Everyone is worked up about losing their gas stove, but natural gas heating is far more reliable and efficient than any electric option right now. This will create a lot of issues until heat pumps catch up. Northern New York is very cold.
Heat pumps are used all over Scandinavia and well into the arctic circle, including rural areas in the parts of Scandinavia (i.e. the polar circle) that see extreme temperatures far more regularly and for far longer periods than NY. Of course relative to NY, they do have a more reliable power grid and excellent building standards. Triple (not double) glazing is the norm there, for example.
And of course more rural places would also feature wood stoves as a backup. There is mostly no gas network there; especially not in rural areas. Before heat pumps became popular about thirty years ago they would have used that or oil based systems.
Well except…
> Of course relative to NY, they do have a more reliable power grid
Okay, yeah. That would pretty much be my concern.
Having been without power for over two weeks in the past 12 months the propane tanks and propane stove / furnace / water heater have been a lifesaver.
Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a lot simpler proposition than trying to generate enough power to heat my house, water, and food with resistive heating.
> Powering the control boards / fans with a generator (or even UPS in a pinch) is a lot simpler proposition than trying to generate enough power to heat my house, water, and food with resistive heating.
My furnace runs on 120V power pulling ~8A when running. That's ~1kW. Comparable sized resistive heating would use about 9kW.
1kW for a few hours a day is easy to provide through a cheap generator, a couple small solar panels and a single marine battery, or apparently a ~$220 wind turbine I can order on Amazon that can output up to 1200W. 9kW is a whole different ball game.
And that's just heating. My stove uses in the order of single-digit watts for seconds at a time. It can also just be lit with a match without power. My water heater does run a small exhaust fan while it's heating, but again... we're talking hundreds of watts instead of kilowatts.
Yes, all these options pretty much still need power, but the smaller power requirements are a hell of a lot easier to provide than the power needed for resistive electric heating. I could run my water heater off of a desktop UPS.
Sure. When we’re talking about the temperature band they work in. Once it hits 0C the efficiency is very low, and by -10C is almost doing nothing at all. At that point you have two things happening…
1. You are using electricity to warm your coils outside to keep frost and snow off them.
2. You are using drastically inefficient heat for your home.
200-300% in their band under ideal conditions, maybe. Seems like cherry picking.
My 10 year old apartment has a heat pump rated for a CoP of 2.3 at a temperature of 17°F/-8°C, which is actually below the record low outdoor temperature for this area. This isn't some exotic new equipment or a model designed for cold climates; it's what was cheap and mainstream a decade ago.
And as for the question about colder climates: it's not a matter of whether an area can occasionally experience temperatures below eg. 17°F. What matters is whether you'll ever experience daily highs that are cold enough to prevent heating the house.
Doesn’t make it wrong.
At -10C you are hardly pulling anything from the air, but you are spending electricity to keep your coils free of frost, as inefficiently as possible.
Do you not know how a heat pump works in cold weather?
You are talking about air source heat pumps. There are actually variants of that technology that work fine at -20 and below. -20 is actually quite far above absolute zero. The challenge is not that there isn't enough energy but finding and pumping liquids around that can absorb that "heat" and actually stay liquid. Efficiency indeed drops below zero. But it still works.
However, ground source heat pumps are not dependent on the air temperature at all and work anywhere you can get a decent temperature gradient from the ground. Which is pretty much anywhere except maybe on top of the arctic ice sheet in e.g. Antarctica.. Stick a few pipes in the ground and get them deep enough and you can have an nice cozy house pretty much anywhere that is not located on a few miles of ice. NY is perfect for that. No permafrost there and stable temperatures below ground throughout the year.
And again, they have been doing this for decades in places like Finland, Sweden, Norway, Greenland, etc. That's because this stuff works and is reliable and efficient enough. This is not some new kind of science fiction technology. Millions of households depend on this when it gets to minus 40C and below (about the same in C and F). And having lived in Sweden and Finland, I can tell you that they like their houses heated properly there and it really gets that cold up north. They don't use gas in houses there at all and never have. There are no gas distribution networks there. Oil based heating has been phased out in most places there a long time ago. But people forget that that stuff has to be trucked in and trucking anything in gets tricky when there's a few meters of snow on the roads. Heatpumps, resistive heating, district heating, and wood based stoves is pretty much all they use there. District heating is not common outside the more populated areas (i.e. most of the Arctic region) with the exception of the larger towns and villages.
The data wasn't terribly correlated to temperature, though he didn't have a mini-shed for the outside unit to protect it from snow, so it probably had to defrost more often during the less-cold, snowy days.
FWIW here in Oslo, we've been using a mini split as the main heat in our home, where it's often -15C for long stretches during winter, and can get down to -25C. It's in the main livingroom, and we do supplement the upstairs bedroom with resistive foil floor heating during the coldest periods. Other than that it's doing great, and comparing the electricity bills with friends and colleagues who don't have a heat pump it's definitely helping a lot.
Sure, but that’s worse than natural gas
I'm so glad I swapped out my heat pump for gas heat. My power bill went down and the house is much more comfortable.
For those relatively few people living in places which get even colder than that, there's the option of either ground loop heat pumps, or more pragmatically propane burners for the very few nights of the year that are super-cold.
[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rheem-heat-pump-sur...
