Washington State Passes All-Electric Heating Mandate for New Buildings | Hacker News Reader

Washington State Passes All-Electric Heating Mandate for New Buildings

ecowatch.com

19 points8bitsrule20 comments

The mandate should be to use electric heat pumps, not use electric heating. In Sweden they switched from oil to electric as “nuclear will be to cheap to meter”. Eventually sanity prevailed and heatpumps became the norm.

> The mandate passed 11 to 3 in a vote by the State Building Code Council to restrict the use of natural gas in multifamily housing complexes and commercial buildings by requiring installation of electric heat pumps. A similar mandate for smaller residential buildings will be considered within the next few months.

This is a poor choice of title as electric heaters are one category of devices and electrically driven heat pumps are another, far more efficient category utilizing refrigerants.

Most people have no idea (and don't care) how any of this stuff works. They don't know or care whether it's done with resistance heating or by running an air conditioner backwards. All they know is it's a machine which makes hot air. If you try to tell them how much more efficient it is to move heat from the outdoors to the indoors instead of just turning electricity into heat they will stare at you blankly and say "but it's a heater, right?"

I thought electricity is much less efficient way for heating than gas - both per dollar as well as pollution outcome. Somebody has to generate all that electricity from somewhere and it’s definitely neither nuclear or solar (it’s usually coal) in near future.

WA has a lot of cheap hydro so theoretically it's more efficient.

In reality everyone who isn't of highfalutin HN levels of income is gonna fire up ye olde wood stove after their first heating bill.

Resistance heating is inefficient, but heat pumps are actually more than 100% efficient -- as much as 300% efficient. They take heat out of the air (even air that's colder than your target temperature). You actually end up with more heat produced than energy put in.

That seems bizarre, but note that heat pumps can run in reverse to pump out cold air on a hot day. That obviously doesn't engage in resistance heating at all -- that would be counter to the point. It's clearly disconnected entirely from the heat value of the electric energy.

Heat pumps exist to pump energy around, which can go from cold to hot as well as hot to cold, if you apply energy to it. And because the outside air is an effectively infinite reservoir, you can get a lot of energy for free.

They should also mandate insulation as it would help with both hot and cold. No matter its cost, it's gotta be cheaper than a monthly power bill.

They already do - Residential Energy Code - 402.1.1

TLDR - R21 in the walls, R49 in the roof, R30 in the floors.

It’s paired with credits for retrofitting to a reasonable level.

Good. I've got no clue what our house insulation here in Canada is as we didn't build it. But it's way more than anywhere I lived in the US. Even at -20C or below, give us a little sun for those southern windows and we get a few degrees to keep the heat off. Although unless heat pumps work well below 0C they're only useful here as air conditioner replacements. We could have moved Moderna vaccine in the back of pickups much of the winter...

Modern air-to-air heat pumps work well in below freezing temperatures. The crossover point where the COP is 1 is something like zero Fahrenheit, but you probably don't care, since they automatically switch to resistive heating, or a hybrid mode depending on conditions and load.

At some point, as you head to colder climates, it makes sense to use a ground source heatpump instead. They're more expensive to install, but pay for themselves in areas with high heating bills.

Talk about an abuse of building codes.

How so?

Unelected, unaccountable boards should not be choosing how people heat their homes. There is no safety concern, and there is widespread experience in the trades.

If there is some broader issue, that should be considered by elected legislatures.

Gas is more dangerous than electric. An estimated average of 4,200 home structure fires per year started with the ignition of natural gas. These fires caused an average of 40 deaths per year [1]. There is no combustion with heat pumps, no risk of CO poisoning. Heat pumps are a superior conditioning technology, from both a safety and efficiency perspective. They will also save money versus burning fossil gas over their lifetime (as the price of fossil fuels rise, from a combination of taxes, demand, and constrained supply due to efforts to disincentivize investment in petroleum supply).

This is what these groups are for. To raise building code when warranted.

[1] https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st...

Drinking soda is also more dangerous than drinking water but nobody mandates me about when I should drink what.

Imagine if I had a heart attack while behind the wheel and hurt someone?? Soda should be banned for this reason.

Soda certainly doesn't meet drinking water standards. The same busy bodies banned it too!

Do you disagree with the concept of a building code? Mandating how buildings are built to increase safety is the purpose of building codes.

There is a fundamental difference between building codes that enforce critical safety needs in order to clearly define negligence...

... and building codes that express someone's preference or taste for how something should be done.

For example, a building code that says all houses must be pink, or all houses must be made from wood, or all houses must use electric stoves, are only tangentially related to someone's opinion on safety at best.

If north america is any example, "considered by elected legislatures" is about the least useful way of getting a result. Limited technical knowledge, staggeringly short-term approach and, um, err, easy virtues just isn't helpful.

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