91–100 of 109 posts
NIST study suggests that gas is the most eco-friendly home energy option. Source: https://www.earth.com/news/gas-electric-eco-friendly-home/
As a Bay Area resident with no gas connection, here are points to ponder: 1) PG&E electricity costs are among the highest in the country per KWH. They have received approvals to increase these astronomical costs by 10% in the near future. Gas is cheaper, by a lot. 2) Any time we have winds or hot weather or cold weather, the grid is under pressure and we are asked to curb our electricity usage. 3) In the winter and s…
Before someone chimes in with the obvious suggestions: a) Water heater is a heat pump set to high efficiency. b) Construction is 2016, so relatively new. c) We have done a lot to insulate the home. Net-net, this is an electricity cost issue; we are paying $0.42/KWH on average. This despite having some solar. This is not a profligate usage issue.
Try a FLIR survey and a positive pressure test survey of the house. Those should help direct future insulation efforts.
Given that heat pumps and other technologies have proven themselves quite well at this point it is not a bad idea for SF to lead the country on this one and shows that one can electrify most stuff (if not all stuff)
as long as the insanity doesn't come to my city, I fully agree with you. What was that "n-gate" phrase "a city at war with it's citizens"?
Why are people so attached to gas stoves when we have induction anyways? I love to cook and have a gas stove, but I bought my parents an induction unit a while back. Sure it can't provide an open flame, but the ludicrous speed at which it heats things up vastly outweighs that drawback. And not having to worry about ventilation nearly as much as just a bonus. My range hood needs to be on full tilt when I cook over lon…
> Why are people so attached to gas stoves when we have induction anyways? People are attached to gas stoves because the usual alternative you see in rented units is shitty electric stoves bought at the lowest cost, not induction.
Induction cooktops aren't as inherently expensive as the price implies: here in the US we don't really use them, so there's just little demand.
When I went to buy my parents that induction stove, the bottom of the ranges offered were induction versions of the top non-induction stoves because they need the highest possible margins to justify the tiny market.
Just an induction cooktop starts in the $700 range, when they start for less than half that in the UK. This could easily be the start of normalizing induction in the US, and that's not a bad thing.
Why are people so attached to gas stoves when we have induction anyways? I love to cook and have a gas stove, but I bought my parents an induction unit a while back. Sure it can't provide an open flame, but the ludicrous speed at which it heats things up vastly outweighs that drawback. And not having to worry about ventilation nearly as much as just a bonus. My range hood needs to be on full tilt when I cook over lon…
Because cooking with gas provides more, and better, temperature control than even very expensive induction setups. If you stir fry, there is no comparison. Also, low temp induction sucks. Even good units do low-frequency PWM to approximate low heat settings that come naturally with gas. Induction is a big step forward compared to the older, resistive-style electric elements, and there's a lot to like about it. But wh…
The average gas range doesn't have open burners so even with a wok you're not going to touch "authentic" stir fry. So even half decent cookware should have enough thermal mass to make near equivalent dishes on induction or gas.
At the end of the day induction isn't a 1:1 replacement for gas, but the places where induction excels are factors you appreciate every single day. Gas excels in corners cases which, again coming someone who's exclusively had gas ranges for the last decade, aren't as strong as induction's strengths.
Why are people so attached to gas stoves when we have induction anyways? I love to cook and have a gas stove, but I bought my parents an induction unit a while back. Sure it can't provide an open flame, but the ludicrous speed at which it heats things up vastly outweighs that drawback. And not having to worry about ventilation nearly as much as just a bonus. My range hood needs to be on full tilt when I cook over lon…
Not exactly what the Reddit'ers say: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/10q188u/anyone_swi... So now it's not just "you need an expensive induction unit" but "you shouldn't get the touch-control units that everyone is selling"? And before anyone says "the proposal doesn't cover stoves" that's obviously going to be the other shoe to drop.
In fact the same people making those cheap units you're complaining about do the same thing for gas: https://cindychenzs.en.ec21.com/Touch_Button_Gas_Stove--7335...
Of course, it's also kind of silly to act like that's the focus when of the first 20 or so replies, 16 of them are people confirming they enjoyed the switch...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It saves 89 people from NOx-related deaths. It is also a necessary step to reach carbon neutrality, which will save more lives.
Do you think that $34 billion could save, say, more than 89 people if spent on a more effective plan?
We need to better understand the downsides and alternatives of proposed, not just the upsides. We need to not call people who point them out "killers who hate the environment" and instead listen and work together toward the best solution possible, not the one that sounds the best without understand the details.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/climate/gas-stoves-biden-...
If national democrats ever said to california democrats "no that is too crazy" there might be an argument here but instead what they say is "shh don't talk about that now we'll do it later"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't have gas service, how do you do space heating? Resistive electric? If so that could be very expensive. Also, insulation only deals with radiative heat losses and gains, not those causes by air leakage and conduction. High air leakage is quite possible for a 2016 house (especially in California where a lot of production built housing has been of poor quality). > Net-net, this is an electricity cost issue;…
We have two external units that serve to both heat and cool, one for each zone / floor. Bryant is the manufacturer, if memory serves. Summer on-peak is $0.49 per KWH (1). Our average is $0.38, I had a math error. Even with my error, the price of electricity in California is exorbitant and the grid is easily stretched to the limit => both will be exacerbated by increased demand from EVs and housing without gas lines.…
All else equal, a heat pump in the Bay Area should cost about the same or slightly less to operate as a natural gas furnace during the heating season. Natural gas is 3x cheaper than electricity per unit of energy, but heat pumps run at near-optimal efficiency in the local climate. Over the heating season mine achieves an average COP of 4.0 (4 units of heat for every 1 unit of electricity input).
> Bryant is the manufacturer, if memory serves.
It's a worthwhile exercise to look up the expected maximum efficiency of your unit to see if it is achieving that.
> Even with my error, the price of electricity in California is exorbitant and the grid is easily stretched to the limit => both will be exacerbated by increased demand from EVs and housing without gas lines.
Prices for electricity are absolutely high in California compared to other states. This is for many reasons, not the least of which is the cost of natural gas itself, which sets the spot price paid for all other sources. It's also because of the utility maintenance issues brought to light by the wildfires.
However, according to PGE's own data, the average household gas bill this January is $195/month. That's on top of what people are paying for electricity. 2 years ago, it was $114/month [1]. That is a 72% increase. In the same time period, average annual natural gas only rates went up by 27%. The reason for the discrepancy is that natural gas pricing is moving toward more closely matching seasonal price variations, so much higher price/therm in the winter and lower in the summer. For 2023, winter rates will be 40% higher than summer rates, whereas in 2021 that difference was only 10%.
Therefore today, you would probably be paying more to heat the same house with a natural gas furnace than with a heat pump. The vast majority of people who use natural gas for heating are discovering that reality right now.
Furthermore, there's not much of a future in which natural gas gets cheaper as an energy source during the heating season. That's just the reality of that energy source.
Meanwhile, peak electricity rates have increased 22% since 2021 (when peak rates were $0.40/kWh), but the seasonal variations in electricity demand are currently the opposite of natural gas (lowest in winter, highest in summer).
In the long term, we can expect winter electricity demand to rise as more heat pumps are deployed. However, even if we exclusively burned natural gas (which we won't) to generate the electricity to meet that demand, it makes far more sense to do so in a combined cycle plant that is 50-60% efficient and sending it to heat pumps getting 3-4 COP, yielding a 200%+ "efficiency", than to burn it in furnaces that achieve on average 80% efficiency.