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Comment by spiralpolitik | Hacker News Reader

A nice idea but I don't see how this is going to work given the age of a lot of California houses.

A good chunk of California houses built in the 20th Century don't have the upgraded electrical to make this a drop-in replacement. It's likely to move to an electric furnace or water heater most houses will have to drop in a new electrical panel and run a new to wire the furnace room. That's $2-3K right there before the cost of a furnace or water heater.

Given that you'll almost certainly pull permits, you'll probably then discover that your current furnace room doesn't match current building code, costing even more money to fix, if it's even fixable.

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They will mandate these in essence. Force everyone that’s renting to go heat pump. That’s the cheapest retrofit

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rheem-introduces-12...

This looks cool. Does it need direct access to air from outside, or can it suck the heat out of the air in the garage?

It’s more efficient in a garage or basement but you can put it in the house it will just fight your heater in the winter

So what is the alternative here? Keep on using natural gas and ignore the effects it has on the environment and air quality? If California - one of the richest areas in the world, which for the most part has a very mild climate - cannot switch away from natural gas, how is anyone else expected to?

Yes, keep using natural gas. At least for now.

As long as 38% of electricity is being generated from natural gas, banning natural gas usage in homes is silly.

Heat pumps at least help, but simply replacing with electric water heater and electric stoves actually hurts the environment more!

Almost all at-home gas usage is after the sun has gone down, as a result the vast majority of the electricity used for the alternative would be generated from natural gas not just 38%.

>As long as 38% of electricity is being generated from natural gas, banning natural gas usage in homes is silly.

Generating electricity in a large gas power plant, transmitting that electricity over vast differences, and then turning that electricity into heat, motive power, or light is much, MUCH **MUUUUUUUCH** more efficient than piping gas all over the place and burning the gas in homes.

By, like, a lot.

With gas burners the vast majority of energy is wasted, blasted out into the ambient air. In a turbine it is almost all turned into whatever is desired. Once at the home immersed heating elements or inductive elements turn most of the electricity into what is desired.

Transmission losses are irrelevantly small compared to the astronomically huge increases in efficiency of the endpoints.

Same goes for cars. Even if power plants used gasoline, which they don’t, it would be more efficient to burn the gasoline to generate electricity in huge generators, transmit the electricity a thousand miles, and use it to charge batteries in EVs.

If a house doesn’t have the capacity to switch to electric, subsidize improvements. If the grid can’t handle it, fix it.

Don’t just throw up your hands and go “well we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”

That is absolutely not true!

Greater than 85% of the heat generated in a water heater, and 95% in a boiler is captured. For electricity it's closer to 60%. Your "vast majority" is completely backwards.

Your info is utterly wrong about natural gas efficiency.

> Don’t just throw up your hands and go “well we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”

That's better than doing things that are known to be worse. Like electric water heaters.

Whoever told you electric water heaters are 60% was either mistaken or a gas lobbyist.

The minimum efficiency for electric water heaters, required by federal law, is 90%.

Electric heat pump water heaters have efficiency ratings in excess of 100%, often over 200% when measured by the same standard as “traditional” heaters.

https://smarterhouse.org/water-heating/replacing-your-water-...

The efficiency of an electric plant is 60%. Many are as low as 45%.

You have a serious blind spot, or wilful ignorance about natural gas vs electricity.

A natural gas water heater easily eclipses any electric one.

A heat pump water heater just barely is better, in some, warm climates, and only if you barely use water (their recovery rate is so low they basically only work in 2 person households). For most people it is NOT better.

Ah I see you googled "efficiency of a gas power plant" and ran with the first result.

Excellent!

The efficiencies of gas power plants are not measured in the same way as water heaters and the two numbers are not comparable. It is also not because turbines generate more power. They do, but most vessel's speed is limited by physics, not the amount of oomph they can put into the screws.

Think of it this way: if gas turbines were less efficient that boilers, why has every navy on the entire planet moved away from boilers? It ain't because maintenance is easier or costs are lower with turbines, that's for sure.

Gas turbines compress the gas. They are much more efficient than dribbling gas out of an orifice at 1 ATM and getting a nice blue flame out of it.

