hot water bottles work pretty well. Probably more effective than constantly heating up air. Water is a good storage of heat
Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
151–160 of 276 posts
Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
#152OK, 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…
Most houses have poor in insulation. Also, adding good insulation without degrading indoor air quality and causing moisture/mildew problems is tricky. So improving energy efficiency of heating for existing houses with lesser insulation is very useful.
Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
At sufficient exercise levels most people have trouble eating enough. 10,000 calories every day tends to be a lot of food.
Even if you're doing a couple hours of intense exercise every day, you're only going to be adding on the order of 1000 Calories to your daily usage. Resting burn for most adults is around 1500-2000, so that's ~3000. What do you consider "sufficient" exercise?
Michael Phelps needed 12,000 Calories a day when training. That's seriously "intense"!
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/08/14/michael-phelps-12000...
Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
#154I live in Florida. This entire discussion is bizarro world for me. It costs nearly $400 a month to keep my house at 74deg in the summer.
Those 3 cold days every other year in Florida are pretty amazing. People wearing every warm piece of clothing they own, old sheets and towels flung over all the tropical plants outside, heat pumps running nearly 24x7 trying to pull a bit of heat out of the air.
Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
#155This is where I really prefer the European model[1] - you heat the whole house with hot water. You make hot water with cheap natural gas. If you're lucky enough, you can even use geothermal. Then you use insulation. This especially is something that feels nobody in the US has heard of. At least in California. As a result, your radiators are turned down to 2 out of 10 all day (heating turns off automatically overnight…
> you heat the whole house with hot water
As others have said, try cooling a house with rads. It's not like North America is oblivious to radiators; they were very much a standard way of heating houses before the popularity of AC made forced air a much more logical choice.
> Then you use insulation. This especially is something that feels nobody in the US has heard of. At least in California.
If you only know about the completely unrepresentative California, why expose your ignorance by projecting to all of the U.S.? And further, why bother calling it "the European model"? Obviously the way houses are built, insulated, and heated in a country like England or Norway is going to differ wildly from how it's done in say, Greece.
Even within California the climate differs so much that there are 4-5 different building codes for insulation. But in general, the minimum code for insulation in California is around half that of states with colder climates (e.g. R30 for ceiling in California, R50 for Wisconsin).
Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
...but the ideal structure is not supposed to exchange air with the outside particularly because of this. That is why windows and doors have seals on them. I'm no mechanical engineer, but I've worked with enough of them in my career to understand that their goal is usually keeping a structure tightly sealed when ingress/egress paths are closed (of course opening windows/doors is a choice of the occupant, which if you…
An ideal structure should minimize convection, but rooms for people really can't be allowed to undergo large changes in temperature without exchanging air with the outside environment, because that would imply a large change in pressure. A 10 percent increase over atmospheric pressure might not seem like that much, but it's enough to notice, and would probably be uncomfortable. It's like being under 1 meter of water.…
I don't think comfort would be much of an issue given a slow adjustment period, but structurally it would be ludicrous. You'd be unable to open or close doors. Your walls would have to be built a hundred times stronger than the walls of a normal house. Any breach in the pressure envelope would be a miniature version of Aloha Airlines 243.
This is, by the way, why hard drives have filtered air holes rather than being completely sealed.
Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
#157People 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 proba…
Fortunately I have natural gas for heating and hot water. Much cheaper than electric heat, but the local gas utility is still charging me about $12/MMbtu, which is about 3x the Henry Hub spot price.
But electronics is not nearly as benign as you suggest, it depends on your lifestyle. E.g. I have 4 TiVo boxes running 24x7. Each draws about 40W. In my area 1W works out to about $1/yr. So my TiVo boxes cost me $160/yr just in electricity.
I also believe that LED lighting saves money. In our family room I used to have a 75W light bulb on for at least 12 hrs/day. That's $37/yr for just a single bulb. I replaced it with an 11W Philips LED. It's now costing me $5.50/yr. That's an over $30/yr savings on a single bulb. The same savings applies anywhere light bulbs are on for a long time.
Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
#158OK, 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…
I agree with all your theory. I thought the same thing. Then I went out and bought a programable thermostat, set it quite low overnight and during the day, and warmer from 5-8 AM and 5-8 PM. My heating bill was higher than just maintaining 68-70 all the time. And that's not even counting the $100 I spent on the thermostat (now on a shelf in the garage, I put the old manual one back in its place).
Either the laws of physics are different than well established theory says they are... or your thermostat didn't do a very good job. I vote for the second one.
Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
#159Very much the "philosophy" of heating here in Japan; heaters for single room, heavy futons on the bed with no heater, kotatsu, foot warmers, etc.
Comes from old, leaky wooden houses, but idea is the same. Lot of bad habits here still, but heating the upstairs guest bedroom all winter long isn't one of them
Re: Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
#160This is where I really prefer the European model[1] - you heat the whole house with hot water. You make hot water with cheap natural gas. If you're lucky enough, you can even use geothermal. Then you use insulation. This especially is something that feels nobody in the US has heard of. At least in California. As a result, your radiators are turned down to 2 out of 10 all day (heating turns off automatically overnight…
> you heat the whole house with hot water As others have said, try cooling a house with rads. It's not like North America is oblivious to radiators; they were very much a standard way of heating houses before the popularity of AC made forced air a much more logical choice. > Then you use insulation. This especially is something that feels nobody in the US has heard of. At least in California. If you only know about t…
> And further, why bother calling it "the European model"?
Because I've seen radiators and decent insulation in literally every house I've ever been in anywhere in Europe. Warm places like Greece and Portugal included.
Differences are mostly attributable to the age of a house rather than its location. But arguably old stone houses (200+ years) in hot places have the best insulation in that they are simply built with 1m+ thick walls and super tiny windows.
Insulation. It works. For both hot and cold.
Granted, the moderner your building and the thinner walls and more cement it uses, the likelier you are to need AC in summer. In old buildings you get enough cooling by just airing the house overnight and keeping everything closed during the day ... unless of course you have a big computer in your room. Then you're screwed.