> insulate their houses more
regardless of your heating source, this is a good thing. less wood/gas burned, less electricity used. I see no downside in that. Strange argument to try to make your case.
regardless of your heating source, this is a good thing. less wood/gas burned, less electricity used. I see no downside in that. Strange argument to try to make your case.
Sure, being efficient sounds great, but constraints of the real world are often unforgiving and need lots of material and labor to make change, both of which are increasing in price.
It gets to -10F most winters here, but heat pumps struggle as it dips below freezing, while a gas furnace doesn't. What does that mean for heat in the colder parts of the year? Will I struggle to maintain 68F even if the BTUs are the same? This ties into my home design as well: Can I even substantially change my home's r-value the way it's built?
I couldn't afford a new home when I bought my house, so I live in older housing stock - 1949, made heavily of cinder blocks with plaster and stucco around them. It didn't have ducting when built, and that was partially retrofitted in using a central furnace with limited air ducts to push heat clumsily from the center of the house into a few primary rooms using a California plenum to pull air from the foundation, connected to certain rooms through floor registers. There's no good way to fix any of these compromises short of ripping half the home apart, or just building a new one, so the least bad compromise is usually an over-specced central forced air solution.
Do I get a central heat pump and air handler system with 100k peak BTUs? Do I get several mini-split units, each adding up to 100k BTUs? Do I overbuild on BTUs if I go mini-splits or multi-head? How will multiple smaller heat pumps work in winter as it freezes?
Will insulating change that? I can't insulate my foundation more than the earth already does. I guess I could rip out all my plaster walls and put in drywall and high r-value insulation behind them, but at that point, maybe a new house would be more worth the effort.
I think these kind of problems are endemic to the older housing stock and they're devilishly expensive to fix. Keep in mind - I have heat now. While my furnace will eventually depreciate to the point it needs replacement, to do all of this for no added functionality would be to take a new car's worth of value and gamble I might save a little on energy costs over the next 15 years. It's a dead-weight loss for me - I'm not going to recoup that on a house sale. It's not my 'forever' home, so I'm probably not going to stay more than 5 more years. (US national tenure seems to be 10-13 years.)
Will insulation reduce your needs? Yes. If you get into a situation where your foundation is responsible for most of your heat loss in -10F weather, you're in a great situation!
If improving the insulation on your walls is too hard, well that's disappointing, but that's a different topic from what happens when you do have good insulation.
The whole story about my house was just to try illustrating the difficulty of reducing a problem to "add insulation" and the downsides of ripping out otherwise-working infrastructure.
Making it just "add insulation" doesn't reduce the problem to trivial levels, but it does reduce the problem significantly.