That massive spike of 50c/kWh at the left looks tiny compared to today even though that’s already insanely expensive
RIP to those running a 4090 on their rig.
I get the joke, but in contrast to heating, you can easily just… not run demanding games while the electricity is insanely expensive for a day.
But running the 4090 would keep your cottage warm.
What do you mean? I can run my 4090 to heat the house instead of my furnace
I got an RX 6800 yesterday, can’t wait to test out its heating capabilities lol
I was slightly joking but not completely, my office is above my garage so it get much colder during winter if I leave the door shut, so I just fire up Cyberpunk for an hour and my whole room is superheated. It’s pretty wild
I kept the main room of my condo warm for a winter by having two rigs running 24/7 while I didn’t have a baseboard because I was doing renovations!
Nah, it’ll keep the house warm!
50 Euros a day is insane. That’s a good portion of what I pay for a whole month.
Part of it was faulty pricing from a Norwegian electricity exporter. Also, they have almost finished the new infrastructure, so they do not have to import as much in crisis situations. I think a new nuclear power plant goes online and lots of renewable stuff. The problem OP is maybe talking about seems to be very well handled by the state and already solved. https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/24708-electricity-prices-in-finland-return-to-normal-levels-in-2023-down-64-from-previous-year.html
Lucky you. 175 square meters, 25cm styrofoam on walls and 30cm rock wool on ceiling and I pay 200€ per month in winter for gas heating in Poland. Solar panels are not economical in current regulations and billing rules have changed so those with heat pumps pay at least twice us much in coldest months.
We are fucked from every angle.
Get a space heater.
Mine was $15 at Walmart, heats my room like it’s Spring, and only adds $5 per month to my electricity bill.
Come Summer, I’m going to get a dehumidifier and see if I can use it in place of my A/C.
Bruh, a space heater is the least efficient way to heat a space, unless electricity somehow costs less per MWh than gas (that is insanely cheap and only true in a few key places in the world).
Also dehumidifiers… don’t do what you think they do? They are basically an A/C unit, that dump the hot air in the room they sit in. Literally worse than nothing.
*Re-*humidifiers have marginal benefits in (very) dry weather as evaporation is endothermic. As soon as the air is even somewhat humid though, they’re literally worse than nothing again.It’s not inefficient if it makes you feel warm. Often you don’t really need to warm everything in a house to be comfortable. It might make sense to do so in a situation when electricity goes out/grid is unreliable and you don’t have a thermal battery to ride on for a few hours, or you want to keep your water pipes warm enough so they don’t freeze.
But I know a lot of people who choose to forego so much heating, keeping their space to like <15/59, and have a heated blanket or space heater/fireplace entertainment center.
Feel like this works best in a shared living situation though, like an apartment or town home. For detached situations, maybe it does make sense to keep things relatively warm in case of emergencies.
They were talking about consistently heating a whole room though. I guess there’s a case to be made if the thermostat for the central gas heating is in another room and can’t be moved… But you should probably organize your heating so that this is a corner case (which is why the thermostat is typically in the living room in detached living. Other rooms don’t usually need to be kept particularly warm).
Of course if you have a badly insulated house and no way to properly distribute the central heating or to pay to heat the whole space to 18 °C, use resistive if you must. But that goes against everything that central heating is supposed to be for.
Also you really should not let a building go under 15 °C. It depends on the specifics (insulation, ventilation), but you’re liable to get mold or other kinds of water damage due to condensation.
Good points. There are a variety of houses/buildings built during various periods of time according to various codes and standards, but if you’re within city limits (US/Canada) then your house was probably built after the 70s/80s and has decent insulation. If there is an issue with the central heating in that kind of home, I 100% agree that there’s an issue that you might want a GC to fix. If your house/building is old, or if landlords don’t want to fix shit (and complaints are too much of a hassle), then I can also see that space heating can be a reasonable bandaid: at least until you get out of that situation.
Condensation is something I also forgot. That’s important for you electrical system too. In my experience in electric distribution/collection, usually we’d want to keep termination points around 20/68, but thermostats could drop to as low as 10/50 before kicking in. Certainly keeping a house colder than 10/50 is a bad idea, but between that and normal 20/68 I’d think would be fine. You also have the risk though that your thermostat is a single point of measurement for the system. Other parts of a house might be cooler/warmer, so I’d agree with the advice to keeping your house warmer than 15/59, unless it supports multi-unit dwellings.
Good convo, cheers
hey, whats the price for gas per cubic meter in Poland?
Invoice from yesterday for December 2023. I used 201 m3 of gas, calculated by provider as being equal to 2224kWh of power for which I paid 682.81 PLN (157 € to be exact) in total including taxes and surcharges. So 3.397 PLN or around 0.78 EUR per m3.
December was one of the coldest months this season. Last year I used maximum of 250 m3 per month which happened to be January/February. This then exceeded 200€
This includes both warm water and heating using low-temperature floor heating. Current thermostat settings give me 22C on the base floor and 20C on the first floor (where most heat escapes, obviously). I also have mechanical ventilation with recuperation.
