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Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

richsoil.com

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

#171

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

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…

It's most definitely not the goal to suffocate the inhabitants, no, and the goal also isn't to have the natural humidifiers living inside create a tropical climate ripe with microorganisms and stuff. Yes, you want to avoid excessive air exchange because you'd lose a lot of heat that way, but tightly sealing a house would be a very bad idead indeed. If you do make the outer envelope essentially airtight, that gives you very low energy consumption and is part of the passive house concept, but then you need active ventilation, which obviously implies a hole in the envelope, and thus will keep the pressure inside equalized with the pressure outside (modulo a small differential caused by the ventilation itself).

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

#172

Post by Dylan16807 »

jlebar wrote: post #79
balfirevic wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how people's desires can be "wasteful". I find that "summer inside the house" during winter is absolutely wonderful from the comfort standpoint and certainly wouldn't trade it for the saving that I would get on electric bill. Of course, I realize that many people don't care for that. More power (and smaller bills) to them.

> 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…

The cost of carbon offsets is apparently less than a penny per kWh. This is barely anything in comparison to the price of the electricity itself, so it doesn't matter whether people are in actuality paying the true cost; they might as well be. Such a world would look almost identical to our own.

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

#173

Post by PeterisP »

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.

For many types of powerplants, a significant amount of heat is generated as a byproduct, sometimes even causing significant expense of cooling the plant on a large body of water, such as the nuclear plants near lakes.

That system can also be designed to provide hot water (both as a water supply and as heating) for a nearby city, and many cities do so, it's cheap and efficient.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration for some description if you're interested.

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

#174

Post by japhyr »

micro_cam wrote: post #142
japhyr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in southeast Alaska, where heating issues can make or break your ability to pay rent or afford a mortgage. Most homes are heated using fuel oil. We moved into an awesome old house last summer, and we were worried about heating costs. The landlord had a heat pump installed last fall. I'm sure we would have had some $300-$500 heating bills (per month) last winter if we were using oil, but the heat pump never cos…

Ground Loop or air to air heatpump? What brand and model? (I ask because we just bought a house in montana and are thinking about a heatpump before winter...we have propane radiant heat now. We'd want one that would work with cold temps though it rarely gets bellow -10 F here.)

It's an air to air Fujitsu. I'll check on the model when I get a chance.

Most of our winter weather hovers in the mid 30's, day and night. We get occasional cold spells in the 20's, but it's rarely in the teens and I've seen single digits once in twelve years here. I don't think it's ever been below zero here.

It was interesting to get used to the heat pump just being on low all the time. Our monitor stove would come on in bursts, and you'd notice a steady heating/ cooling cycle throughout the day. The heat pump just puts out a steady, slightly warm airflow all day long.

I'm not sure how heat pumps behave in colder climates. Our landlord did not remove the monitor stove when he had the heat pump installed, and it was nice to know we could fall back on the monitor if the heat pump was not putting out enough heat. You might consider leaving the propane system in place this winter if you do try a heat pump. It might just give you a little peace of mind about not having an issue in the middle of a cold spell.

Feel free to send an email if you're curious to ask more.

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

#175

Post by mkesper »

XorNot wrote: post #93
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…

On hot water bottles: the energy spent boiling that water is likely comparable to the energy an electric blanket on low power would use.

Electric blankets can burn you and the whole house down and do not use the same form of heat transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer. They just should not be used.

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

#176

Post by Dylan16807 »

tempestn wrote: post #166
PhantomGremlin wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You're reading the word 'sufficient' in the wrong way. Sufficient to demolish calories, not sufficient to be healthy.

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

#178

Post by thaumasiotes »

roel_v wrote: post #119
schiffern wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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

Why do you believe this?

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

#180

Post by stinos »

byuu wrote: post #111
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.

My thoughts exactly. Started reading on the site a couple of weeks ago after an article about lawns on HN (which was reasonably ok and correct). His CFL article starts ok, and he does make some good and valid points but then the pseudo-science and false logic kicks in to levels that make my cry.
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