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Comment by bregma | Hacker News Reader

Where I live (rural Ontario), propane costs somewhere around $2500/year for heat. Hydro costs about $4000. The sane people stick to wood, which if you cut and split it yourself will keep to under $1000. We have disconnected all the electric heaters in my house (except for the newly-installed radiant-heat floor in the bathroom, because it's a luxury I'm willing to splurge on) and only fire up the second woodstove for those weeks it drops below -20.

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Have a look at heatpumps, you may end up with a very pleasant surprise, assuming your lot is large enough. Even shallow grids to really well.

Heat pumps don't work so well without some way to circulate the heat inside the house and are useless without electricity. I have a large acreage but the water table is under 250' of granite, and there are no ducts in my house. I would be very pleasantly surprised indeed if I could harness geothermal without electricity, extreme home renovations, and $100k in well-drilling costs.

Ah that makes it a lot harder, if not impossible. Too bad!

They are in the north. Heat pumps are worthless below a certain point. I think around 10-20F.

Ground-source heat pumps take advantage of the fact that the earth stays at reasonable temperatures below the frost line.

They work just fine, you're just going to go a bit deeper then. I put a thermal sensor down an old well head in mid winter, it was -20 Celsius at the surface and a 'balmy' 12 degrees at 10 meters down. That gradient will allow you to do a lot of good stuff if you use a freeze proof working fluid for your heatpump.

I’m guessing in-ground heat pumps with their heat exchanger liquid lines below the frost line still work…

Wouldn’t you be able to have a heat floor heated by your wood? If wood is cheap where you live heating water with it is a nice upgrade from a basic wood stove.

Yes, it would be possible to use the heated cistern water from the wood cookstove but that would mean running insulated pipes through the house, using electric pumps to move the water, and additional maintenance of all that especially when it drops below freezing inside the house. Besides, the joy of the electric radiant heating in the bathroom is best experienced briefly first thing in the morning before going to rouse the fires. The older I get the more I'm willing to splurge on a few luxuries like that.

I’m currently renovating a house and we live with a single wood (pellet) stove for the whole building. Living in a 16C home is surprisingly fine but the worst part is indeed the cold bathroom in the morning.

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