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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

Why are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead. Seems like fossil gas has been too cheap for too long, which have incentivized dependency on it despite the CO2 external cost.

Are there any plans on using waste heat from industry combined with district heating anywhere? Biofuels? Subsidized insulation retrofitting?

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Heat pumps have only recently become economically in climates like Germany’s. Most people don’t want to replace their furnace until it breaks or needs expensive repairs.

It’s been economical for 30+ yrs for Germanys climate, they just have older housing that’s never been updated. Every heat pump has backup source of heat too. Which will be electric coils or gas usually, so you don’t even have to give up gas heat for the really frigid days.

I'd say in UK heat pumps are only just down to affordability domestically. If capital is cheap for you then perhaps they've been affordable much longer, but baseline costs are only recently noticeably low enough for me to consider it ... possibly when I look next time it'll be out of reach again given the weak pound and massive cost of living increase.

I'm hoping to get a heat pump next Summer.

Yeah there’s no denying that it definitely helps that electricity is a good bit cheaper in the US, making gas v. Heat pump heat pretty much on par in the northeast at least.

Supply is a real problem at the moment. If you really plan on getting one I would order it well before you have the installation planned.

Thanks for the advice. I was hoping to have time over Christmas to start looking, I've done a little preliminary research. There are, as ever, complications (possible extension?).

It's tricky stuff, best to befriend a local installer so they can help you choose. In the end after doing all the numbers for our house the simplest solution for the next two years (as long as we still have netmetering) was to install ample solar and postpone the heatpump that way by the time we will buy the heatpump the solar installation will already be halfway towards being paid off, with the current electrical rates here the ROI on solar is incredible, and running a heatpump off the solar system in the winter isn't very effective, at a minimum you'll need a battery set up for that. But even in October we managed to be net positive with respect to the grid which helps to offset the cost of the gas.

But in 2025 it will be a completely different story which will likely require yet another investment. I'm kind of wondering how people that can't just do that kind of thing are going to cope, it is a worrying development. Of course it doesn't help that the measures to control the prices of energy here effectively benefit the large producers at the expense of the people that decided to go for heatpumps early on.

But as long as the countermeasures still split by gas and electricity usage it is to our advantage to get as close to the cap as possible on natural gas. Ridiculous, but the difference is too large to ignore.

It hasn't been, though - not for any particular technical reason, mind you. Yes, they are 3x as efficient, but meanwhile we have heaved so many taxes and other costs on private electricity prices (to keep industry use cheap) while natural gas had stayed dirt cheap that the upfront capex really made no sense.

If they weren't so impractical, everyone should have been buying gas turbines to make their electricity - that's the level of market failure we are talking about.

If the government can subsidize solar installations, can't they just as well subsidize furnace replacements? It's interesting which parts of this problem people are eager to tackle, and which parts they completely let their own side down on.

The incentives and the rhetoric are poorly aligned.

Heatpumps gained in popularity here in Sweden around 20 years ago. My parents have one that's starting to get old enough to need replacing.

https://skvp.se/statistik/varmepumpsforsaljning

Fwiw - I moved to Canada and people basically don't understand there's any other way to heat a house than a basement gas furnace.

I guess a combination of harsh winters and cheap gas?

Things are changing in Canada too. Heat pumps are much more common in the past few years.

In rural Canada you'll find plenty of oil furnaces with their own tanks as well. Some of those are 30 to 40 years old and all of them are terribly inefficient.

And they are expensive AF to run. I had family members who had an oil-heated house on the Northeast US, and it was close to $2k a month to hear in the winter months (the house was large, something like 3000-3500 sq ft, but that's still an astronomical cost for heating)

We're getting into similar territory in Europe with the current gas prices. 3 Euro / cubic meter at my supplier. I never thought that the cost of heating our house would become a factor again in my lifetime but here we are.

They need to get their windows fixed!

Plenty of these old houses have much bigger problems than just the windows (which, in Canada at least in all but the very oldest houses always was double glass, even if it came in the form of an inner and an outer window).

Crappy foundations without insulation, roofs and walls with poor insulation, front door directly opening into the house instead of a separate space, almost all of them freestanding (especially rural ones) and relatively large for the number of people living there. Heating in Canada is an interesting problem. -40 Celsius on the other side of a 4" barrier is nothing to take lightly. One elderly couple that I'm aware of had begun to dismantle their house on the inside and they were burning it all up bit-by-bit to stay warm, the two of them sitting around a shitty old pot bellied stove that moved the bulk of the heat generated straight out the chimney. Stuff like that breaks your heart.

That is awful.

My post was a little too quick… one of my good friends was an energy efficiency expert and when I asked him for advice on replacing a boiler in our “new to me” home and he goes “don’t!”.

We did an audit and spent about $4000 on efficiency retrofit - it cut our heating bill about 25%. That was 10 years ago, and we’ll probably start looking at replacement boilers when incentives ramp up for new tech.

I had the full energy efficiency report with infrared camera and expert's eyes and blower door test. It was enlightening. I strongly recommend first thing get the expert report and follow the recommendations.

A few years later I got another report and fixed a few more things. House cold spots mostly went away, bills went down, less outside noise, and have the same windows and furnace.

