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Comment by ricardobayes | Hacker News Reader

I find something very refreshing in this, reading from Europe where we get told "gas" is the big bad, even threatening to make condensing gas boilers illegal from time to time [0], despite over 95% of homes (in the UK) being heated by this method.

That said most of Europe doesn't heat or cool adequately, Spain and Portugal barely heat their homes in winter and boy it gets cold with 41F/5C nights. Then Germany/Switzerland refuse to use A/C even though the summers get to 95F/35C. Just a few days ago a friend told me he went to the doctor and the doctor passed out during examination from the heat.

ps. Not sure why it's downvoted, I think people read something into my comment that I didn't want to express.

[0]: https://www.edfenergy.com/heating/advice/uk-boiler-ban

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> Reading from Europe where we get told "gas" is the big bad, even threatening to make condensing gas boilers illegal from time to time

Long-term this is true, and it makes sense to ban gas boilers (potentially with some exceptions): electric heat is significantly more efficient, and can run on renewable energy. But that requires a big investment in infrastructure build-out (heat pumps) which will take decades, and we definitely need to be careful that we handle the transition without screwing people over.

Yes, most households don't have the 25-30k available to switch to heat pumps. If we dig deep I think we partially solved why people don't have kids anymore in Europe: for that you need optimism, and to be told every few years even something basic as your heating system is due to be illegal (!) doesn't really fill people with optimism. Same thing with banning internal combustion engined-cars, which was reversed too... Europe as a whole needs to manage these tech transitions very differently in my opinion.

Where are you getting 25-30k from? A standard split that can handle 25m2 is 1-2k, with one in each bedroom you’re fine

Yes that is a split A/C, which is also a form of heat pump, that's not really what people refer to as heat pumps by default in Europe. A heat pump is normally an air-to-water system here, which drives either radiators or heated floors. Heating with an A/C is practically unknown in most of Europe and definitely not the desired choice for most people here (even though it would make sense).

And you’d still need five or six split systems to properly heat a home.

Kitchen, dining, bathroom, three or four bedrooms.

I’ve never seen a split system in a bathroom, but I’ve definitely seen freezing cold bathrooms, or bathrooms with a radiant heater on the wall or heat lamps on the ceiling, which occasionally get left on all day and destroy electricity bills.

Ducted systems almost always extend to the bathroom, and almost always cost AU$15,000 or more to install.

Ortogonal to the discussion, but I think in an odd way, Australia is one of the most similar countries to Spain in this aspect. Very limited to no natural gas proliferation, electric heating, if any, but houses made rather cheaply but somehow still ending very expensive. I've seen houses near Melbourne resembling a tin hut costing AU1.5M. According to weatherspark, some Spanish locations have their climate counterparts in Australia, e.g. Perth is most similar to Malaga.

True true. The old housing stock is poorly insulated. I mean: not at all insulated, and retro fitting insulation is painfully expensive.

Sure, insulation in ceilings is relatively easy to do, but swapping windows out for double glazed windows with solar thermal reflective film, very expensive.

New homes are much better designed, requiring wall and ceiling insulation and double glazed windows or better.

And yeah, the state of Victoria is still prompting banning new homes even connect to gas. Seems strange when we export around the same volume of LNG as Qatar.

The people who need heat pumps the most don’t have $6000+ to blow on heat pumps.

So now we’re back to government subsidies, which routinely prove to drive up the price of whatever is being subsidised, especially at the scale of residential homes.

And your solution still results in the living room / dining room and other shared spaces being inhospitable in winter / summer, so you’ve underestimated the cost at least significantly.

> and we definitely need to be careful that we handle the transition without screwing people over.

Well we’re certifiably not going that.

No need to wait decades to look at the recent data.

London can’t even work out how to properly ventilate their underground rail network.

The solution is obvious: built nuclear power and refrigeration (heat pumps).

Where it’s too cold either nuclear and heat pumps and / or district heating, or burn gas.

Or people can melt in the summers and freeze in the winters. Because that is exactly what “renewables” have been delivering.

> Well we’re certifiably not doing that.

Don't disagree with you there.

> London can’t even work out how to properly ventilate their underground rail network.

This seems unrelated. It's not an energy problem: it's a problem with lack of space in the tunnels and lack of places to build ventilation shafts due to the issue not being considered 100 years ago when the tunnels were built.

> Or people can melt in the summers and freeze in the winters. Because that is exactly what “renewables” have been delivering.

