Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The biggest heat pumps

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 197 posts

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#161

Post by mos87 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #24
willvarfar wrote: post #14

In the nordics we love heat-pumps! Something like 70% of houses are heated by heat-pumps, and 90% of apartment buildings are heated by district heating and that is often generated by huge heatpumps. Apparently 95% of new heating installations in Swedish houses are heat-pumps these days: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC1... Heatpumps have been heating nordic homes for decades. Even in the co…

Sign of a rich and very developed country. A lot of buildings in Austrian cities are still heated by burning oil or wood and the whole city smells like a bonfire. Probably gonna have my lifespan shortened by at least a decade from all that fossil fuel pollution, but at least we banned that dirty nuclear from killing us.

LMAO good one.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#162

Post by rsynnott »

hexbin010 wrote: post #155
rsynnott wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever about a combi, you probably don't want a non-condensing boiler these days, not with gas the price that it is.

What's the cost savings? Also factoring more expensive purchase, repairs, replacements etc

Ye olde non-condensing boiler is usually about 70% efficient (that is, 70% of the heat from burning the gas goes into your house vs out the exhaust), sometimes worse (60% wouldn't be that out there for old ones). A condensing boiler, _if set up correctly_, will do 90% (95% for the newest models, allegedly). Now, the catch is that it'll only hit 90% if the return water is within a fairly narrow temperature range, so some system balancing is required, and in practice a lot of them end up more like 80%. But given how expensive gas is these days (at least in Europe) that 10-20% saving will handily pay for the cost of the boiler.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#163

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

looofooo0 wrote: post #159
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem could have been solved by breeder reactors. Now China is doing it instead of us.

Well that thing was never turned on in Germany.

They not only developed it, but actually built it to completion, with the liquid Natrium circulating. It was ultimately stopped for political reasons by the SPD state government, and the usual cowardice of CDU/FDP.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#164

Post by skeletal88 »

holowoodman wrote: post #76
pjc50 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that required? Switch to three phase? Wasn't required for me in the UK.

No. Everything in Germany has been three-phase since forever. But especially with old houses, with any "not insignificant change" to your electrical setup, you have to bring everything up to modern standards. Also, and connected with that, metering is weird in Germany. If your consumption rises above a certain amount (I think 10MWh for a single-family home) you are required to get a "smart meter", meaning a digital m…

wtf, this is totally insane.

Here the upgrades for meters are paid for by the grid operators. No changes to the cabinets are required, old analog meters were replaced by them for smart meters, at no extra cost to the consumer, and now they will replace them with new meters capable of metering by 15 minute interval.

This cost in germany is really only created by overregulation and insane bureaucrats creating work for them.

I first heard that in Germany there is much resistance to smart meters and I thought they were just silly people, but if it costs so much..

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#165

Post by seec »

holowoodman wrote: post #76
pjc50 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that required? Switch to three phase? Wasn't required for me in the UK.

No. Everything in Germany has been three-phase since forever. But especially with old houses, with any "not insignificant change" to your electrical setup, you have to bring everything up to modern standards. Also, and connected with that, metering is weird in Germany. If your consumption rises above a certain amount (I think 10MWh for a single-family home) you are required to get a "smart meter", meaning a digital m…

I know the electricity situation is pretty bad in Germany, but come on, can't they manage to make an equivalent to the French Linky?

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#166

Post by supersparrow »

hexbin010 wrote: post #52
supersparrow wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A boiler should actually be lasting more like 20 years. I recently replaced my 20 year old one purely because if anything went wrong, it’d become an expensive/long job to fix as parts were hard to find, otherwise it was still running perfectly at its manufacture specified efficiency. Running them for 20 years isn’t uncommon. I had a quote for a heat pump - £20k, plus the cost to replace 13 radiators, plus cost to rep…

Was your old boiler a non-combi? Modern condensing combis I think are designed to be more complex and not last as long. I'm not sure all the complexity and fancy modulation etc is really worth it myself. I'd rather have a boiler that lasts 20 years and that any half-competent gas engineer can fix with a spanner and some spare parts. £20k, jesus!

