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Comment by alphabettsy | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of storms happen rarely if ever happen in the winter and they typically happen in the spring and summer so I’m not sure how this presents much of an issue for heating. They seem to impact rural areas much worse though.

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SE Michigan has outages all year round, it's just an infrastructure problem. Before I moved, I was used to (fortunately short) DTE outages at least once a month, every computer needed a UPS or you would lose work. In Nashville I haven't had an outage without a tornado coming through (knock on wood). I remember being woken up by the UPS beeping at night all the time and I just spent four years with it right next to my bed with no issues (albeit only because I wasn't sleeping during the tornado sirens anyways).

In the northeast all my worst power outages happened during the winter. Usually from ice storms or even just an overabundance of wet snow causing tons of tree limbs to come down at once.

We were talking about Michigan though. Also, power lines can be constructed or maintained in a way that trees and ice aren’t an issue.

They can be, but in large parts of Michigan they haven't been - a quick check says 15% of power lines are buried. So any weather event that risks damage to tree limbs also risks power outages.

Burying power lines is extremely expensive - and the utilities aren't going to eat that cost, it's going to be passed right on to you! Moreover, when there are problems with underground power lines, which ironically tends to also happen in the winter due to the salt used on roadways, it's very time-consuming to resolve issues. The utilities would need 5x the crews they currently have in order to restore power in as timely a manner as they do now.

How do I know this? I work for a major utility serving the midwest. Winters are no joke in these parts. As others have noted, heat pumps are only good down to 20F. If it gets colder than that, which it frequently does, you're going to want a natural gas furnace because electric furnaces are stupid expensive to operate! This coming from a guy who works for the power company!

There's not going to be any phase-out of natural gas for decades - which is the amount of time we need to build all the nuclear generation we need to make power as cheap and abundant as we need. We can't heat our homes and power our cars with wishes and desires - we need a hard-nosed energy policy and plan of execution.

> As others have noted, heat pumps are only good down to 20F. If it gets colder than that,

Others said no such thing. Did you leave out the minus sign?

You're right - they said -20F. I didn't leave out the minus sign, I didn't even see it!, and it's interesting why. Thirty years ago my parents had a house having both a gas furnace and a heat pump that worked in tandem. They had a problem with their furnace that they didn't immediately fix because they were using the heat pump. Then they got the bill. It was nearly 3x more expensive than usual. My dad immediately got the furnace fixed.

What I recall my dad saying is when the furnace guy came out to fix the furnace my dad was talking to the furnace guy about the bill. The furnace guy said heat pumps get very inefficient below 20F. So my dad's system was designed to run the heat pump until the outside temperature got to 20F and then it would switch over to the furnace, if available. If it detected the furnace not coming on then it would continue to run the heat pump. So I've had it in my head ever since that you don't want to run a heat pump below 20F.

Are the new heat pumps different? Is it now -20F instead of 20F before your costs soar?

Yes, apparently there have been huge advances in the efficiency of heat pumps since then. And this is why ground source heat pumps are less of a thing these days: you don't need the help of that underground temperature as much.

This guy gets really excited about heat pumps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEHFsO-XSI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43XKfuptnik

Thanks for the links!

It is still not too smart to run your heat pump below 10F. It will work, but the BTUs it can produce will be limited, right when you need a lot more because it's f*%&in' cold out.

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