Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill • Hacker News Board

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#111

Post by byuu » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:09 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #67

OK, Paul Wheaton simply doesn't know what he's talking about: "I think that this does produce some savings, but not as much as you might think. If you set your thermostat to a constant 70, the heater works a little at a time throughout the day. If you drop it to 50 at night or in the middle of the day, the heater stops working, but then when the time comes to warm the house again, the heater has to work at full power…

His article on CFLs (http://www.richsoil.com/CFL-fluorescent-light-bulbs.jsp) is very cringe-worthy as well. As part of his argument, he references a report he heard of claiming that kids gained 20 IQ points by switching back to incandescent bulbs. Seriously.

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#112

Post by Retric » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:09 AM UTC

wickedlogic wrote: post #94

jlebar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how people's desires can be "wasteful". In a world where people paid for the true cost of their energy use, this argument might fly. But in most of the world today, this isn't the case, not by a long shot. If you heated to "summer inside the house" and bought high-quality carbon offsets corresponding to your increased energy use, I think most people wouldn't call that "wasteful". "Warm" might be the ad…

Sorta like when people order whatever they want for lunch, because they bought high quality calorie offsets?

At sufficient exercise levels most people have trouble eating enough. 10,000 calories every day tends to be a lot of food.

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#113

Post by lutorm » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:10 AM UTC

lutorm wrote: post #32

mangecoeur wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Does plenty to save energy. Reasons: - for half the year, you don't heat but you still light, so you automatically gain savings for that whole period. (also if you have air conditioning, in summer you heat the house with lights then have to cool the air again) - Lights are on the ceiling. Hot air rises. Therefore heat coming from lights does almost nothing to improve your thermal comfort. - If you are heating…

If you don't heat, you don't have a heated house. Hence my comment does not apply.

I wish whoever downvoted this would indicate what part of my comment they disagree with... I said "If A then B", and then the response was "wrong, because if not A then C".

Of course it saves energy if you don't heat the house, that's obvious. What's less obvious to many is that it saves much less than you think if you live in a house in Northern Sweden, heated with electric heat (which I happened to grow up in).

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#114

Post by jwmerrill » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:13 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #67

OK, Paul Wheaton simply doesn't know what he's talking about: "I think that this does produce some savings, but not as much as you might think. If you set your thermostat to a constant 70, the heater works a little at a time throughout the day. If you drop it to 50 at night or in the middle of the day, the heater stops working, but then when the time comes to warm the house again, the heater has to work at full power…

Your theoretical analysis misses an important physical fact: houses are able to exchange air with the outside world, not just heat. As you heat a normal room, it will expel air in order to maintain constant pressure, and similarly, as you allow a room to cool, outside air will enter again to keep the pressure constant.

There was an article about this in the American Journal of Physics [1, 2] a couple years back, and the authors calculated that heating a room from 273K to 300K (32F to 80F) causes it to expel about 10 percent of the air inside it.

Somewhat surprisingly, the authors don't comment on how relevant this is to the question of when to turn your heater off. The fact that allowing a room to cool draws in cold air from the outside means that the practice is worse than you would naively think, but I don't know when if ever that actually suggests leaving the heater on a constant setting. I'd be very curious to see someone extend the calculation to give an answer.

[1] http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/ajp/79/1/10.11...

[2] http://www.stat.physik.uni-potsdam.de/~pikovsky/teaching/stu... [PDF]

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#115

Post by roel_v » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:39 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #67

OK, Paul Wheaton simply doesn't know what he's talking about: "I think that this does produce some savings, but not as much as you might think. If you set your thermostat to a constant 70, the heater works a little at a time throughout the day. If you drop it to 50 at night or in the middle of the day, the heater stops working, but then when the time comes to warm the house again, the heater has to work at full power…

Sure, if you have shitty insulation. The proper strategy is to have good insulation, and then to have the heat on constantly using a CV system at low temperatures, because heating constantly with water of 30 degrees (C, that is) is much more energy efficient than heating in peaks with much warmer water (60, 70, 90 even 20 years ago). So yes, in houses with crap insulation warming constantly is less efficient. However in properly build houses, warming constantly is more efficient. (I'm living for a few months in New Zealand - oh my the quality of the houses here is atrocious. It's one of the main reasons I couldn't live here permanently. And then they put in a 'heat pump' (an air to air one) and call themselves 'green'. Don't get me started.)

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#116

Post by tungwaiyip » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:40 AM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #36

People should check out WattVision. It's a little device that attaches to your electrical meter so you can monitor your electrical usage. What I've found is that almost all of our home's electrical usage comes from heating (heaters, clothes dryers, and hot water). Everything else is almost a rounding error. For example: I saw almost no change when we switched from incandescents to LED lighting (even in the summer whe…

Totally heating dominate energy use. I'm rather disturb to hear people pay much attention to so call "phantom power" from idle electronics and adapters. Adapters plugged in the socket do not consume measurable power. Wifi router uses about a few watts. The worst offender is a set-top box that uses 18W irrespective of power on or off. It is piece of crap anyway so I unplugged it. All the electronics in the house probably use less power in a day compare to running a 1500W heater for 15 minutes.

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#117

Post by jebblue » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:41 AM UTC

I was really caught up in this story and the effort involved until ... "I wonder if these techniques caught on, could this reduce or eliminate US war for oil?" and then "If I wrote this article 20 years ago might we have never gone to war with Iraq?".

Iraq was _not_, repeat, NOT, N O T, about oil. Iraq was about stability, about a nut case leader who terrorized and killed his own people, who let his sons terrorize people. It was about all the terrorists caught who had evaded worldwide, WORLDWIDE authorities for decades in many cases, found hiding out in ... Iraq.

Hussein disregarded Bush elder, Clinton and Bush junior, covering 3 US Presidencies, both major US political parties. He shot missiles at the very ally planes charged with making him keep his army at bay.

He plotted to kill the very US President (Bush elder) who forced him to back out of Kuwait:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/iraq/tim...

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#118

Post by ChikkaChiChi » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:44 AM UTC

Three ladies at my company campaigned heavily for those heated keyboards a few years ago. One shorted out within the first month and the other two stopped functioning within a year.

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#119

Post by roel_v » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:47 AM UTC

schiffern wrote: post #10

debrice wrote: post #9

Well, not heating your house enough can also cost you your house as mold and ice can grow in very cold zone of your house. But I do like the ingenuity of the solution. Shit Norwegians Say: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”

This is addressed in the article. >FAQ: It might work in Montana, but in Seattle, our windows would get moldy >There are a variety of ways to mitigate the mold problems that occur in cold, humid climates. I did some experimenting when I lived in the Seattle area and have compared notes with people that are still living there. This is a really large issues even if you don't try this. While there are many things to be…

" 1) learn how to properly clean mold problems"

That was one of the parts that made me go %O most - when you live in a house where the internal climate is such that it will let mold grow, it's downright unhealthy to live there. It's like saying 'yeah driving while drunk is dangerous, you'd better have a box of band aid laying around in your car for when you get into an accident'. Uh no, don't drive while drunk, eh?

Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

#120

Post by roel_v » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 2:49 AM UTC

willholloway wrote: post #63

Energy is abundant, there is no need to shiver in the cold. Solar forced warm air is inexpensive, simple technology that is very underutilized. Solar photovoltaics get all the attention, but solar warm air/water is less expensive and simple to manufacture. http://sunmatesolarpanels.com/content/view/2/31/

But you can't power a computer on PV. I don't think anyone who knows something about energy efficient heating suggests PV to warm a house electrically, it's too inefficient.