Also, if the power plant is integrated into a CHP system to heat nearby households then generation gets back some percent.
Methane leaks are much more environmentally damaging than often appreciated because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas.
Converting gas heat to heat pumps, even if they have a gas heat backup for worst case days in northern latitudes, would still be a big win in the net environmentally.
Our leaders have lost their minds pursuing green purity. It's a religion at this point.
And for the other 99.99% of the time the heat pump is so much cheaper to run it’s not funny - and in the long run you save even more when you’re not paying for all that gas infrastructure to be installed and maintained.
Rationally speaking we can only turn the ship as fast as it can turn. Rushing and forcing things to happen that do not have a solid foundation (i.e. a suitable large and reliable grid) are just going to cause problems.
Repalce heat pumps with gas furnaces and you have an equally true sentence, if "the grid" is the gas grid.
Gas usage also spikes on those cold days. You know what people do to prevent this being an issue? Storage. Nothing you couldn't also do with electric power.
They're not talking about taxing gas - they're talking about banning it.
Did you read my comment before replying? I already addressed this. Yes I am talking about well below zero F.
> They're not talking about taxing gas - they're talking about banning it.
Yes and they should ban it. Electric heating is way more efficient, doesn't poison the occupants and can be powered from renwable sources.
I think this ban is too bold and will result in political backlash that will end up doing worse than if something less drastic was proposed.
Hochul was 10pts away from losing the last race to a complete RW zealot.
Ironically the best combo is a heat pump + natural gas furnace as a backup. Best of both worlds. But here we are making those illegal so we can pretend to save the planet.
How does this work in practice though? The natural gas distribution lines don't pay for themselves. If they're only gonna be used in emergencies then they'll be crazy expensive. You have a lot of money by not having to run natural gas through a neighborhood at all.
A more realistic backup in these types of places (which is used widely in the northeast) is heating fuel oil in a tank.
Abatement of tank leaks can run into the millions as you have to dig up all soil contaminated by heating oil when the tank is retired, and tank retirement is a cost that holds up many property sales and redevelopment here in the Pacific Northwest.
What changes with it not being political suicide? Government subsidies paying to add oil infrastructure to houses and to pay for unused pipelines?
Yes, which is why it only kicks in when the heat pump isn't enough. Which is not most of the year!
I know what you mean but it is actually nearly 100% efficient. The inefficient part is converting high entropy heat to low entropy electricity.
You can run the blower and electronics of a natural gas furnace or boiler off a little camping generator for a week or even better a natural gas whole house unit in perpetuity.
So you don't, you know, freeze to death.
Best of all, the total investment and maintenance actually decreases.
Likewise for a heat pump, right?
Does this "power out for days after a winter storm" thing actually happen very often? I am from Manitoba and my worst-ever experience was 10-11 hours when it was very, very cold out in 35+ years.
Assuming I run the generator for 12 hours a day at half load (powering my whole house, still firing my equipment up and working remotely…) and the furnace runs for three hours a day throughout that time… I can keep going for a couple of weeks. If I _can_ get gas to fuel the generator with that can be extended pretty substantially—the generator is really what’s using up all my propane.
So in the realm of the kind of power outages where you reasonably expect society to recover and continue… works pretty well for me.
But yeah, in the future I would love to move over to a heat pump and solar generation / local storage. That extends your potential runtime pretty near indefinitely. (We’re talking lifetime of batteries and solar panels at that point instead of “when the propane truck can come by next”.)
They clearly over-generalized. I didn't say they "overstated." They didn't say "in some parts of Seattle" they said "in Seattle."
I'm sure there have been edge cases in every state of the country where the power has been 10 days at someone's house because of unique circumstances. That doesn't meaningfully change the risk profile of a heat pump over gas furnaces.
Alright, that's so rare it's hardly a data point.
>I live in the middle of the Seattle metropolitan area, not out in the country.
Wait, so you aren't even talking about the city of Seattle? Never mind...
> that's so rare it's hardly a data point.
I never expected a 10 day power failure in the middle of a metropolitan city.
E.g. Seattle City Light has a better reputation for uptime than Puget Sound Energy.
Near Ottawa—in the past 12 months I’ve had an eight day outage, a four day outage, and a few day long outages.
We don’t need to survive the -40 or -50 of the prairies, but even with good insulation a -10 day in the spring makes the house pretty cold after a couple of days.
An average gas furnace blower motor draws around 7A at 120V.
A heat pump can require between 20A-40A at *240V* PLUS the air handler which is the same as above. A heat pump air handler is just a furnace without burners. If supplemental heat strips are needed they can be on a 50A breaker at 240V.
Source: I used a little gas generator many times to power the gas furnace when the electric grid was down.
I'm glad to pay the premium for silent heating.
https://homeinspectioninsider.com/are-all-heat-pumps-noisy-1...
Burning stuff is also loud, but resistive heating is mostly quiet other than fan noise and metal containers creaking as they heat up/cool down
Burning gas is inherently more complex to transfer heat, and has more losses as a result.
Lots of houses burn oil in NY. That will still be possible.
Also, I know you likely didn’t mean to exclude this, but in cases where gas service might be cheaper in the short term that’s only because it’s effectively heavily subsidized and many of the costs are externalized.