That's the right approach though: any Joule you don't need to produce is one saved and even the most efficient furnace can not fix a leaky house. So the priorities are: economize (because it is free, and assuming you still can), insulate, high efficiency heat (depending on the age of the furnace, anything older than a decade is likely not HE+), self generated power in that order.

There are lots of options out there. My parents have a 95% oil burner that works great for heat and hot water.

The gotcha is that the efficient units require more maintenance so in some situation it’s cheaper to be less efficient.

The latest generation (HE+) is a lot better than the ones before it which tended to erode the inner liner of the burner vessel into a nasty aluminum rich sludge that ended up clogging the drain. The newer ones do not have that (much thinner drains too).

Until fairly recently heat pumps didn't operate at the temperatures regularly seen in the northern US and Canada. Hard to shift a lifetime of the choices being expensive resistance electric heating or (comparatively) cheaper burning fuel.

Really depends on where you are. Parts of Ontario and BC you could probably get away with just a heat pump, but lots of places in the prairies you could only use a heat pump for maybe 1/2 of the winter months. It's just too cold the rest of the time, so you'd have to augment with electric or gas anyways.

With the amount of flak raised about infrastructure not being able to handle electric vehicles I can't even imagine the chaos if the prairies went electric heat.

I'd really like to see strong baseline energy efficiency standards put in provincially for new builds and a lot of investment in retrofit, but with the current political climate in the prairies that's impossible. Promoting anything that doesn't burn both oil and money is anathema.

In Quebec, people heat issuing electricity.

Depends on where you are in Canada. In Québec where electricity is cheap, most homes rely on electric heating. Of course, in Alberta where gas is cheap and electric is ~2.5x more expensive it's not surprising gas furnaces are the default choice.

Heat pumps don’t work all that well in Canadian climates. They sort of work now.

Advocates usually don’t mention that the solution for the millions of houses with hydronic systems are usually mini-splits, which are both ugly and noisy.

Lots of people who don’t have heat pumps are rabid advocates of them. In some cases trying to ban gas heat.

> Heat pumps don’t work all that well in Canadian climates.

They seem to work okay in many parts of Alaska (down to about -20C):

* https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2021/even-in-frigid-tempe...

Parts of Alaska (eg Fairbanks, Juneau) are not as cold as the Canadian prairies, where it frequently gets well below -20C in the depths of winter. In Winnipeg the average low in January is -21C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_and_climate_of_Winni...

All of your suggestions have already been applied. They're already part of the Energiewende.

I don't know if downsizing sq ft is part of the energy transition, though I was in a few multi-bedroom houses in Germany which relied on firewood for heating.

Also, the book Cooking Without Electricity was published a year ago. https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Kochen-ohne-Stro...

Yes, gas has been much cheaper than electricity. Heating your house with an electric boiler was several times more expensive than a gas one. Anyway, you still need fossil fuels for industrial processes and agriculture

> Heating your house with an electric boiler was several times more expensive than a gas one.

But this is not the case for a heat pump.

In a disturbing chicken and egg problem, the heat pumps industry is not as installed and scaled up yet, which kinda refrain people from making the jump. Stories of heat pumps breaking up in November after less than ten years with no one left to fix them are not making the tech look good, whereas gas boilers routinely last 15/20 years while everyone forget them except once a year for maintenance - and once every couple decades because of geopolitics.

This will definitely change in the next few years, as heat pumps will replace "fioul" (petrol ?) boilers, which are being slowly banned.

Which will make our direct co2 emissions slightly better, and our electricity generation problems MUCH bigger...

(Full disclosure : I bought a house with a 5-year old gas boiler that I haven't had the heart to trash yet, instead investing in insulation, and a good wood furnace. My goal for 2022-2023 winter is to use it half as little as last winter.)

There was recently a NYTimes article about how there aren't enough Heat Pump installation technicians in Germany to meet demand, so some folks are learning how to do it themselves.

That's understandable considering the sudden demand spike that's ultimately because of the war. People aren't extra interested now because they want something more environmentally friendly, it's pure economics. Using fossil fuel wasn't expensive enough before since the external costs aren't factored in, so now when Putler has driven up the price of gas and oil people learn that there are alternatives, and now many of them are cheaper as well.

My question isn't "why aren't you switching now", it's "why haven't you switched during the previous 20 years, when we've all known about climate change"? And on top of that there's the strategic issue with relying on Russia.

That does exist; In my street they are doing construction work for exactly that purpose, but this is one of the largest cities, no idea how widespread that is.

>>Why are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead.

You do realize that in many countries - including the US - a very large portion of electricity is still generated from fossil fuels? Until there is enough electricity generated from wind/solar/nuclear, switching to an electric heat pump just switches where those fossil fuels get burned, i.e. it pollutes someone else's neighborhood instead of your own.

Heat pumps have efficiency above 100%, by exchanging and transporting heat, instead of generating it. 2-4x for air pumps and close to 5x for geo.

Burning fossil fuel isn't primarily about polluting neighborhoods, it's about polluting our shared atmosphere. If 20 000 houses use electricity from one oil burning power plant it's relatively easy to capture the carbon emissions from that one plant, and to replace the plant with other power producers eventually.

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