Heat pumps show how hard decarbonisation will be
economist.com
economist.com
We switched to a heat pump last year and couldn’t be happier. It was quite expensive but Federal subsidies are now available with the Inflation Reduction Act in effect.
The real issue here is that the HVAC industry is quite conservative and still commonly recommends against heat pumps. This is the real political difficulty to overcome and the IRA’s buckets of money will do it. Europe needs the same.
They are also extremely badly insulated and costly to heat, having solid brick walls, large windows and high ceilings. We've already picked the low-hanging fruit like loft insulation and double glazed windows.
What's left to do is things like exterior cladding. I looked at getting external insulation applied to a victorian terraced house, and was quoted £30,000 - more than the UK's median salary.
The average annual energy bill is £1,923 so even if that insulation was so effective it dropped the energy bill to zero, it'd still be a pretty bad investment.
Even my grandma's summer cabin has double glazed windows and it's not liveable during winters in the least. =)
Over here triple-glazing is the minimum and has been for decades, I don't see why it wouldn't be useful everywhere else too. They keep the heat out during summers and the heat in during winter.
Unfortunately, having more panes of glass does not automatically mean you get more energy efficiency.
The triples with very good insulation and coatings (eg. heat rejection) can be better than old quadruples. My parents have quadruple windows from the 80's, and energy efficiency is much better in a modern triple single unit than with the two doubles they have.
That would be what, like 7% return on investment? We just had a period of ~0% interest rates and <2% mortgage rates.
It is not realistic to expect ROI of only a few years for upgrades to buildings or infrastructure. Lifespan of these things is like half a century or more.
Coming from eastern Europe, the age and condition of housing here was a bit shocking.
There used to be a grant in UK for insulating housing, and it was cut by conservative government. Our rate of insulating homes dropped form 2 million houses a year to basically zero. Without favourable credit, maybe zero interest credit, avaliable, of course individual homeowners will find it difficult to afford.
For the walls, it can become quite expensive to insulate it. But at least for the wooden floor, you have a cheap option: lay a new laminate flooring with proper underlay. It will cost typically less than £1000, you'll avoid damaging your wooden flooring, and also improve the thermal confort by removing the air leaks and insulating more.
I got AC installed a few years ago and regret not getting a heat pump. I didn't think about it until it was too late.
The main issue is your basic 14 SEER heat pump needs larger capacity to be able to be the sole heating source than it does for just AC, so in my case in the northeast US the heat pump can’t economically be run in Winter, just spring/fall & probably can’t keep up with the coldest winter days at all. But it does provide flexibility if gas prices spike in the future, and saves a very small amount of money per year (< $100)
If you’re the type to buy a high efficiency system going with a heat pump over central AC seems like it’s maybe more worth it from a return on investment standpoint
The solution usually is like in your case to include an auxiliary heat source such as electric or gas for those extreme cold days the heat pump can’t keep up.
I say that because both can spin up very aggressively.
What you’re seeing is not really because it’s brushless- it’s a “soft start” feature… most likely. It could also be that your unit is a variable speed.
Now — I may be completely misunderstanding what you’re asking. If so apologies. I went from an old unit to a newer variable speed, and the starting does seem very smooth, even when cranking up to full vs the jarring and faster spin up of the old unit.
Your typical AC unit has a single solenoid that physically makes or breaks the connection across your 240v line. That's the big clunk you hear when the compressor kicks on. This type of control is either all the way on or all the way off.
An inverter topology uses a bunch of electronics to convert your incoming 240v to a lower voltage or even frequency. This gives the electronics very fine control over how the motor works. You can start up slow, or run the motor at 50% or anything you want.
This doesn't really have anything to do with whether the motor itself is brushless. All brushless motors require advanced drive electronics. This usually ends up being pretty similar to an inverter topology, but not necessarily. A brushed motor doesn't care, you can just jam some electricity in and get motion out.
What you think of when you say "brushless motor" is categorically -not- the kind of motor in an AC unit. AC compressors use larger induction motors which may not have brushes, but they are not 'brushless motors'
A brushless motor specifically refers to a particular type of DC motor which uses phased, stationary coils to move a rotor with a ring of magnets. An AC induction motor may use either an iron core in the rotor, or a coil of wire that produces a magnetic field for the stator windings to push against.
Inverter refers to the drive circuitry for the compressor. The inverter basically concerts AC to DC, then it's inverted back into AC, however the AC output can be variable frequency. This allows for slower speeds of the compressor, at lower power consumption.
As far as I'm aware the compressor design can be exactly the same, the only difference is the drive for it.