Shit’s expensive.
With current prices of electricity, the same heating power with perfect constant COP of 3 (not possible with December temps for air heat pump) would cost me 666 PLN. (Nice). How can I offset the cost of installing it in the first place LOL.
i hear you, current rate in Lithuania is 0.87 eur :(
wow! i paid 220euros for gas heating and warm water in 78m2 flat in poland for all last year.
Yeah I lived in flats before, it’s a totally different story, unless your flat is on the last floor or on the corner there is not much heat loss assuming your neighbors also use the heating.
not really… my flat is in corner. Gave 3 sides, nirth, east, and south. No other flatsconnected with mine. And to this, flat under mine is empty, nobody is living there.
Then I don’t know why, but I am sure over 30% of heat in my house escapes through the roof.
Many are going to pay 200€ today
I will never complain about paying 33¢/kWh for 3 hours a day in the summer ever again.
Tomorrow is back to normal. Even the 37c/kWh spike hardly registers on the graph compared to today even though that’s still pretty expensive.
Are you actually paying the daily spot price? Not a flat amount with the utility provider taking the hit? That’s how I know it from any other country, unless you have a specific contract where the user made an informed decision to opt for market rates.
Mainly the reason is that many countries do not have hourly capable meters, so calculating the price for each hour is not possible. Flat rate is needed when you just have the cumulative read once a month.
In Finland the meters communicate automatically once a day, and send the 24h values to grid company. The next generation meters which are now installed can communicate once a hour.
30% of Finns are on spot.
Oh interesting, never knew that’s a thing. Sounds mostly like a good development to make people more conscious about their consumption.
Sounds more like an incentive to put up solar panels and battery storage. Even if it isn’t enough to go off grid totally, you can at least store on cheap days.
Spot is quite normal in the Nordics. Over all it’s the cheapest, but some days suck obviously.
This summer we had days with negative prices. My bill for July was 78 NOK (about $8). Might have been August when I think about it…
Yeah about 30% of Finns have a plan lile that. It’s bit of an gamble, but on average it’ll be cheaper on the long run.
Do most Finnish people pay spot prices for electricity?
About 30% do
Interesting.
At these temperatures, I can’t imagine air source heat pumps being very efficient.
I would probably have a spare gas, oil or wood based heater and use that for days like this, or for if the power goes off on days like this.
Older houses definitely have them… but there was this trend at some point to renavate older houses and remove the oil heaters and fireplaces and wood heated saunas, and replace everything with electric ones. Why? No idea, trends are weird.
Electricity is usually less polluting than the various fuels, wood fires especially will fill a valley with smoke, the rest are mostly to avoid the carbon dioxide
Carbon monoxide too… and chimney fires… don’t forget about indoor emissions with open stoves… Even if you don’t care about the environment, electric wins the health&safety race by a landslide. Forgetting to do the maintenance on a heat pump doesn’t exactly carry the same risks as with a wood stove.
Heat pumps are expensive and electricity can vary in price (who in their right mind opts in to spot pricing without on-site power generation tho, what the hell). Still, it’s not hard to see why everyone who can afford it is electrifying.
Also Russian fossil fuels
Newer models are actually.
We had negative 30 C the last two days and our air-to-air kept the whole upper floor comfortable. 90 m².Granted it’s a brand new and very well insulated house, but -30 bites well on those too!
Most houses up here have other electric alternatives or a fireplace.
Gas and oil are beyond abnormal to have and I think oil is even illegal in Norway now…
Don’t quote me on that thoughWow, air to air even?
But do you know what the COP is at -30?
I must make a small correction though: The last night with -30 it struggled a bit. Only managed to keep the upper floor at 19 °C so we had to turn on the cables to get over the peak.
I’m still mightily impressed by it though!
Max consumption was 32 kW/day, so roughly 4-5 € pr/day with our prices.
What about a solar + electric heating?
Well, here (in middle of finland) the sun set at 14:30, so there wasn’t all that much solar energy available.
Also heat pumps are always at least as efficient as straight electric heating.
It think above -20C or so, cold weather heat pumps are still way more efficient than resistive electric heating.
Good R-factor insulation is probably the most important upgrade in OP’s case. There are people where I live in the Northeast who heat their homes almost exclusively with the waste heat from cooking, electronics or old incandescent lighting. They have like R-30+ homes and really neat ventilation designs for cooling in the summer too.
I had plans to build a tiny home with Vacuum insulated panels and a small marine stove for heat, until we had a child and plans changed.
Now I’m looking at a solar battery setup with geothermal heat pump that will probably cost nearly what the whole tiny home was gonna be.
Solar is quite poor in Northern winters. Wind + solar + heat would be a better bet, but the battery required to heat your house for more than a day with low winds would be prohibitively expensive unless you added geothermal to the mix like a geothermal heatpump which is also very expensive. Betweem the gear, battery, geothermal, all installed your probably in the 80k$ range or more. A wood stove would be the best bet
Finland has about 5.2GW of wind capacity vs 4.3 nuclear. If it’s a windy day the spot price will usually be low.
