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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

> NYC will still want to have direct-burn natural gas heating for cold days because that’ll be more efficient than resorting to resistive heating.

I agree.

With climate change and unpredictable weather I really wouldn't go all-in on heat pumps. Even with hyper-heat it only works efficiently down to 5 degrees Fahrenheit. NYC rarely gets colder than that, but I wouldn't be surprised if the extreme cold days are the same days where electricity has problems. Those two things together means people freezing to death.

I think buildings should have both, and default to heat pumps.

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> Those two things together means people freezing to death

What is the deal with americans and freezing to death? I’m from Scandinavia, and the only times I’ve heard people discuss that is in the context of someone getting drunk and passing out outside.

Fuck me, even if it somehow reaches -20C inside all you need to do is grab a few extra blankets and stay under them in order to remain warm.

If you’re really worried, just invest some money in a sufficiently warm sleeping bag. Installing gas as a backup would be moronic unless you’re expecting to spend months without power.

I think it's Americans invested in competing technologies, doing the modern cultural thing of hyperbola and escalation to the point of insisting that people retrofitting stuff with heat pumps are MURDERERS and clearly seeking to literally kill hapless victims. I'm seeing a lot of intense argument here that's going waaay over to the extremes of scaremongering, and the context doesn't seem to warrant using emotional arguments to shut down the proposal in shame and guilt over actually setting out to kill lots of foolish people. That seems… excessive, as a claim.

Me, I'm in southern Vermont, heat with a wood stove and oil furnace, and just replaced a deteriorating resistive water heater with a big heat pump water heater. I do envy the cooking-with-flame folks, though :)

Hi Neighbor! I'm also in Southern Vermont (Readsboro), also heat primarily with a wood, also have fuel oil backup, and also recently replaced my resistance water heater with a heat pump. I don't know if you need to envy the flame for cooking, though. We've got a fairly weak propane range top, and while the largest burner works OK, I'm thinking of upgrading to induction at some point.

That’s a big misconception. Latest generation heat pumps can work well even in very cold climates eg Lake Tahoe. The “fixes” needed to make that work aren’t that dramatic eg a bit of pre-heating of some parts with regular electric heating elements.

What's the big misconception? My comment doesn't disagree with what you're saying.

Heat pumps work in cold weather and should have emergency heat where it's resistance coils inside the home. Your HVAC installer should install the correct system by zone.

Your fear of people freezing to death over heat pumps are unfounded. There are backups built in that work with the insulation value of a house. New homes should be very air tight and require less heating, suited for heat pumps.

I never claimed heat pumps don't work in cold weather. The point is about non-electric redundancy, not heat pumps having resistance coils. I'm well aware of the functionality of modern heat pumps.

Even in a house with foam insulation - the highest "normally available" insulation - freezing to death is just a matter of time without heat. When considering city-wide infrastructure it's something that needs to be considered. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to happen, but you'd be dumb not to think about redundancy measures, hence my top-level comment.

This type of redundancy is why many commercial buildings have gas generators, for example.

A gas furnace would require electricity. You need electricity to ignite and exhaust most natural gas heating. There are vent-free options. Not common for those to be installed and back to having your own option for backup power. Which can be propane or gasoline.

The amount of electricity a gas furnace requires is trivial and not really relevant to this discussion. A heat pump requires many orders of magnitude more electricity. A 10kwh battery could power a gas furnace and a water heater electrically for a year.

Now this natural gas house has a 10kwh whole house battery backup too? Hope your refrigerator can also last a year off that battery pack (oh wait it's a ac compressor too!),

Heat Pump for heat, Heat Pump water heater is the future for new home builds. Buy a portable generator, a 10kwh gasoline generator is <$1,000 USD and 1/10th the price of a 10kwh batter pack. Problem solved.

I don’t disagree. My point is that what’s nyc doing for redundancy?

The problem with relying on resistance-based emergency heat is that it means heating efficiency tanks by a factor of potentially 4 or so at the same time as heating demand is also at its highest. This is a really great recipe for collapse of the electrical grid, which of course people are going to be 100% reliant on for heating, at a time when not having heating would literally be fatal.

I know people that spend months in a tent on an Antarctic or Greenland Glacier, with no access to mains gas.

They don’t freeze to death.

You can get heat pumps that work in colder weather, those are very common here in Canada. Certainly plenty sufficient for NYC.

You can also mix and match a variety of backup/supplemental heat sources (only some of which make sense in an urban context), and of course a ground source heat pump is another (expensive) option for very cold climates.

> Those two things together means people freezing to death.

If we want to prevent people from freezing to death, the best way is to help people get 1. food 2. clothes 3. shelter 4. health care.

I'd argue gas based heat isn't even on the list. As you said, we should not go all-in on heat pumps. We can and should have alternate sources of heat for vulnerable people (I am thinking hospitals, retirement communities, and so on).

I am confident that healthy, well-fed, appropriately dressed people in well insulated homes do not die because the weather outside dips below freezing for under a day.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/bayc-j28.html

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