My AC unit is only 1.5 tons but my furnace is 40k BTU and, unlike the 75k BTU furnace it replaced, is appropriately sized for the space. (Why someone previously installed such a massively oversized furnace I will never know.) If I remember correctly a 1.5 ton heat pump is roughly equivalent to 18k BTU, so it might be useful in the all too brief cool but not cold periods in spring and fall but in winter I'd still mainly be relying on the gas furnace.
It would also make people getting AC think about getting more expensive low-temp heat pump.
These people dgaf. Don't delude yourself that they do.
Also, what AC system doesn’t also heat efficiently? When I got our split system installed there wasn’t even an option to buy a non-reversible one.
> Inflation Reduction Act
Does not compute.
I've got an old heat pump and the refrigerant it used, R-22, stopped being using new systems about 10 years ago, and production was banned a few years ago. It is still legal to sell existing stock and to use it in existing units, but the price has skyrocketed.
I'd like to replace it, but the refrigerant that replaced R-22, R-410a, is now being phased out. Manufacture and import was banned starting this year. It is being replaced with R-454b. Systems cannot be retrofitted to use R-454b, so getting an R-410a system means getting a system with an already doomed refrigerant.
If I buy a new system in the next year or so, when R-454b systems become available, is that a refrigerant that should remain available new for the lifetime of the unit, or is it too going to get banned in 10 years?
R410a isnt even banned from new HVAC until 2025, and they've stated they'll permit importing until 2037 for maintenance purposes.
Seems pretty straightforward that you can easily/cheaply service the unit for at least 10 years, then after that you're going to need to potentially pay a lot more.... which seems entirely reasonable, given that the service that requires lots of additional refrigerant is exactly the problem the EPA is trying to solve: refrigerants leaking into the atmosphere.
Honestly, I'd be much more worried about being able to find parts for the complicated heat pump systems (electronics, mostly) 10+ years down the road than I would about being able to find refrigerant.
This actually just like a car. At some point maintenance cost exceeds the value of the car and it is no longer feasible to continue keeping it. So you scrap it, or sell it to someone else.
If you're frequently refilling an old HVAC (R22 or otherwise) it means that it has a leak. And that's precisely the thing that the EPA wants people to not do, since it's damaging to the environment. HVAC units should never leak, ever, if they are working properly.
In any given house, per unit of heat generated is going to leak out at the same rate no matter how that heat is produced, no? Whether that heat comes from a gas boiler, a heat pump, or a resistive heater shouldn't matter...?
But it’s quite stupid: In both countries you need AC, so why not install a mini split heat pump+AC system like the Nordics and the US?
It also doesn’t help that they don’t tax fossil gas like electricity, hence you often need subsidies to make it worthwhile to switch
Almost no residential building in Germany has AC, and I'm unsure what you mean by "need". Also the buildings are built to last, so no remodeling every few years like in the US. That means one is stuck with most of the utility built into the house from the start. Remodeling a regular central European brick-and-mortar house to accommodate floor heating or duct vents is difficult and expensive.
There's a fine line: if you have green energy, why would you care? Consuming more green energy actually improves the overall situation, as more money is available to build out green energy in the first place (especially with things like Green Planet Energy). It's just the need for moral superiority for some folks that's stopping AC distribution in central Europe imho.
Sales are on the increase as summers are hotter. We even see apartment dwellers in Norway getting these
https://www.verivox.de/presse/13-prozent-der-deutschen-nutze...
Really it's besides the point - you might not need a plunger to unclog the toilet or a fire extinguisher or a first aid kit often, but when you do, you really need it!
And for rest district heating is common enough. And there a centralised solutions make sense, even real efficiency gains like using waste heat from factories and datacenters.
Less than 5% of houses in the UK have AC
In particular, half the houses in Britain have no insulation in the walls at all. In fact older houses tend to handle heat better - they are naturally drafty, there is a loft taking the heat, they have high thermal mass, and maybe they are even damp and have a leak and mould. All that takes away from the heat.
But now we get newbuild apartments without AC's, and that should be a crime. These buildings are air tight, have zero ventilation, trap heat, no thermal mass so they don't stay cool from the night, and in some of them you can't open windows. And you are not allowed to install a split system because the landowner will never give permission.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/292265/insulation-in-dwe...
Air-water heat pumps are a thing
It's not about the technology. It's about how electricity is priced very highly compared to gas in the UK. Our electricity in Western Australia is only double the cost per kWh compared to gas, but one kWh of electricity generated three kWh of heat in a reverse cycle air con so it's a no brainer.
With a heat pump, you really need to make an effort to keep the heat inside, as the heat output can’t match a boiler. So you need to redesign the whole building.