Good point, for aome reason i was thinking more off-grid than load balancing economics. The battery would probably help lower power by filling when power is cheap and supplying when the rates spike throughout the day
Heat pumps only work to about -4c.
I’m surprised that those 30% don’t have batteries to shift load times
Those batteries would never pay themselves back.
I’m in the UK on an agile tariff and I’m not quite so sure - it depends on a number of things. Sure my batteries were bought primarily to support my solar panels. but I’ve been making quite a lot of money this winter.
- There are times when it is windy and there is low demand, when prices actually go negative - fill your batteries and make money
- The differential between lowest and highest price per kWh is often 30p so filling up when it is 10p and using when it is 45p makes sense.
- The grid will sometimes pay you large amounts of money with a few hours notice that they will pay you a premium to discharge your batteries when demand is predicted to be extremely high - to avoid them cranking up coal power stations. In November and December I made £90 just from this - and I only have 5Kwh batteries.
I haven’t run the figures on payback times if the batteries were just for shifting and not solar - but they might just pay themselves back.
The math has been done multiple times. The batteries don’t pay themselves back, and also need to be replaced from time to time.
Sure. But the math depends on electricity tariffs. And those change and therefore, so does the maths. it sounds like tariffs are pretty extreme currently
Batteries on a plan like that, where they’re part of a large virtual battery, do pay for themselves within warranty
Solar batteries never do. To rationally buy a battery one needs to put high value on backup power
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Is that actually a widespread practice anywhere? I’m in Switzerland and I don’t think I’ve seen that anywhere (other than in one farm near me which is entirely covered in solar panels)
In the UK domestic solar panels are quite common and new installations usually come with batteries. Agile 30-minute pricing tariffs are still new and fairly experimental, but people are rapidly realising that their batteries can be really useful when used to force charge/discharge based on grid demand. Octopus is probably the leader: https://octopus.energy/blog/agile-pricing-explained/
I live in the northeast US and we looked into batteries. Unless you’re rolling your own and have a very specific home/garage layout installing them is really difficult. They have to be outside the living space, away from flamingo wall coatings and windows. And they need to be relatively climate controlled (not great in direct sunlight or frigid temps).
Until we start designing battery systems that can mount outside (away from the house, like propane tanks) within their own heat pumps to manage temps built in, it’s not going to be popular in climates like ours (which are very similar to Swiss and lower scandawegian climates).
They should probably be bigger metal boxes with sodium flow batteries and heat pumps, like we have now for utility boxes in some places. They could incorporate the smart/net meters required to pump back into the grid too.
Time to install a wood stove.
Is there a specific reason the price spiked that much? That’s a 950% price hike within four hours.
We’ve had negative 20 temperatures for over a week which happens about once every 10 years so the demand is extremely high and on top of that few of our powerplants are out of service for maintenance so that electricity has to be bought from abroad too.
Few cold days in a row is not an issue as buildings still have heat stored up in the structures but when it lasts for a long time the demand for more heating goes up drastically.
Scheduling power plant maintenance during winter in a country where it gets that cold seems a tad, uhm, insane?
I don’t think it was scheduled maintenance. Something broke
Sometimes circumstances leave you little choice…
Wait til you find out about the Enron scandal
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That happened because winterproofing windmills and power plants is expensive and no one was forcing the companies running them to do it.
Which, from this thread, sounds like what’s happening in Finland.
Not quite the same. Their demand has outstripped their capacity, the same as happened in Texas. But since they could import from other regions, the supply was still there. So people won’t be dying from widespread power outages, and some people who chose more risky fee structures will be paying exorbitant prices.
We’re actually importing as much as the lines from Sweden to Finland are currently able to support.
Guess what country is on our east side? Yeah.
If you’re in a granny cottage then just burn wood instead? Doing this rn and am very happy to go off-grid for ca. 48 hours
I unfortunelately don’t have a fireplace in my house. It was removed when the house was renovated in the 80’s
In a place where it’s regularly cold? Whose brilliant idea was that?!
When I said my house is tiny I truly mean that. I don’t even have space for a medium size house plant let alone a fireplace. The attic was converted into living space and I believe the fireplace used to be where the stairs are now.
I have a wood burning sauna on a separate building though
Have you looked at anything like this? They are extremely tiny wood stoves that are perfect for little spaces. https://cubicminiwoodstoves.com/
Yeah I have considered it. There’s just no good place for the chimney either. It would need to go thru the wall and past the eaves on either of the two sides of the building that the roof is not sloping towards to because else falling snow is going to rip it off in the winter.
I know it’s not uncommon for the chimney to go through the eaves for more support, if that’s an option for you. I know someone in Alaska with a tiny house that did something like that, with a wall mounted tiny stove and it was pretty impressive!
That’s fairly typical. WTF would you do in an outage?
Shiver uncontrollably.
I hear this a lot since we converted to heat pumps. People don’t realize basically every heat source these days other than wood needs electricity. We kept our oil system as a backup for very cold days but it also doesn’t work with no power.
