The enormous heat pumps warming cities | Hacker News Reader

The enormous heat pumps warming cities

bbc.com

For those interested in installing heatpumps I can describe my experience in running a rather big one that provide sanitary hot water for 6 holiday apartment we own and one for AC/heating for each of said apartments.

In summary, switching to heatpumps was a win. In fact, the sum of monthly bills went down by around 30% compared to having electricity and gas. In addtion, they don't require the yearly safety check-ups and smoke tests that gas boilers of that size did. The downside is that you have to do small maintenance more often since there are more moving parts that fail.

We have been running them since 2017, so I only have data for 6 years (5 if you don't count 2020 which for tourism was a bloodbath). The maintenance frequency is not going up, but the costs went a bit up in 2022 due to more expensive parts. If things stay this way we would break even in an additional 2/3 years, granted that we had to do quite a big renovation and so my cost figures of when we did the works are not perfectly attributed. The company that installed the units says they have a lifetime of 15/20 years, and so well worth them as by them we would have saved enough to update the heatpumps with money to spare.

We're in a rental for the month in Florida. We're from the midwest, so where gas is used for almost everything. The backlash against heat pumps and electric stoves, ovens, water heaters, etc is normally the ol' "gas gets hotter and is faster" mantra. The unit we're renting is exactly why people think that way. The water heater is old, nor well maintained, and small. The stove is your old coil-top running off a 120v@30A circuit and the heat pump is an old unit that uses the hot water for emergency heat.

So yes, based on this experience it really sucks. That's what you get for the cheapest obsolete tech. It'd be great if people realized there's better electric appliances out there.

I have an induction stove. I can point a liter of water in right about a minute. I have not timed it with a stopwatch, but it is seriously fast.

Cheap gas is superior in speed to cheap electric, but at the midrange their differences basically disappear.

One thing that Gas will always have over electric though is availability.

If the power goes out in a blizzard you can usually still light your stove for emergency heat and cook food. Not so with electric.

Surely the earth 50-100m down is warm due to radioactive decay deeper in the crust, rather than from “absorbing sunlight over millenia”!

A valid point, not sure why you were downvoted

Geothermal, Nuclear and Tidal* are sources which don't rely on the Sun. Fossil fuels are solar energy that's been stored for millions of years, Solar and Wind rely on the sun.

* OK the sun has a small affect on Tidal but the moon has more of an effect - and there's about 10^30J of energy in it's orbital energy, enough to power human civilization for billions of years

That's nothing compared to the sun of course, which puts out about that amount of energy every hour.

Also some from the initial heat of formation of the Earth.

But yeah - this is coming from inside, not outside.

At those levels the temperature is the same as the groundwater.

Which in turn is originally heated by the sun.

Further down (maybe 1000m under ideal conditions) the heat comes from the core.

I may add that in Sweden this kind of heat pumps are abundant. I have one with a 150m drill hole.

The article seems more about small heat pumps with shared ground loops. Which is a bit more modern. Big heat pumps feeding district heat is a slightly older and more established tech.

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