121–130 of 494 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always joke that in winter all appliances are 100% efficient (I know they're not). Some look at me funny but the ones who pay the gas bill get usually get it.
And incandescent light bulbs!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a resistance electric furnace, that is essentially true. With gas, you add the electric generation and distribution losses, which is a pretty big difference. It does cost more to run an appliance than to heat with gas.
Gas boilers produce NO2, and other nasties - they do affect air quality in your house
Surely properly installed gas boilers always did that even without balanced flues too.
Why can’t my whole home participate in this technology? It would seem an ok fit for things like freezers, refrigerators, hot water heaters, etc. When it’s freezing cold outside, it seems crazy that I warm the air of my house and then use electricity to keep the fridge cooler than the air I just heated. Someone needs to make a standard for moving heat/cool through all appliances in a house…
It can be implemented as a single line of force water flow with 20-25 Celsius. It is viable as both a heat source and a heat sink at the same time.
This thing can be connected to both your coolers and heaters, and thus transfere heat from one to another. Maybe you could even get you desktop computer into the loop.
Usually it implemented on a lager scale, but i don't see why this would work scaled down.
In 2017 we installed a very efficient air-source heat pump and solar panels. My electrical utility offers 1:1 buyback of electricity so I am able to build up a credit in the summer and run the heat pump well into the fall and winter on that surplus. The system is sized for cooling the house which means that it is undersized for heating, but during cool fall and spring temperatures it operates satisfactorily as a heat…
Still waiting for one of these people who rave about their heat pump system to actually rely on it full time without a backup. Most folks could barely afford to replace an existing furnace in a place that has all the fixtures installed, much less pay to install a second one based on different setup, and then pay for maintaining two systems on top of everything else. It is absurd to think that this is a plausible way…
I live in a heavily populated area with high standard of living, and yet we have had power outages lasting up to a week in the years we've lived here. Almost all in the winter, but also some due to hurricanes. We have have solar, which is great in the summer heat, but not as wonderful in the winter. We have air source heat pump, but also oil furnace backup.
We normally run the heat pump when its above 35F, as the efficiency of the heat pumps drops like a rock below 40F and its just not worth running below 35F. The heat pump is not an ancient POS. It works great 99% of the time, but 1% of 365 is 3.65 days per year. Banking on "most of the time" to be alright all of the time is foolish.
We have diesel generator in case of power outage, which allows us to run the oil furnace using the same fuel as the furnace. This strategy has allowed us to ride through many 1% case scenarios without drama.
Why can’t my whole home participate in this technology? It would seem an ok fit for things like freezers, refrigerators, hot water heaters, etc. When it’s freezing cold outside, it seems crazy that I warm the air of my house and then use electricity to keep the fridge cooler than the air I just heated. Someone needs to make a standard for moving heat/cool through all appliances in a house…
> it seems crazy that I warm the air of my house and then use electricity to keep the fridge cooler than the air I just heated The fridge is simply moving a little of the warmth in your room out of its box, and adding a little more warmth to the room in the process. You lose no heat from the room, which is what matters, really. It would be worse to dump the heat outside! At least in winter. The heat has to be removed…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fridge isn't the biggest energy hog in the house, but I'm very sympathetic to the absurdity of heat levels in a house. I often see my HVAC cooling when the set-point temperature is actually _higher_ than the outside temperature. Logically, the house is a heat generator, it makes sense physically. The roof is black, etc. It would offer a good number of benefits if the system could outright open a duct to the outdo…
I've built/retrofitted and a prototype of mechanically operated louvres with push/pull fans for air exchange in an old school building, tied to the thermostat, ac, and a CO2 detector. The idea of doing the same in my home has been taunting me for years now. Ideally you'd have two such louvres, one with a push fan in the upper floor and the other with a pull fan in the lower floor to simultaneously eject unwanted heat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fridge is heating your home, so that reduces the burden on whatever is heating your home. The coil on the back gets hot.
> The fridge is heating your home Not really, efficienty aside the heat it puts out the back is coming from inside the fridge... Which is coming from the room housing the fridge. So over the course of a day it should be neutral.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still waiting for one of these people who rave about their heat pump system to actually rely on it full time without a backup. Most folks could barely afford to replace an existing furnace in a place that has all the fixtures installed, much less pay to install a second one based on different setup, and then pay for maintaining two systems on top of everything else. It is absurd to think that this is a plausible way…
Loads of countries have effective power grids which go down incredibly rarely. I can't even remember the last power cut I had - maybe a few years ago? It's certainly rare enough that I don't need my main source of cooking and heat to take it into account. My parents live in rural Scotland and use a ground source heat pump for heat and an induction stove for cooking. Power outages happen more often - but still pretty…
This is not an academic question, especially in North America. The weather here can be very harsh.
We lost power earlier this year as the temparature dropped to 0F (-18C). Our contingency (oil heat, oil generator) kicked in and we were fine, but many people were not.
After power was restored, people with air source heat pumps were still stuck, as the heat pumps don't function well at all at those temps, and heating up a house after it has cooled to a low temp is not what a air source heat pump is good at. These are not problems at all for an oil furnace.
In a house I own in Melbourne, Australia, I just replaced an old gas central heating system with 3 new top of the line Daikin mini split heat pumps. The new units can heat the entire house for the same amount of electrical energy that was used to run the FAN in the old gas unit. They are crazy efficient. Ducts are dead. The Daikin Alira X is the gold-plated option and cost $8k AUD for 2x2.5kw and 1x7.1kw units includ…
How much electricity was the fan using? :)