Back up generators if the expected outage is to last more than one day - and sometimes it can.
You could heat it from a fire outside with a boiler and a radiator. I’m not sure if they have those for sale in Finland but they’re a thing in the US.
That sauna sounds like a candidate to hook up to the heat pump if you ask me.
Diesel heater set up properly maybe the way, just not sure how well it would work kept outdoors at those temperatures.
At 50 bucks a day it would pay for itself pretty quickly. Not sure what prices are by you but here you can get a brand new stove with auto-temp and a catalytic converter and everything installed for 10k to 12k, or get a decent used stove and have someone install it for 5k ±
Today is highly unusual. Never before in recorded history has the price climbed anywhere near this high. Last year we had record high electricity prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and even then the average price for the year was 18c/kWh. This year it has been around 12c/kWh I think.
That’s akin to our rates, im about 13c/kwh delivered. I use about 1.2 to 1.5 mwh per month (with natural gas furnace and wood stove), so 2.50$/kwh would make me shut my house off at the breaker and call it camping.
How about a small propane heater, like a Mr Buddy type unit? Those can be connected to a extension hose and a 20lb propane tank, and are safe to use indoors with adequate ventilation.
I got one for emergency heat, and it can take 2 of the 1lb propane cylinders directly, or the 20lb tank with a hose. The 20lb tank could provide heat for over 24 hours but IDK how expensive propane is there. It cost me $18 for a 4-pack of the 1lb cylinders, and I think the 20lb ones are about $50 range.
Have you tried burning reindeer?
It’s a Christmas scented ash they leave behind, most unsettling
Hang a few blankets or bubble foil against the windows for
isolationinsulation.What about for insulation?
No no, it’s for insolention. Fuck them HOAs.
Wouldn’t there be a price cap in events that the wholesale market has anomalies like this? That’s standard in most jurisdictions. The wholesale price is still “real” because there’s some system or market condition reflected in this spike, it’s just not normal for ratepayers at the distribution level to not have a price cap protection. It’s like the opposite scenario if the price isn’t high enough to cover the cost in actually delivering the energy and running the grid, so a Global Adjustment would come in to effect to cover the difference. There can even be surplus conditions where the price is in the negative.
what kind of regulatory distopia do these laws come from?
/s
We have price caps in the UK. They’re not perfect but they have stopped us from paying a lot more than we would have this past year. And the UK is definitely no (did you mean to say?) utopia. Or do you think a price cap to protect consumers is something from a distopia?
Big part of the price was that Finland was close to needing rolling blackouts, because there wasn’t enough electricity. All transmit lines were fully utilized, and all available power plants on, so only way to get the consumption down was with the price.
It worked, Finland dropped the electricity consumption almost 10% and we got through quite easily.
I guess with my knowledge of energy markets, a situation like that would result in higher prices just by the way the market functions, responding to supply and demand. The graph here appears to be a market clearing price rather than a price after adjustments, where a lot of incentives would be brought in like an intentional price hike.
We were in the opposite situation though where we were running into surplus overnight during a period of energy transition. You’d see these stupid misinformed articles being like, “the government is giving away YOUR electricity to the US!” Was like during the 2003 blackout where we needed to bring large loads online carefully alongside generation, people were freaking out how casinos and industry got power before them. The need for dispatchable loads connected to the high voltage transmission grid in that situation wasn’t as headline worthy.
wow that is crazy. my bill for December was $77 in the US.
Finland has more than 330 hydro power plants, with total capacity of over 3,100 megawatts in 2022. Hydro accounted for 18% of Finland’s total installed power generation capacity and 22% of total power generation in 2021.
WTFINLAND
Hydro-Québec Production main power plants (2020) Total Others (49 hydro, 1 therma) - 13302 MW
Hydro =/= hydro. The plants in Finland are tiny in comparison.
Finland is flat, no possiblity in hydro if you don’t have the mountains with water in them. Norway gets all the hydro, and Finland buys it there.
Canada has 85% of the worlds freshwater. There are a crazy amount of big rivers. Its not really a fait comparison.
This is Québec only. Other provinces that have more water and hills still have less hydro.
I don’t think the fact that Finland is north and cold and icy is a factor either. A lot of Québec’s power generating stations are in the desolate north, with some of the biggest ones on rivers flowing into the Hudson’s Bay, and they were built in the 70s.
However looking at the relief and hydro and topo maps of Finland, while there’s plenty of lakes, there’s no strong rivers. Couple this with an apparent ban on new hydro, and we got the answer.
I wonder how they’d fare with geothermal.
How are you using 21kWh/day heating a small home? Do you have any insulation at all?
Probably because it’s about -35C outside.
Dude is basically living on the set of The Thing at this point.
That’s a perfectly normal number for any home that isn’t very new and perfectly insulated.
My 37sqm appartment needs approximately 5000 kWh in natural gas per year, 876 kWh last December, so 28 kWh per day on average. The building is admittedly old and not perfectly insulated but it’s also not a log cabin out in the open in Finland, but instead a flat enclosed within 3 other flats in the middle of cosy, never below -8C Germany.