Also, good job ignoring the fact that you were wrong about water heater efficiency and then dismissing my correction and then immediately changing the thrust of your argument.

It warms my heart to see that people never change.

Finally, your information about heat pumps is extremely outdated, from the 80s or 90s, I'm assuming you're older and don't keep up with technological developments? (or are an oil and gas lobbyist)

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? Personal attacks, name-calling, and snark are not ok on HN. Your comment here is stuffed with them. Seriously not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Generating electricity in a large gas power plant, transmitting that electricity over vast differences, and then turning that electricity into heat, motive power, or light is much, MUCH *MUUUUUUUCH* more efficient than piping gas all over the place and burning the gas in homes.

> By, like, a lot.

Source?? Modern gas furnaces are 95% efficient. So only 5% of the energy in the fuel is lost.

You lose around 5% of your energy just transmitting electricity from the power plant to the home, let alone the pitiful performance of the turbine.

[1] https://iwae.com/resources/articles/95-afue-gas-furnace-work...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3

That’s gas marketing bullshit.

The AFUE rating for electric baseboard heating is 100. The AFUE for heat pumps CAN EXCEED 100.

The MOST efficient gas water heaters use 11.9MMBtu/yr.

The LEAST efficient electric water heaters use 8.9MMBtu/yr.

The MOST efficient electric heat pump water heaters use 4.2MMBtu/yr.

Converting gas into BTUs by burning it in a power plant and transmitting it to a home is much better than burning it in the home.

Energy Efficiency Design Options for Residential Water Heaters: Economic Impacts on Consumers

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Environmental Energy Technologies Division

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1016713

> Converting gas into BTUs by burning it in a power plant and transmitting it to a home is much better than burning it in the home.

This is utterly false, as multiple people, and multiple sources of data have shown you.

At this point you either have to update your knowledge and accept reality, or acknowledge that you are being willfully ignorant, and quit making false statements.

I understand you believe this, but can you explain this discrepancy between the water heaters? I figure by the least efficient electric heater you mean a resistive one, so it's close to 100% efficiency, right? There are plenty 90% and 95% AFUE gas heaters on the market, let's say 90% is the most efficient so it should be using 1.1x more energy than a 100% efficient resistive heater but in your numbers the gas heater uses 1.33x more energy. I.e. you claim the most efficient gas heater is 75% AFUE? I don't think these are even legal to sell in the US any more.

It's not silly -- the long term goal is to stop burning natural gas completely, and we can't do that unless we stop burning it.

I'd imagine most of those homes already have air conditioners. Aren't the electrical requirements of a mini-split pretty close to a couple window units? I'm pretty sure our five-head 12K BTU Mitsubishi is on a 15 amp double pole breaker.

I have a small sample size, but I've lived in several dwellings in california with natural gas furnace, natural gas water heater and no a/c. If there were any window units, they were on 120vac.

Not to mention the ridiculous cost of the onerous permit needed from some non-self-sufficient government agency, notably in a state that is highly hostile toward new housings.

Good point. My brother bought a house with a 100amp panel. Barely sufficient even when your running a gas furnace and stove.

He paid something like $15,000 to upgrade to a 200amp panel.

Not cheap.

That cost is atypical. It’s usually $2-4k, and there are income based subsidies available in the Inflation Reduction Act (and no income limit if the panel upgraded is required as part of a rooftop solar install; it too is eligible for a 30% federal tax credit).

Atypical? Based on what? That's the normal cost to rewire a house and upgrade service in California unless you're talking about some podunk town in the Central Valley.

This ain't the mid-West.

Just had a friend have the work done an hour out of Sacramento for the price I mentioned. I’m aware of the California tax, but $15k wildly deviates from the median unless your utility is requiring a service entrance upgrade under concrete.

It costs $3-5k for an electrician in that part of the country to get off their arse and sign off on an already completed installation. Throw in the permitting procedure and everything else involved, and I'm moderately surprised it's so cheap. There's a reason such a high percentage of homes in the area have illegal lofts/porches/bedrooms/stoves/....

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