They’re not at all what most people living in a typical single family dwelling would think of as a furnace, which may be a forced air or water-based baseboard radiator setup.
A heat pump can keep up with a traditional furnace type system just fine, but not a boiler system because the buildings with boilers are so old they don’t have much insulation at all.
In Britain a boiler is a device in a single family home that provides heating by using gas or electricity to heat water which is then piped to radiators. It is also used to heat water for showers. Boilers can be quite small, many modern boilers are “combi” boilers that heat water on demand without a separate hot water tank. My boiler is the size of a suitcase.
Older properties generally have a boiler and insulated hot tank. This means that you need to plan your showers and heating requirements in advance by “putting the water on” to ensure there’s enough hot water in the tank.
Forced air heating is rarely used in the UK and people are generally not familiar with the concept.
I think the way costs scale is important - a big gas boiler doesn't cost that much more, you're just burning more gas, but a big heat pump costs more. Heat pumps put more of the cost up front and less down the track.
So if the uninsulated homeowner is facing a $10k bill for a massive heat pump they can say "ooh what if I spend $1k on insulation" and they could get the sizing down and spend $6k.
There's really no fundamental difference. The heat pump itself doesn't know whether you've got a massive house that's well insulated or a tiny house that's poorly insulated, it's just a heat load.
Is the idea that heat pumps don’t pack enough punch to replace boilers on their own, and they need to be combined with a more efficient building envelope in order to be sufficient?
Gas boilers generally produce much hotter water, so the radiators they use tend to be small.
Heat pumps gain more efficiency if you can reduce the output temperature. So running a heat pump at max efficiency through radiators designed for a gas system, won't put out as much heat into the room.
So you have two options, increase the size of the radiators or increase the insulation. It's better to increase the insulation as you gain the benefit of both warmer room and less energy required to heat a room.
The problem with insulation is retrofitting it is expensive and carries a huge risk because older houses are designed around the idea that they breath.
The current practice of insulating inside the envelope is just so blindly stupid I can't wrap my head around why people think it's a good idea. If you work it out, insulation should go on the outside of the envelop. Think insulated siding and roof panels. Granted I'm now seeing that,
And with insulation you quickly run into the problem that the benefits rapidly diminish while the cost is linear. R30 doesn't save you three times R10.
At some point it's be cheaper to put solar panels on the roof to run a heat pump than add more insulation.
Because construction industry is shockingly incompetent and corrupt.
Lived in a few newbuilds, they are full of fuckups - walls aren't straight, the hole for a fire sprinkler is not where the sprinkler is, so in case of fire it won't actually work. The hot water plumbing was not up to spec and has discharged a swimming pool of boiling water into someone's apartment, they are lucky no-one died.
They will not get something as complex and humidity control right.
https://www.bradfordinsulation.com.au/information-centre/how...
https://insulation.com.au/product/pink-batts-insulation/
It's recycled glass.
Every time I mention trees, I am told that instead we need expensive contraptions made out of mined materials, that usually require an external source of power. Instead of putting a tree in the ground and letting nature do its job, we have tricked ourselves into thinking that nature doesn't know enough.
In our hubris and delusion we will end our species and the rest of nature will scratch its head and wonder why.
Anyway I’d just like to know what you think about “gorilla growing” because very few people own more than an acre, and, especially where I live, people are very hostile about trespassing, it could get you killed
My personal pet peeve about biomass is the use of artificial grass.
Shouldn’t this be fixed no matter the heat source?
Thermal heat from gas is cheap, even when gas is expensive. Gas has a LOT of btus. Furnaces are also far simpler to make and maintain than heat pumps, which is why they are still so popular.
Boilers can go either way.
Edmond, OK incentives geothermal installs in homes as its lowers the city's peak electricity costs. That said Edmond's average household income is $108k for a 31k households city in one of the cheapest metros in the country so they can afford it.
You can't just hear all that down, and improving the insulation is expensive, more expensive than just installing a new heating system. Think at least 50k EUR for a small house, five to ten times as much for a typical inner city large, multi tenant building.
This is the problem. Putting so much of the burden on the consumer and hardly any on the manufacturers, companies and so on. Consumers contribute just a small percentage of the problem but are being asked to account for much more.
And the thing about climate change is that consumption is much more equal than financial wealth. A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less.
Agree that the problem with the investments of the wealthy driving climate change is consumer demand that needs to be destroyed (EVs, heat pumps, solar, factory farming protein, etc).
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f...
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi...
We need to shave co2 off everything, as if we were doing weight reduction to a bicycle.
Source and/or explanation?