21 kWh in a log cabin in Finnland actually seemed pretty low to me. It’s sort of obvious OP is using a heat pump and the cabin must really be absolutely tiny.
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Why are you measuring natural gas in kWh? How do you even measure that as such?
It’s an easy conversion - 1 kWh is equal to 3412 Btus. In Germany, both electricity and natural gas are charged in kWh. I know a fair bit about energy measurement if you have any questions.
This is fascinating to me. How does it factor efficiency, since gas needs to be burned?
To turn gas to electricity assume 50% efficiency. 2MWh of gas = 1MWh of electricity.
So given that most gas furnaces (at least in the US) operate at 90-95% efficiency, does that mean 20 kWh of resistive electric heat (as measured on the bill) provides similar heat to ~11 kWh of gas?
Ah. 50% efficency to turn gas into electricity.
If you are just making heat then burning gas directly is much better.
Great question. When it comes to utility billing, efficiency doesn’t factor at all. Just like with electric billing, the utility company gives zero shits about what you do with your energy. They just bill you for everything you use.
Utility companies keep track of the volume used in cubic meters and convert it to kWh using the formula…
Volume (in cubic meters) • Calorific value (usually around 37-42) • 1.02264 (correction factor) ÷ 3.6 (conversion factor to kWh) = kWh
The calorific value accounts for the varying energy density of natural gas caused by its inconsistent composition. The correction factor accounts for the effects of the average temperature and pressure at the property on gas volume measurement. 1.02264 is standard for most locations but would be different if the location is extreme, like the high elevation of Machu Picchu.
What sucks about gas heating is some of the heat energy released leaves with the exhaust. The heating efficiency varies depending on the unit but is generally 90-95% for newer units but as low as 50% for older units. While 90-95% doesn’t seem bad, electric heat pumps achieve efficiencies that exceed 100%, even as high as 300+%.
My meter measures it in m3 and my supplier, knowing the exact caloric value of the product they’re selling, tells me in kWh on my bill.
edit: m3 of course not 2 lol
50kWh and closer to 90kWh on days like this. It’s a log cabin and I’m keeping my root cellar and insulated shed above freezing aswell. Even running a 1kW heater all day would result in a consumption more than 21kWh and that wouldn’t keep any house warm.
A tiny heater running all day would do that.
1kw is a small heater. 0.8kw is a tiny one. 0.8x24 is 19.2. Assuming they have other basic appliances, that’s already more than enough to account for their usage.
I like to keep my bedroom a cosy 1600 degrees C
I’ve got a small 1200w heater that kicks on in the morning to bring the living room space up to 69. I live in a 40 year old house that’s insulated fairly well (I just had the attic redone last year to r-49) and it’s 45f outside right now. That little heater has used 6kWh since kicking on this morning getting the house up from 63f to the near 69 it is now.
On a day below freezing that heater will got for a lot longer through the day to keep temps up.
Space heaters are the way to go.
It’s the difference between paying $70 and $5 more per month.
Space heaters are one of the most expensive methods. Check the power consumption, they are hungry things.
My electric bill says otherwise.
As always, I encourage people to see for themselves rather than trusting strangers on the internet.
The only time space heaters work well is when you avoid heating the whole house, and instead heat only a room
No shit.
What are you smoking? Space heaters gulp down electricity with the smallest ones running at hundreds of watts and standard ones around 1-2 kilowatts. The only ways a space heater is more efficient is if either you’re spending a shitton of energy heating rooms you aren’t in or if your homes heating system is in bad need of repair/replacement
Well, my electric bill went up a negligible amount and I keep the space heater running pretty much all the time.
Maybe you bought a shitty one or you’re getting a shitty deal for your electricity.
All space heaters operate at the same efficiency since they convert electricity to heat via resistance. You may have a small one and low electricity rates in your area to see a negligible change. Or maybe other uses went down and masked the increase from the space heater usage.
Almost. Some are better at heating people, others are better at heating air
Bruh I don’t think you understand how electricity consumption works.
A space heater will pull a given wattage, say 1000 watts for a pretty common one. Electric heaters are 100% efficient meaning 100% of the energy going in is converted to heat, so running that 1000 watt space heater for 1 hour will consume 1000 watt-hours (or 1 kilowatt hour) and heat the space by exactly 1000 watts or 1 kilowatt (kilo meaning thousand)
Plugging this into a electric bill calculator, at a common $0.15/kWh running that 1000 watt space heater 24/7 will cost about $100 per month
If your space heater is so insanely awesome, please do tell me, what’s your electric rate and the wattage of the heater?
Bruh, I don’t think you understand that heating a room is cheaper than heating your whole house. If I ran my space heater 24/7, I’d be sweating all day. If I run my central heater 24/7, my house barely reaches the temperature my room does before I turn my space heater off.
My electric bill is ~$160 when running the central heater. It’s ~$80 when I run my space heater.
