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Heat pump sales rise across Europe

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Re: Heat pump sales rise across Europe

#31

Post by gandreani »

jakozaur wrote: post #8

A heat pump could win as the best HVAC technology, though a better drilling for ground-sourced ones. Just a shallow drilling (up to 100m) that works in retrofit mode, such as drilling from the basement, would be a great upgrade: - No outdoor unit that looks awful in many settings - works well, even in the coldest winter, without a spike in electricity usage, COP 5 - very reliable with long durability - super quiet, n…

Drilling in the basement seems like a pain to remove the dirt you dig up. Saving yourself a couple of feet cannot be worth the access troubles

Re: Heat pump sales rise across Europe

#33

Post by pimlottc »

ejoebstl wrote: post #24

In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes. Heat pumps are by now cheaper, more efficient, more versatile and definitely greener than other means of heating. If you get one, just make sure to get the dimensioning right. They are WAY more complex to plan, install and maintain than traditional heating.

> DACH, an acronym for Deutschland (Germany), Austria, Confoederatio Helvetica (Swiss Confederation), the three major German-speaking countries

I was not familiar with this term before, had to look it up.

Re: Heat pump sales rise across Europe

#34

Post by joe_mamba »

konschubert wrote: post #13
jakozaur wrote: post #8

A heat pump could win as the best HVAC technology, though a better drilling for ground-sourced ones. Just a shallow drilling (up to 100m) that works in retrofit mode, such as drilling from the basement, would be a great upgrade: - No outdoor unit that looks awful in many settings - works well, even in the coldest winter, without a spike in electricity usage, COP 5 - very reliable with long durability - super quiet, n…

Friends in south Sweden and they got a hole drilled in the front yard like it’s the most normal thing. Is it there?

The challenge is for people who live in apartment buildings in urban environment where you have no front yard you can drill into at your leisure.

Re: Heat pump sales rise across Europe

#35

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

stephencanon wrote: post #30
jakozaur wrote: post #8

A heat pump could win as the best HVAC technology, though a better drilling for ground-sourced ones. Just a shallow drilling (up to 100m) that works in retrofit mode, such as drilling from the basement, would be a great upgrade: - No outdoor unit that looks awful in many settings - works well, even in the coldest winter, without a spike in electricity usage, COP 5 - very reliable with long durability - super quiet, n…

We have a ground-source heat pump for our ADU. We did it because we were curious about just how efficient we could make the house, but I don't expect that it will ever break even financially vs a modern air-source system with resistive backup in our climate (northern New England, typically very few –20˚ nights, –10˚-0˚ more common with daytime highs in the single digits). It works great, but it's hard to see a way to…

You might still get the most out of it when the AMOC collapses.

Re: Heat pump sales rise across Europe

#36

Post by joe_mamba »

ejoebstl wrote: post #24

In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes. Heat pumps are by now cheaper, more efficient, more versatile and definitely greener than other means of heating. If you get one, just make sure to get the dimensioning right. They are WAY more complex to plan, install and maintain than traditional heating.

>In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes.

And yet in Austria, most apartment buildings in big cities are still heated by burning heating oil, gas or even firewood. Worst of the worst for air quality.

Walk through Graz in sub-zero winters and it's like you're breathing in a barbeque bonfire. Even your clothes smell like soot when you get home if you've been out too long. Which is bizarre to me, considering how much posturing and chest thumping Austria is doing about how green and anti-Nuclear they are yet they love burring wood and oil. Male this make sense please.

Sure, rich people in the bacon belt living in single family homes in the suburbs or rural areas, have heat pumps, solar panels on the roof and a Tesla in the garage, but that's a different story compared to those living in the city stuck in the fossil fuel stone age, where they have no choice over their rented building's heating method.

How do you convert the city's apartment buildings to heat pumps? Is it a technological limitation? Money limitation? Bureaucratic and political limitation? All of the above?

Re: Heat pump sales rise across Europe

#37

Post by wattso »

frevib wrote: post #25
jakozaur wrote: post #8

A heat pump could win as the best HVAC technology, though a better drilling for ground-sourced ones. Just a shallow drilling (up to 100m) that works in retrofit mode, such as drilling from the basement, would be a great upgrade: - No outdoor unit that looks awful in many settings - works well, even in the coldest winter, without a spike in electricity usage, COP 5 - very reliable with long durability - super quiet, n…

Drilling alone is €10.000. The whole installation of a air/water heat pump is €10.000. Mostly not worth it.

To jakozaur’s point, there’s plenty of reasons drilling can get cheaper and there’s at least one other company working on it [1]—would love to hear about others! I’m a minimally informed amateur but my intuition is that the way it’s typically done (multiple inch borehole, U-tube geometry) is fairly suboptimal since the diameter is a lot wider than you need it to be just for hydrodynamic resistance and you get losses from the outgoing liquid cooling the incoming liquid. Dropping the diameter should make drilling a lot easier—-you can sink a 5/8”x12’ ground rod with hand tools in the right soil! (you’d still have to figure out how to make the holes meet up but I imagine there are ways of doing this).

[1] https://www.borobotics.ch/

Re: Heat pump sales rise across Europe

#38

Post by pandora-health »

I run daily comparisons between a gas boiler and a heat pump in the UK. Given that gas is cheaper than electricity, a well-installed and well-controlled gas boiler can still be cheaper to run. Heat pump running costs can drop drastically when combined with solar and battery storage, but that requires a much greater upfront investment.

https://x.com/AO7186252340513

https://bsky.app/profile/showpiece.bsky.social

Re: Heat pump sales rise across Europe

#40

Post by teachrdan »

ndr42 wrote: post #26

> [it] become[s] cheaper than gas heating within 11 to 14 years This a no-brainer for buildings with high energy use. But we looked into getting a heat pump last year but it doesn't pan out because our house (15 years old) has a very low energy use and we would not recover the costs (about 20K euros after subsidies) for 20+ years.

With any luck, oil prices will rise enough to make that conversion worthwhile!
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