Old and new both condensing and both non-combi.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#167

Post by seec »

oceanplexian wrote: post #104
sowbug wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is now an even easier way than vacuuming. Instead of pulling the unwanted air and moisture from the lines, you can push it out with another gas, which itself can somehow coexist with the refrigerant. I haven't tried it because I already have the pump and gauges, but if I were installing my first mini split, I'd consider it. Example: https://www.highseer.com/products/pioneer-kwik-e-vac

It's so ridiculously easy to vacuum and charge a heat pump it's kind of unnecessary. I think I spent $200 in parts on Amazon and have done 4 heat pumps now. It's a vacuum pump, a scale, and a digital manifold/guage. Punch the numbers for subcool/superheat into a calculator and use the temp probes on the lines where they connect to the condenser and you can even skip the scale.

Isn't the problem having access to the gas in the end ? They are tightly regulated, and this is why installers can charge a lot of money, I believe. How did you manage to locate a source?

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#168

Post by seec »

jack_tripper wrote: post #61
stephen_g wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longer term this shouldn’t be the case though - a fridge is just a heat pump, and an air-to-air or air-to-water heat pumps aren’t that much more complicated, nor should they be any less reliable. It’s something that will become more of a commodity and eventually won’t be any more sign of wealth than owning a fridge. I mean, we can see it already in air-to-air systems - I’ve had mini-splits supplied and installed here…

>Longer term this shouldn’t be the case though Long term I'll be dead anyway. To me the the actions taken in the present is most important that what maybe might happen 30 years from now since that's why everything is fucked in Europe, because everyone coasts on hopium for the long term instead of fixing the present.

You got downvoted, but I share the sentiment. It seems we coasted on hope for better solutions that never really get there and are largely unaffordable for most people.

A heat pump would make a lot more sense if electricity were cheap; alas, we went all in for renewables while ignoring nuclear for political reasons. The result is expensive electricity while still having a dependency on fossil fuel and even importing the renewable tech. That makes no sense in the short run, and I very much doubt it will make any sense eventually.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#169

Post by citrin_ru »

fy20 wrote: post #139
OptionOfT wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that district heating is so popular there. IIRC in the Netherlands people don't like it, because it because it means that there is a single company supplying my heat, with * minimum amounts of 'heat' purchased * no incentives to maintain their infrastructure above the bare minimum * no competition

I live in a post-Soviet city with district heating, and I'm not really sure it's worth it. Our network is government run, and they don't do a bad job, but it is more expensive per kWh (8c) than if you were to heat with gas or an electric heat pump (both 6c). The heat source of the network is gas or various oil fuels, so it makes sense that it's cheaper to do it yourself - gas infrastructure is very optimised, and the…

In USSR it was common to use waste heat from a thermal (gas/coal) power stations for district heating. Heat itself in such system is basically free - instead of sending hot water to cooling towers it first used to heat homes. But a pipeline network is not cheap in maintain (pipelines were usually not well maintained and leaks were common but with modern materials corrosion should be less of a problem).

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#170

Post by sokoloff »

seec wrote: post #167
oceanplexian wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so ridiculously easy to vacuum and charge a heat pump it's kind of unnecessary. I think I spent $200 in parts on Amazon and have done 4 heat pumps now. It's a vacuum pump, a scale, and a digital manifold/guage. Punch the numbers for subcool/superheat into a calculator and use the temp probes on the lines where they connect to the condenser and you can even skip the scale.

Isn't the problem having access to the gas in the end ? They are tightly regulated, and this is why installers can charge a lot of money, I believe. How did you manage to locate a source?

For a typical new install, the outdoor unit contains the charge and unless your lineset is unusually long, you just use that, releasing it with the valves after installing and leak-checking the lines.

In the US, you can get your EPA 508 cert online in a couple hours and buy the refrigerant online. (You need the cert to be legal, but it’s not really checked just to buy.) Tightly regulated is not true in practice. You could buy some in 3 minutes online and have it Monday.

Post reply on HN