As always, I encourage people to see for themselves rather than trusting strangers on the internet.
Experience is better than theory, every time. I feel sorry for the people who will avoid saving money because of comments like yours.
To quote my earlier comment with emphasis this time:
The only ways a space heater is more efficient is if either you’re spending a shitton of energy heating rooms you aren’t in or if your homes heating system is in bad need of repair/replacement
So you’ve already agreed with my original point, because you reduced power consumption by turning your HVAC down and using a space heater to heat just the room you’re in. Running a 4 kilowatt central heater will use more electricity as it runs than a 1 kilowatt space heater. But a 1 kilowatt space heater is still pulling down a kilowatt to run (which is a lot!)
Experience is better than theory, every time. I feel sorry for the people who will avoid saving money because of comments like yours.
YOU CAN LITERALLY CALCULATE THIS! Watts consumed by the heating source multiplied by number of hours per month it runs gives you the watt hours for power consumption, bigger number means bigger bill. In fact it’s important to calculate it first because electric bills will naturally fluctuate and be difficult to identify the changes in consumption due to being an aggregate of everything in your home combined with outside temperature fluctuations.
Outer walls in new homes in the Nordic countries are often 25-30 inches thick filled with insulation. They will keep out some cold (and some heat).
Heat pumps aren’t designed to function in this low of temperature. The problem is they need a real heater instead of a heat exchanger.
This is such an outdated information. Modern heatpumps work just fine even in temperatures of -20C and below. Ofcourse the efficiency gets worse the colder it is but even at worst it’s still 100% efficient. On a typical year there’s only a handful of really cold days. It doesn’t make sense not to get a heatpump just because it’s inefficient for few days. It’s not like it stops heating or something. It just effectively turns into electric radiator which is what my house was heated with before I got the heatpump anyways.
This is true only if you have a heat pump with electric/resistive backup heat. But for some reason, it’s pretty easy to buy one in the US that doesn’t. (Which is where I assume that poster is, because most anti-heat-pump sentiment seems to come from here.)
Not quite, in my experience on really cold days my heat pump struggles to keep up. This is expecially true when the outside unit is frosting up. The unit has to reverse and pump heat out of the house.
That’s one of the reasons i run my wood pellet stove on those days. The secondary source of heat takes the load off the heat pump.
Sure, but as I said it’s just a handfull of days in a year. If the heatpump alone struggles to keep my house warm I can just switch on one or two electric radiators.
Most heat pumps will use the aux coils to defrost. It’s also ok for the heat pump to literally run 24/7 if it needs to. A lot of people freak out when the heat pump runs all day and blows “cool” 80F at from the vents, but it’s still working as intended. Though I totally get how that can make a place feel “drafty” without some backup running
It’s true they’re at worst 100% efficient, but they’re also typically sized lower than resistive electric heaters in terms of input power. In the US, a residential heat pump likely draws about 4kW, whereas resistive heat strips or baseboard heating could be multiples of that. As an air source heat pump’s output drops on very cold days, a unit rated for e.g. 48000BTU/hr at 47°f might produce only half of that at 5°f/-15c. A “good” unit here would produce perhaps 75%. The way we do HVAC sizing, unless you radically oversized the system for most weather (including air conditioning) you’ll need a backup source of heat on the coldest days.
Code (law specifying how much heating / cooling capacity is required in normal worst-case weather conditions) where I live would require me to use about 2x the normal sizing to achieve pure heat pump heating at the required design temperature (around 5f/-15c). That means at the peak of summer (about 100f/38c) the unit would be operating at less than half of its full cooling capacity.
Apologies for weird units; I live in MAGAland.
I live in a very cold part of the world where the temps can easily exceed your -20C for night times for several weeks at a time. And even as the daily high for a week stretch or two over a winter. And while I could have purchased a heat pump that would work to that low of a temperature, it would have cost over twice the price. Going from $5000US installed to over $10,000US for just the heat pump. And that included the rebate incentives.
My heat pump is set to set to cut out and switch to LP heat at -10C because it becomes cheaper to run an LP furnace at that point - cost of electricity = 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour vs $1.75US gallon LP. The loss of efficiency matters to my pocket book. And I chose my particular heat pump with my advice of my Daughter who has a PhD in ME and works as a research engineer for a non-profit studying HVAC systems and the efficiencies of the technology used in them. And she won’t install a heat pump in her house because for where she lives, they literally do not make financial sense. There is zero savings to be had with switching from natural gas heat to electric.
So installing a heat pump is not a universal no brainer. You still need to to the math to see if it pays.
Yeah obviously it’s a whole different game when you live in a place like that. That’s just quite rare usecase. The vast majority of people who keep repeating the “heatpumps don’t work in cold climates” lives in a climate much warmer than I do. Even mine struggles on the really cold days we get few times a year but that’s fine because it gets the job done flawlessly for the remaining 350 days.
