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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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...

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