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The biggest heat pumps

bbc.com

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Re: The biggest heat pumps

#51

Post by looofooo0 »

Maledictus wrote: post #48
looofooo0 wrote: post #42

Germany at its best, instead of keeping its 20GW+ nuclear power running and get district heating pipes installed to them, they engineer this solution at x times the cost. In this case a 30km pipe from Philippsburg NPP would have done the trick.

Guess who supplies all the nuclear fuel? Russia, and we don't want to buy from them anymore. The same is true for pretty much all nuclear power plants.

No, this is a lie. It is also funny because Germany was so depended on Russian Gas that nuclear fuel even if fully depend on would be laughable.

Germany has its own fuel enrichment and production, and it is still running https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urananreicherungsanlage_Gronau

And no Uranium ore does not stem from Russia, they might still produce some of the UF6, but this can be much more easily shifted because unclear fuel cost are only a small fraction of the total cost!

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#52

Post by hexbin010 »

supersparrow wrote: post #46
hexbin010 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto UK. Gas is relatively cheap, and a replacement boiler is £1,500 to £3,000 and will last ~10 years and there'll be no doubt about whether it can sufficiently heat the home or produce enough hot water etc . Lucky you living in Spain though lol

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!

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#53

Post by pjc50 »

willvarfar wrote: post #25
pjc50 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. those are somewhat unrelated things, though?

A heatpump needs power to operate, but will generate at least 3x more heat than the electricity to power it. The article describes how there will be a water battery. So it can be thought of as a part of a bigger countrywide or europe-wide plan and grid?

Sure, but if you build a nuclear reactor suitably close to your city (!) it produces hot water directly in addition to electricity. It's just a much bigger pain to ship hot water over long distances than electricity.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#54

Post by willvarfar »

stefanfisk wrote: post #44
lnsru wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing amusing. Germany is not really rich compared to nordics. And now let‘s do so math! Electricity: 0,3€/kWh and gas 0,1€/kWh. I need ~3x more gas to get same temperature in my room. And gas heating costs €10k while heat pump €40k without subsidies and probably raw €15k material cost if I install it by myself. So why should I pay more by €30k to install experimental thing for a decade when my low cost gas heating…

What is the calculus behind 40k? I just checked some Swedish vendors and here they calculate 12k for hardware and installation of a fairly large heat pump. https://www.polarpumpen.se/kunskapsbanken/varmepump-kunskaps...

Yeah small air-air pumps - which are the most common for single houses - are easily under 2000EUR including installation; if you keep eyes out for special offers it'd be about 1500EUR in Swedish prices.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#55

Post by pjc50 »

lnsru wrote: post #38
moooo99 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German, I find the popularity of heat pumps in the nordics especially amusing. In Germany heat pumps were an incredibly political topic and people were pushed by some media outlets to really hate heat pumps. One recurring topic was that heat pumps can‘t work at German temperatures.

Nothing amusing. Germany is not really rich compared to nordics. And now let‘s do so math! Electricity: 0,3€/kWh and gas 0,1€/kWh. I need ~3x more gas to get same temperature in my room. And gas heating costs €10k while heat pump €40k without subsidies and probably raw €15k material cost if I install it by myself. So why should I pay more by €30k to install experimental thing for a decade when my low cost gas heating…

The problem is the gas (a) emits CO2 and (b) comes from Russia.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#56

Post by willvarfar »

looofooo0 wrote: post #47
mrmlz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hrm. It might be cheaper than in Germany but its not cheap in Sweden except for the most nordic parts (hydro). South Sweden - i think the prices are more on par with germany.

Well in the south you might need to factor the gas cost in (vs Germany) and also the network effects of heat pump being the main form of heating in sweden.

The south of Sweden is expensive because Sweden did away with the previous single energy market and split into zones with sales abroad. Often Swedish producers sell to Germany at the same time Swedish consumers are forced to buy from German producers. It was a big thing about 'free market' and iirc Denmark was upset that Danish manufacturing could not compete with the price of energy across the straights in Sweden. The solution was to make energy more expensive in Sweden.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#57

Post by pjc50 »

supersparrow wrote: post #46
hexbin010 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto UK. Gas is relatively cheap, and a replacement boiler is £1,500 to £3,000 and will last ~10 years and there'll be no doubt about whether it can sufficiently heat the home or produce enough hot water etc . Lucky you living in Spain though lol

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…

I managed £15k minus £7k of Scottish government incentives, and I managed to avoid replacing all my radiators by .. getting a "hybrid" system which also includes a boiler for HW :/

Far from ideal solution, but it is mostly green, somewhat offset by the solar panels, and actually more comfortable than the old system because of the more even heating. Set to 20C and forget about it for the season. I'm hoping that it will last until the actual gas phaseout when a solution compatible with 8mm piping will exist.

This is why they need to be mandated on new houses, because it's so much better than trying to retrofit it.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#58

Post by pjc50 »

jcsager wrote: post #45
DrScientist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity prices are certainly a factor, and retro-fitting can be very expensive to nigh on impossible. The real scandal in the UK is how the updates to building regulations to bring in higher energy efficiency have been delayed and delayed - presumably due to lobbying by UK house-builders. Given the big push to build large numbers of new houses it seems madness not to have the higher standards in place.

Planning rules conflict with building regs in the UK. Planning means that most new houses are little boxes made of little more than ticky-tacky. So adding insulation to the walls makes them even smaller inside.

Unclear what this means - both of these sets of rules apply, so the planning system couldn't force people to not comply with building regs? The new approach appears to be prefab foil coated insulation board in the walls, under brick or breezeblock skin, given what I can see being built nearby.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#59

Post by pjc50 »

mrmlz wrote: post #40
hexbin010 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto UK. Gas is relatively cheap, and a replacement boiler is £1,500 to £3,000 and will last ~10 years and there'll be no doubt about whether it can sufficiently heat the home or produce enough hot water etc . Lucky you living in Spain though lol

UK houses are really interesting.. Single-glass windows, poor insulation etc. And plumbing on the OUTSIDE(!) :) Are the boilers typically connected to water-radiators?.. I assume so based on the word "boiler". There are heatpumps that are used to heat water so it would be a slot in replacement..

Not many people left with single glazing unless they've been trapped by historic building rules. "Outdoor plumbing" is not a thing.

The pump is a drop in replacement unless you have 8mm "microbore" piping, at which point the lower temperature times restricted flow rate becomes a problem in terms of getting enough heat through.

Re: The biggest heat pumps

#60

Post by stephen_g »

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.

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 in Australia for something like 20% of the cost I’ve heard quoted for equally sized units in the US, for example - just because basically every electrician has a license to install them here because they are so incredibly common (for cooling even more than heating, but they can basically all so both here). Air-to-water I expect will be the same in cold climates - in 15 years basically any plumber will be able to do it and they’ll be far cheaper than today.

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