My issue with these arguments is the blanket statements that get made. Both arguments on this particular subject can both be true at the same time. And until you do the math for your specific situation, you can’t tell if it pays until you know the answer
Now, I believe it works out for you just as it does for me. But I had to the math to figure it out to know for sure. Most people who argue over this subject have never done the math.
If your intention is to heat or cool air using as little electricity as possible, a basic heat pump split air conditioning unit is going to be more than adequate for 90% of people. If you live in a place like Yakutsk, then yeah, you probably need to look into something else, but for the vast majority of people it’s going to be just fine. A general recommendation doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for literally every single person.
But it very often catches many who simply take it as an irrefutable truth.
As I gave as an example, my one Daughter who is recognized by her peers as an expert in this field, and is all about improved efficiency and renewable energy, did the math and found that it doesn’t work for her. And it’s not because she lives in a terrible climate - it’s warmer and varies less than where I live by a noticeable amount. It’s because when you compare total costs, over the life span of a heat pump, she would end up paying extra to have one verses a simple natural gas furnace. It would be even sillier for my neighbor who is a logger. He uses 100% wood heat. Because he can literally harvest, process, and store enough firewood for several years in one afternoon. Anything else is far more expensive. But the math says it works for me.
You can’t make general statements about 90% of all people until everyone does the math. This is just one of the field studies my Daughter is doing. Trying to collect enough real time data on real homes and families and doing the math to help pinpoint locations where it makes sense and where it does not make sense at this time. It does not always workout like you and I might think it would.
In very cold climates, having a hybrid system like the one you’re describing is that universal no brainer in my opinion. Especially since most cold regions also typically have really long transitional periods where your heat pump is most efficient and pays itself off fastest. Combining that with turning it off during harsh winter weeks gives you the best of both worlds.
It’s not even a no brainer even then. You absolutely need to actually do the math for your particular situation to make that determination. For me it works out. For my neighbor down the road who is a logger, it does not. He can harvest, process, and store 2 years worth of firewood in a mere handful of hours. Any other heat source makes little sense for him.
You really, really, really need to do the math!
I am also an engineer and used to have LP backup heat and the only way the LP is cheaper per BTU is if you rapidly deprecate the heat pump asset.
A gallon of propane has 91,000 BTU, and a kWh of electricity has 3400 BTU. 91k/3.4k ~ 26kWh x 0.065 ~ $1.73 for electricity equivalent at 1.0 coefficient of performance. But your COP is likely around 2-3, so the heat pump will be at least 2x cheaper than the LP. It would take like 6000 hours of operation to break even on the bigger heat pump, and that’s ignoring the cost and maintenance of the propane furnace
There are heat pumps that exchange heat with the ground. Those can function well in more extreme temperatures. Also you could/should have alternative heating methods for extreme situations even if they are much more inneficient
In colder areas like that the heat pumps are usually ground source so the ambient air temperature doesn’t change the performance much.
Have you actually priced such systems and the payback time vs heat pumps vs petroleum sourced heat?
I know one person who chose a mix of ground heat pump, LP, and wood heat. He told me that it only had a reasonable payback was because he was building a new home and the extra cost could be tagged to the total build cost. Making it cheaper than a retro fit. He said it added another $25,000 to the cost of his new home. But in fairness, he does enjoy it.
I only do the refrigeration side of things and I don’t do residential stuff so I’m not sure on exact pricing. Pricing will also vary greatly depending on the exact area. For example in my area we have a high enough ground water level that open loop geothermal is easy and that is the cheapest/easiest method of geothermal. The other types will also vary in cost depending on soil type and moisture content because that will partially dictate how big of a ground loop you need. The amount of area you have for a ground loop will also be a big factor because if you don’t have enough yard area for a horizontal loop then you need to use a vertical loop which can be heniously expensive.
As far as payback goes they are far more expensive to install regardless of the type but the ground loop (assuming closed loop system) can easily last over 50 years and that is the most expensive part of the whole system by a large margin. Out of the $25,000 you mentioned I would bet that about $20,000 of that was just for the ground loop. The rest of the system is going to be more durable as well due to not being outdoors. The expected lifespan of the other components is 20 years and they can easily last far longer than that. So the energy savings is only part of the cost savings. The other part is that geothermal heat pumps need practically no maintenance and break down far more rarely than any other conventional heating or cooling solution. With how long they last and how durable they are a geothermal heat pump can probably pay itself off just with avoided service calls.
The biggest issue is if you don’t have the money to buy it, it matters very little about the efficiency and how long it lasts. You still need to pay for it. He could justify the expense because we are a very rural area and land is cheap and tagging it to a new build brings down the interest costs. This is often makes geo-thermal a non-starter for most - as you point out. He even admits he wouldn’t have done it under any other circumstance.
i keep a pile of coal in the cellar for the extra cold days
To do what with? Light a coal fire in the living room?
It doesn’t sound safe even in a proper fireplace.
found one whose never felt the heat of a coal stove
it’s handy to have backup heat source when the power goes out so pipes don’t freeze
Nope, I am far too young for that.
