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Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

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

#161

Post by jpindar »

tempestn wrote: post #146
roel_v wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CFL is crap, use LED lights. Last 20x longer with 1/20th the energy use. Replacing incandescent with CFL is a wash, replacing them with LED is a no-brainer.

Much more attractive too, if you prefer a redder (more like incandescent) light indoors. Modern LED bulbs are really good.

You can get LED lights in a variety of color temperatures. You can even get ones like my Phillips Hue bulbs whose color can be adjusted remotely. They aren't cheap but they're a lot of fun!

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

#162

Post by PhantomGremlin »

nkozyra wrote: post #45

I 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.

Why are you at 74F? We're having a mini heat wave in Portland, so I've been running my AC. It's set for 76F and I'm quite comfortable.

You need to convince yourself that you'd be comfortable at higher temp and humidity. E.g. in Hawaii the "natives" sneer at the new arrivals who don't like the high humidity.

Fortunately this area has reasonably low humidity. But if I were in Florida, I could probably be comfortable at 78F as long as the AC got rid of about half the relative humidity.

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

#163

Post by PhantomGremlin »

lucb1e wrote: post #105
_delirium wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Copenhagen, and it's also bizarro world for me. :) But mainly because electricity is very expensive here, whereas district heating (hot water produced by municipal plants, which you can draw through your radiator if you'd like) is quite cheap. It would be hard to beat the costs of district heating using a space-heater approach, even given better spatial concentration of the heat.

Wait a minute you get hot water from the pipe instead of heating it yourself? That's interesting.

This is a wonderful benefit of living in a big city. E.g. Con Edison in New York supplies steam to commercial buildings.[1] Back when they generated electricity "locally" in each borough, the steam was almost free for them to generate as a side effect. But now they actually have to pipe steam under the East River.

But I no longer live in NYC. I don't miss the rats or cockroaches or traffic or air pollution. C'est la vie.

[1] http://www.coned.com/newsroom/energysystems_steam.asp

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

dredmorbius wrote: post #46

Spot-heating, especially within a leaky building envelope utilizing expensive heat sources (electric resistance) is one option. But it's hardly the only one, or the best. For northern climates, taking a whole-system approach to home/structure design gets you a tremendously greater payoff in terms of energy savings. Among the most powerful demonstrations of this I've seen are Thorsten Chlupp / Reina LLC's experiences…

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by tempestn »

jpindar wrote: post #161
tempestn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much more attractive too, if you prefer a redder (more like incandescent) light indoors. Modern LED bulbs are really good.

You can get LED lights in a variety of color temperatures. You can even get ones like my Phillips Hue bulbs whose color can be adjusted remotely. They aren't cheap but they're a lot of fun!

For sure. I just meant that if you prefer bluer light, you can get that with CFLs, but they can't give you the 'softer' light that we're used to from incandescents, while LEDs can (if that's your preference).

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

#166

Post by tempestn »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #153
tempestn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Wow, that is intense. Way beyond what I'd call "sufficient" exercise though!

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

#167

Post by buyx »

roel_v wrote: post #115
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 South Africa, most homes are built with little consideration of cold weather, since the winters are relatively mild. Problem is that draughts and poor insulation in winter then result in significant spiking energy usage.

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

#168

Post by taejo »

mikeash wrote: post #158
ams6110 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or there is more than one physical effect in play: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8112118 -- there's air movement as well as heat, because your house is not a sealed box.

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

#169

Post by dharma1 »

_delirium wrote: post #50
nkozyra wrote: post #45

I 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.

I live in Copenhagen, and it's also bizarro world for me. :) But mainly because electricity is very expensive here, whereas district heating (hot water produced by municipal plants, which you can draw through your radiator if you'd like) is quite cheap. It would be hard to beat the costs of district heating using a space-heater approach, even given better spatial concentration of the heat.

Same in Helsinki/Finland - district heating (hot water radiators) for most of the city. Even data centre heat is recycled in this way :)

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

#170

Post by ejain »

snicker wrote: post #124
jwmerrill wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

...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…

So if you forget to open the windows often enough, you suffocate? :-)
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