driers, which only half dry clothes (they put them up on a line to finish) but use less energy. It's some sort of virtue thing, I guess.
Overdrying clothes damages them. Hang-drying clothes increases the clothes' longevity.
Damage of clothes through the washing/drying cycle is mostly the result of the kinetic energy they are exposed to in the process. Keeping a lower net weight load, and reducing the rpms in the spin cycle can have a large impact on longevity.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#198Here in UK on certain tariffs (Octopus Agile) price of electricity regularly falls below zero at night. If you have an electric car set to only charge when price of electricity is below zero, you're getting paid to charge your car.
Being in the UK myself, I'm curious about this. Does Octopus provide the price of electricity at the current moment? I had a quick look at their website but couldn't see anything obvious.
Yes, you get an app and you can see the current and historical prices, in 30 minute increments.
Looks like this:
But if you want, you can also export all of the data as an excel spreadsheet.
Some car chargers(OHME for example) can read this data in real time and only start charging when the price per kWh falls below a pre-set level.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s. I wonder why they don't find a location on planet which is most stable, away from human settlement. Then create a nuclear reactor large enough to meet all the world requirement for electricity and supply it t…
Because the cost of transmission will be even higher. Moving large amounts of electricity over large distances is hard; it’s much cheaper to move gas or oil.
Not any more. China's longest power transmission link is 3324 km. 1.1 megavolts DC. 12 gigawatts. Running for over a year. Equivalent to moving 30 million tons of coal per year.
China's cheap power sources (coal and hydro) are in the northwestern part of the country, and the big loads are in the southeastern part. So many HVDC links are going in.
The US's biggest HVDC link is Oregon to California, opened in 1970.
Re: Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lint in the lint trap comes from somewhere, and I really doubt that much material is flying off of air dried clothes.
Judging by the color of my lint, 99% of it comes off bath towels rather than clothing. At least, with my towels and my clothing. (My towels are a very distinct shade of red, a color I never wear. The lint is the exact same color.)
Lower quality towels have a very loose weave that easily comes apart both in the washing and in the drying. Some of the very worst, in my case Eastern European, towels are so bad that they show near bald spots after just 3 washing cycles.