We definitely should be funding research (because systems aren't good enough yet) into these systems because we're not acting fast enough and CCS has the advantage of acting on the lag effect. But this is no excuse to not also reduce emissions. They're coupled: we need less CCS the less we produce which is nice especially considering nuclear is a cheaper option than CCS at this point.
You will never move a river by asking each drop, you build a dam.
Found the millionaire coping with his excessive consumption.
No really, I don't own a car, don't fly, don't go on cruises, don't go on vacation three times a year any other way, live in a 50 sq m flat without anything but the most basic amenities. And you know why? Because I'm poor, that's why. Like most of Earths population. So don't try to tell me my carbon footprint is the same as Gordon Geckos, it simply can not be true.
That is just not true.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/carbon-f...
There are many other sources.
> in the UK, the least wealthy half of the population accounts for less than 20% of final demand, less than the top 5% consumes.
You got this backwards. It's like trying to clean up a river by only picking up trash at its mouth. You're not going to do a great job.
Consumers can only buy what's available. Most people are too poor to make choices other than that on price. Capitalism can work great for price reduction but one way to do price reduction is quality reduction. If the whole non-luxury market is focusing on price reduction and the easiest way is to achieve that is quality reduction then guess what happens. On the other hand, if quality has to hold constant -- which happens when consumers are less price sensitive and won't go for a slightly cheaper option when competitor tries quality drop -- you have to research and build better and/or cheaper. BUT if most major players try the same strategy of quality reduction at the same time then consumers never get the chance to indicate to the market that they value quality.
> A Wall Street banker doesn’t have a carbon footprint that much higher than a regular person. Maybe even less.
Maybe don't guess and check first. We're on the internet, you don't have to respond immediately and state something that is verifiably false. While we don't have good refined data on specific jobs, there is strong correlation with wealth levels and specifically consumption rates. But if you're modeling a Wall Street banker as someone who works all day, takes the subway, sleeps, and never takes vacation then sure, that's lower. But don't confuse the mean and the median.
Edit: Taking our analogy from above: if all producers simultaneously have to do "x" then all consumers automatically also choose "x". This is where regulation can play a role since you can do things like "all cars must get at least 50mpg" or have a more market driven approach like "$100 fee per ton CO2eq" and use that fee to perform such actions like sequestration and/or research to make sequestration effective and cheap.
We live in an era of unprecedented consumer choice. Especially for the rich who you rightly pointed out are the source of the problems we are trying to ameliorate.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. Markets aren't exclusively driven by consumers and such framing is incredibly naive. You can't buy the fruit that doesn't exist.
I want electricity, or more accurately I want to heat my home, wash my clothes, etc.
It is not my consumption that has caused us to continue subsiding oil and not investing properly in renewables for over half a century.
In the US at least, and especially the West Coast, things like SEER (HVAC efficiency) and CAFE standards (car fuel economy) have been steadily rising, at least until Republican officials push back. Building codes include better and better rules for renewable energy production, insulation, etc. In the private sector things like LEED encourage buildings to utilize better materials, passive heating and cooling, water management, etc. Those are all constraints on the manufacturers and companies. Where consumers are encouraged to change to newer appliances, grants usually help cover the costs of new fridges, LED lights, HVAC equipment, sprinklers, etc.
Heat pumps as a consumer phenomenon didn't even catch on until very recently, decades after regulations spurred market innovation.
Maybe it works differently in Germany, but here at least it seems like we go way out of our way to incentivize consumer behavior over decades instead of forcing through overnight changes.
Could it be a marketing issue, where governments and manufacturers making these iterative changes don't really broadcast them to the public at large, such that when the changes finally hit the average homeowner, they are still caught by surprise? To them it might seem like a sudden change even though it's been happening behind the scenes for years?
If Brits want to hear a Taylor Swift concert, and Swift's private jet crosses the Atlantic twice emitting 700 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the process - are those Swift's emissions?
Or have 900,000 concertgoers each emitted 7kg of CO2, equivalent to driving 2 miles?
What about if, instead of Taylor Swift tickets, we consider electricity? More consumption directly increases the power plant's emissions - but consumers can't control whether coal, gas, nuclear or solar supplies their power.
If you take the view that corporations' emissions are attributable to the corporation, not their customers - then corporations are much, much less green than consumers. And we'd need to focus more on emissions by giant corporations, and less on plastic straw bans.
The CAFE model seems to work for that. It doesn't really matter whether it's the driver or the car manufacturer, taxpayers front the regulatory research and costs, manufacturers moan and whine then eventually comply to some degree, consumers buy cars with slightly better mileage each year, over time things get better. Then Tesla comes around and makes electrification a reality, etc.