I think this has very little to do with renewables. In particular, solar is perfect for reducing "melt in summer" cases (it's almost always sunny when it's hot) (and I'm not sure where has freeze in winter problems).

The issue seems to be more that weather has gotten hotter, and infrastructure needs to change in response to that (inevitably slow and expensive).

London’s tube system had an eminent domain, technology, political will problem. It’s entirely fixable.

Cold weather kills more people than hot weather. By a huge margin.

People frequently move from cooler areas to areas that have comparatively hotter climates than even the worst (completely fabricated) global warming predictions.

But they rarely do the opposite.

Europe has unlimited wind, not unlimited gas. Electrification of most things is just a matter of time. Gas for heating is wasteful. I think AC will get very popular eventually once the stragglers realize that these are not unusual one-off warm summers, but is a result of global warming.

I live in northern Spain and it really doesn't get that cold. There's about a month during which I need a little plug in heater to stay above 18 degrees C. Then after a few weeks I find myself using it less and less. Honestly I wouldn't bother investing in a central heating system for how little I need it. There's only a few days a year the temperature actually drops to around 5C and that's only in the deep of night when I'm in bed anyway, and of course the indoor temp doesn't drop much.

Aircon I need a lot more. If anything I'd invest in more of that and more insulation. But a heating installation is just wasted money really.

That's kind of my point. It's not cold - to you - because you are used to it. In Hungary or Romania since energy is (or was) cheap, due to residual/waste heat from power plants everyone heats their homes to 23-24C. Because if you have "free" energy, why not? That's what people feel comfortable at home. If you would drop a Hungarian to your 18C northern Spanish home they would be incredibly uncomfortable, but the same for an American. I'm not saying this for you to feel bad, or question your cultural heating standards - just pointing out in Europe we have an incredible energy poverty for the most part - and even Spain wasn't like this pre-Franco. People have heated their homes much more, same with coffee etc. That terrible torrefacto was not a thing before, but that's a whole another conversation. Re-reading what I wrote I don't think you will really grasp my point due to me not being to articulate it well enough and I hope I don't come across combative. Spain does a million things perfectly and I don't mean to criticize...

My point is I think somehow, to create and foster policy that focuses on the well-being of people, using a long-term plan that includes an abundance of everything, including energy. In an ideal scenario you could have your apartment at 18C if you wanted to, but since energy would be near-free and abundant, you could turn it up to whatever you want, guilt-free.

Hmm no, 23-24 in winter is not comfortable for me. It's incredibly uncomfortable. I'm much happier in 18 degrees.

But I'm not from Spain. I have been to Romania a lot and I really hated how much they heated the office during winter. I'd go outside in the -15C in my shirt just to cool off during meeting breaks.

Honestly I'm super comfortable in Spain most of the year. Just 1 month I need a little extra heating and 3 months I need aircon, and a lot of it. But summer is also peak time for solar so energy wise it's not bad.

But I don't consider it poverty at all, really. It's also important not to have too much of a temperature mismatch with the outside because we spend a lot of time outdoors here. And not in airconditioned cars because I don't have (nor want) a car. I'm a lot happier with the freedom that public transport offers.

Yes, for what it's worth, solar is an incredibly good start (for Spain at least) for said energy abundance. Approaching from the other way, there are actually quite a few Spanish who say using the aircon is wasteful, expensive or even claim that it's unhealthy. Most of these beliefs stem from the fact it's considered something exotic, expensive, consumerist and foreign. If energy was so cheap it costed basically nothing to run the AC, these beliefs would fade soon (as they had in the US, or China). My dream is to see a well-heated (to your personal preference), and well-climatized Europe where anyone can easily afford to do both.

So we should only address the symptoms and not the cause. What are you saying?

Modern AC units are heat pumps the same box cools in summer and heats in winter, more efficiently than a gas boiler.

What is your stance on heat pumps? Conservatives here, who use the same talking points as you, are against them and they prefer to use oil and gas.

And is 5c a extreme night temperature? Where are you from? I'm not from Europe I think.

I love heat pumps, but they are well out of reach for most people at 25-30k for a full system with insulation and radiator change. 5C is indeed a cold night, for Spain, in an uninsulated house which most are, and 13C/55F daily high, it's teeth-chatteringly cold without heating, yet most Spanish just brace it, for similar reasons they don't have AC in Germany: "it's survivable, and it only lasts around 3 months". This is why I refer to this as "energy poverty".

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