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Comment by cpsns | Hacker News Reader

I have a heat pump and a wood stove in my house. The heat pump doesn’t do as good of a job, but it keeps one from freezing and it really shines in the summer at cooling the house.

Heat wise the wood stove is much nicer. I can’t quantify why, but the quality of heating feels completely different and I’d much rather use it.

Additionally as someone who has used a heat pump in -25C I dispute the claims they work well in the cold with personal experience. If I hadn’t had backup heat I’d have been way, way too cold as it didn’t heat acceptably at that temperature.

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>> I can’t quantify why, but the quality of heating feels completely different and I’d much rather use it.

It is because your wood stove is radiant heat. It is pumping out IR radiation which is heating all of your surfaces, as opposed to heating air that is then moved around your house. It is the difference between standing in a warm breeze and standing under a heat lamp.

This is exactly it. You get a similar experience with the old radiators powered by a boiler. Both have the added advantage of not having as many issues with humidity as say forced air heating, which dries the air out as it heats it.

I grew up in a house heated primarily by a wood stove and setting aside all the environmental issues, it’s incredibly comfortable. I lived in an apartment for a few years that was heated by a boiler, and it was almost as comfortable (a bit louder though, but there’s no smoke to deal with). Midwest Winters were quite comfortable there. Unfortunately that apartment had no AC, so the summers were pretty brutal.

It depends on the setup. Some radiators are meant to sit in the corner, heating air, which then circulates around the room like in baseboard heating. Wood stoves are generally in the middle of the room and "visible" to everything, allowing them to radiate more. Radiator colour can make a big difference too. A black radiator will radiate more than a white one. Wood stoves are generally dull grey/black. Radiators are often white/shiny.

Color has extremely little effect on radiation performance: https://www.bestheating.com/info/does-the-colour-of-your-rad...

Air-to-water heat pumps provide radiant heat too.

There are also IR panels that provide radiant heat directly (although with COP=1).

Agreed this is the best combination. Wood stoves are also great for when the power is out. If only my building would let me put a fire in my apartment. :)

> Heat wise the wood stove is much nicer. I can’t quantify why, but the quality of heating feels completely different and I’d much rather use it.

Radiant heat, it reminds us the bonfires, which kept bad things away. I also like my fireplace much more than more convenient to handle wood pellet furnace in my basement, but warm floors are nice too.

Did wood stoves become a trend recently?

It happens every time oil/gas spikes. Heating oil was just pushing $6/gal, so yeah.

And the federal tax credit just got severely neutered. At least that's what caused me to install a new one at the end of last year as opposed to later this year.

Wood stoves and heat pumps would seem to pair well. Heat pump capacity is expensive, and drops precisely when you need it most. Rather than falling back to resistive heat for the small amount of coldest days and watching your electric meter spin while you shiver, you can focus on the wood stove and have plenty of heat. On most days, you can keep a fire going if you're home and you want to, or you can just let the heat pump do its thing. Also unless you have a huge backup generator (and a correspondingly large fuel source), a heat pump isn't going to work in power outages while a wood stove will.

Not where I live, in rural Nova Scotia almost everyone has one if not for primary heat, than for when the power inevitably goes out.

People here are not well off and wood is hands down the cheapest heating option. In other places? Maybe it’s a fad/trend.

The EPA was going to ban them, so everyone who still used one got very vocal, along with about a third of the state of Maine.

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