Hacker News Reader

Comment by tamaharbor | Hacker News Reader

What is the backup, resistance heating?

Electric resistance heat is super inefficient. That's why it's often referred to as "emergency heat".

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.

>> Electric resistance heat is super inefficient

I know what you mean but it is actually nearly 100% efficient. The inefficient part is converting high entropy heat to low entropy electricity.

Heat pumps are significantly >100% efficient, if measured as (heat energy brought inside)/(electrical energy consumed).

Yes, because you are moving heat from one location to another. Same thing with a refrigerator.

> 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.

I agree with everything you said except there has been a war on heating oil since before this tiff with natural gas. So even suggesting that is anathema because it would be career suicide for the politicians pushing this. You can certainly use an oil furnace as a second stage, though oil is more often used as a boiler for steam or hydronic.

Storing heating oil is risky, expensive and is a dirty use of a property due to the need for an underground or above ground 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.

That's not really true elsewhere. Using in-ground oil tanks is an antiquated practice that isn't used anymore. Any modern heating oil installation has the tanks either in the cellar or in the yard behind the house. Either one would immediately reveal a leak so it could be remedied quickly. Yes Seattle is full of shitty bungalows with in-ground oil tanks that have to be condemned, it is a problem and one of the many reasons Seattle sucks. I did a stint at AWS so know the area. You can get away with a heat pump or baseboard electric in Seattle because the outdoor temperature rarely dips below 30F in winter. Go to a place like Maine where the vast majority of houses use oil. There is no natural gas infrastructure and heating with electric is impractical. 30F is a 'warm' winter day. A heat pump cannot effectively deal with the frigid climate in the NE and electric space heating would be insanely expensive. Many thousands of homes are heating with oil in the northeast everyday and not turning their yards into superfund sites. There are many compromises that work for the milquetoast PNW that won't work elsewhere.

Without said "war on heating oil" suddenly it becomes cheap to install multiple heating systems in your house?

What changes with it not being political suicide? Government subsidies paying to add oil infrastructure to houses and to pay for unused pipelines?

> Electric resistance heat is super inefficient. That's why it's often referred to as "emergency heat".

Yes, which is why it only kicks in when the heat pump isn't enough. Which is not most of the year!

The problem is when it kicks in for everyone in the neighborhood at the same time on an especially cold night and causes a brown out. (Happened to me this winter.)

If you actually had to pay for the methane leakage from having the interconnect, it would be cost prohibitive, even if they were legal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com