Similarly with the solar market, subsidies spurred investment and research and deployment and helped foster growth, until there is so much of it that (say) California's grid can hardly keep up, China saw the market and took it over, etc. These days it's a commodity. Government carrots do work, is all I'm saying.
You can create demands and markets through planned public investments.
Sometimes, though, we do blame fossil fuels companies, whether they're using tankers or oil rigs or pipelines. Sometimes those controversies can help spur better protections and safety regulations and whatnot, but at the end of the day your point stands: from a climatic standpoint the emissions are there whether we attribute it to a single company or a million individuals. Maybe the accounting is different and helps different political players, but the atmosphere doesn't care how we divvy it up.
IMO Taylor Swift flying in a private jet isn't that different than, say, OpenAI making a bunch of CO2 for a product that millions of people end up using, or Larian spending a bazillion CPU and GPU hours to make Baldur's Gate, or some politico flying back and forth to attend climate meetings. At the other extreme, Greta sails low impact and has great marketing, but that only goes so far. We still need everyday solutions that mid size companies and governments can implement on actionable timescales. That typically means low hanging fruits like more solar, more batteries, occasionally nuclear, incremental standards, etc. Is it enough? No, not nearly. But I think it's more than we've gotten from, say, Greenpeace or PETA. People generally respond better and faster to carrots than disciplinary punishments...
I actually chose that example partly because there's an immediately actionable lower-carbon substitute: flying first-class on a normal commercial flight.
But that same logic can apply for many people and our lifestyles... why not take the train across the country instead of flying? Why not arrange carpools to/from work, or take the bus and subway? Why not stop eating meat? Ride your bike more often? Turn up the AC by 5 degrees? It's just a losing battle... imo we're genetically disinclined to do things that may vaguely benefit the species as a whole over a period of 20 years when the alternative benefits ourselves in the here and now. Maybe we celebrate that sort of altruism precisely because it's so rare and difficult for most people to do.
That's why I think steering the market towards better alternatives using a not-so-invisible hand works better than trying to coerce (or even convince) people into behavior change.
Some people feel the whole "why not stop eating meat and ride a bike" narrative is PR by huge polluters like coal power plants and private jet owners, hoping to shift responsibility away from themselves.
I don't disagree that big fossil fuel companies and billionaires are evil. But their evil has the tacit (and often explicit) approval and support of millions, if not billions, of average individuals who value their own comforts and convenience more than our collective well-being. Sure, not everyone's like that, but enough are such that unpopular punitive climate programs don't really have a chance of surviving long enough to matter.
That's not a matter of blame accounting, just humans being humans, a much harder problem to solve...
Dua Lipa?
The real answer for this situation is that it doesn't matter. For the 70 (not 700) tons, flip a coin between assigning Swift an extra $14000 on her already expensive flight, or assigning each concertgoer a pence. Either way it's a trivial amount.
This is the attitude that shows that “fixing” climate change is doomed. Everybody can find somebody else who’s “worse” to blame the problem on and so they justify doing nothing themselves.
I understand why people cry that “corporations are the problem” but I can’t believe that deep down they believe it.
The only thing consumers could do is buy less, but life makes that rather hard. The companies that you are trying to absolve lobby to make that harder.
Spoiler alert, life is going to get rather hard for a whole lot of people over the next few generations because we’ve been ignoring “the personal responsibility theory of pollution.”
Between space heating, transportation, water heating, and cooking, about 42% of energy-related emissions are things that consumers have some control over in their homes. We have to decarbonize both the supply side (which is happening super rapidly with wind/solar) as well as the demand side (which is much harder because it requires coordinated action across millions of people). And we have to do this incredibly swiftly to keep a livable climate.
Lots of UK houses are built <1930 and have suspended floors. I was told in various quotes for floor insulation because of tongue and groove floorboards, they'd get damaged when lifted and would have to be replaced. I managed to keep them having insulated the floor with 300mm rockwool just this past month.
Not only is there the benefit of heat retention, but hopefully it will kill a lot of draught entering the house also.
The wholesale gas price spike meant this would have paid for itself in around 5 years (I have a combi boiler), but will perhaps be closer to 10 now.
Cost all in: £400 for insulation, £1000 labour, £800 flooring replacement £200 various.
If I'd went through an accredited installer I could've received a Home Energy Scotland grant of £1500.
I'd still need to insulate my (600mm whinstone solid) walls for an air pump to be economical.
Floor has a permeable cover holding the insulation up and goes over the joists.
I think for the walls it'll be PIR boards. I can't insulate outside as it'd be out of character with the street.
i paid $2700 and had it done the same day