I have never heard of anyone that currently has a coal-heated house. I thought it was entirely dead in the developed world. Here these heating options are common district heating, geothermal, direct electric heating, some other kind of heat pump, biofuel (like pellets), and a tiny bit of oil and gas.
The most popular by far is district heating, after that comes electric heating (which includes electricity used for geothermal heat pumps and other kinds) and then biofuel. Gas and oil are barely visible on a graph.
I just tried to find a place in my country which sells coal for heating but alas I didn’t succeed. You can of course buy coal but its intended purpose is always grilling or smithing.
Your thinking of charcoal, which are chunks of wood converted into almost pure carbon by heating them above their combustion temperature in a low oxygen environment. He was talking about coal that was mined out of the ground. Plants from an ancient swamps that didn’t decompose, but were converted into almost pure carbon from millions of years of heat and pressure from being buried.
No.
I don’t think any type of coal heating has existed for homes in quite a long time in my country.
I honestly thought it was phased out decades ago in pretty much the entire western world.
I have electric! The coal stove is backup, some people use wood as a backup. It’s not uncommon
Is heating with electricity common in Finland? That seems like it would cost a fortune even in good times.
Older houses burn oil for heating the house and water but even most of them have heatpumps installed. New houses usually also have heatpumps or geothermal so direct electric heating is more and more uncommon. Apartment buildings generally all have district heating and even some private homes do.
Yes it’s expensive but so is everything else too. Our houses are way better insulated than in most places though so that helps a little.
Geothermal is expensive and not worth it financially in many countries but when you are looking at 2.35€/kWh it seems like a great investment.
He doesn’t mean geothermal in large scale but home level geothermal. It is actually very cheap and efficient technology.
Over half of the new houses in Finland are build with geothermal. It costs roughly 18 000€ to construct.
He doesn’t mean geothermal in large scale but home level geothermal. It is actually very cheap and efficient technology.
I understand, but it’s not cheap when compared to solar
Solar panels doesn’t provide heat, it produces electricity. Also it is quite common on Finland to have solar panels + geothermal heating, because both of them pay for themself in 5-10 years. Unfortunately solar panels do not provide us enough electricity to be only source, not even with batteries.
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Overall electricity is relatively cheap in Finland. Historically they were oil heated, which is not very cheap either.
We do not have gas lines in Finland, so we cannot use that like other parts of Europe. This is now of course better because we are not depending on Russian gas.
Previously we got parts of electricity from Russia, but that shutdown after the Ukraine war.
Pretty common here in France and it’s cheap enough. Why would you think it would be expensive? And expensive compared to what?
When you say it’s common, are you talking about heat pumps or old-fashioned resistive heating? I’m not very familiar with heat pumps since they weren’t common at all when and where I bought a house, but at least where I lived it was normal to have either an oil or a gas furnace for heating. Resistive electric heating cost a lot more to operate and so it was generally used only where it would be too difficult or expensive to install a furnace and hot water pipes or hot air ducts. For example, some friends of mine lived in a 19th century house which was meant to be heated by a wood fireplace and they also had electric heaters in the bedrooms, whereas my own house was built in 1980 so it had an oil tank, a furnace in the basement, and hot-water radiators.
(My own house also had a modern wood stove in the living room and buying firewood was even cheaper than buying heating oil, but the problem was that the wood stove took a lot of work and it only heated the living room since it wasn’t connected to any mechanism for spreading the heat to the rest of the house.)
I was talking about the old-fashion one. It’s really common across France even though modern housing have heat pumps. Oil furnaces have almost completely disappeared and the gas one are in the process of being replaced as well. Electricity is cheaper here than in most countries (thanks to nuclear power plants).
Ouch.
Meanwhile, in Portugal, my peak energy price will be around €.10, with the minimum at around €.06
To what degree is your house insulated already?
-40 is eye buggingly cold. You could have a styrofoam house and I would still worry about being cold in it, plus y’know, the giant fire hazard.
Saves a pretty penny on refrigerating stuff but makes for a hard time to have a decent night of sleep.
And your remark on styrofoam hits hard with me.
I have an old house, nearly 100 years old, with a very poor score in thermal efficiency, that really needs some improvement but the idea of glueing highly combustible materials to the walls does not go well with me.
At least you can quick chill a beer!
I can’t drink…
At least you can quick chill a soda!
There’s that, I’ll admit.
Well after lighting the styrofoam you won’t feel cold anymore
But I like feeling vijif!
Lol I don’t know how that got autocorrected. Dutch is a funny language, but that isn’t a word…
It’s crazy. I’ve been doing all my insulation calculations based on a delta of 20 (20 inside, 0 outside).
To hit the same heating requirement, I’d need to triple the amount of insulation for -40.
Normal energy price in Finland around 0,04€ - 0,10€/kWh. Last year average was 0,068€/kWh
That’s extremely cheap, compared to 0,35€ in Germany.
That is really nice.
It’s a log cabin with 5cm added fibreglass insulation on the inside.
That’s a lot. And being a log cabin I wouldn’t add anything on the outside that would hide the wood. That is really harsh weather to endure.
