electric heating

How can that part of the process be inefficient? Where does wasted energy go in a resistive heater?

I wonder what percentage of generated power goes to heating the power lines.

They know quite a bit about heating and energy efficiency in Ontario- much more than you- so don't worry about them. This country is the real cesspool where they need to outright double the minimum insulation used in all type s of construction but are taking their sweet time doing it- the measure is just now in committee in the residential code council.

According to MacKay in "Without Hot Air", p71, "Of the energy that gets turned into electricity, about 8% is lost in the transmission system."

It's also crazy to phase out natural gas, which has 1/2 the carbon of other fossil fuels. (No one seems to get that...)

Huh, that makes no sense. The heat has to come from the surrounding air, I guess it's OK in the summer if you want to cool your house too. Heat pumps work best with a small delta T. I looked into geothermal when our old oil burning furnace failed, but (at the time) they only ran with a forced air system. (we have hot water w/ base board radiators) and AIUI heating from 55 (F) ground temperatures to whatever I need for the hot water, (130 F) you lose efficiency big time...

We heat our domestic water with electric. I've got one with a tank. Not sure of the power, but 240 V service on a 20 Amp fuse. I've also got a tankless heater. The element is ~7.5 ohms, again 240 V (40 or 50 amp fuse... I've forgotten.)

George H.

Two heat pumps. When it gets cold (under 40F), resistive elements in the heat exchangers take over. At something like 25F the heating system can no longer maintain 65F and the inside temperature starts to slide. I don't remember how big the circuits to the heat pumps are but the house has two 150A services.

That seems like a really bad idea.

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Conventional gas furnaces are ~70% efficient.

Modern condensing ones are about 95%.

It seems weird to use a PVC flue pipe for exhaust. The temperature of the outlet is only 40-50 deg C.

kevin

But they are thinking green, which cuts their collective IQ roughly in half.

The Germans are thinking green too, and they've made a mess.

A lot of houses in areas without piped-in natural gas use electric air and water heating, and also electric clothes dryers. It's very inefficient and the costs are much higher.

I recall my childhood home in Florida and it was a big deal when me moved to a new neighborhood that had natural gas piped in. No more tanks of propane delivered. The guy across the street from us, a plumber, had a natural gas refrigerator and a natural gas air-conditioner. At that time, the gas company was charging very low prices for natural gas to residences, the same rates they were giving to commercial customers. In hurricanes, when the power went out, he still had a working refrigerator and air-conditioner.

But if you're generating electricity with hydro, nuclear, wind, or solar, then there is an upside, at least in terms of cutting emissions.

Germany has converted 30% of its electricity production to renewables, mainly by providing very high reimbursement to homeowners for generated power. Likewise, solar is very popular in California communities served by PG&E and SCE because of very high reimbursement rates.

We got a new clothes drier for the cabin in the mountains. We went to the little franchise Sears store in Truckee, and the manager (a former Silicon Valley engineer) said that electric dryers are as cost-efficient as gas driers, partly because gas heat is wet and doesn't dry as well as dry electric heat. So we got electric.

There are energy-poor Germans who can't afford electricity any more.

Something like this...

I think an ideal heat pump, heating air to 30C and exhausting to a 0 deg C heat sink, would be about 10x as efficient as a resistive heater. 3x seems practical.

Den mandag den 16. maj 2016 kl. 21.55.21 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

I think geothermal the COP is something like 2.5 to 5

but it is mostly suited for under floor heating, the water is a bit too cold for regular radiators

-Lasse

You and I disagree on whether there's a problem to be addressed, but I do agree that there's a lot of non-thinking going on when it comes to solutions. Hence my suggestion in an earlier reply that the solution to too much energy use is to gracefully reduce the population. Of course, if only responsible people cut back on their baby production, that means a bunch of babies raised by irresponsible people.

I was in kind of a horrified awe of the whole hydrogen economy thing a few years "we'll power everything with hydrogen!" but with no thought to _where_ the hydrogen comes from.

That whole episode, various statements about energy I hear from non- technical people, and the periodic requests I get from people trying to build perpetual-motion machines (one of which managed to get past my BS filters into a real contract before I realized just what the super-sekret thing was they were doing), leads me to believe that you shouldn't be allowed to graduate high school (or maybe grade school) without being able to recite the three laws of thermodynamics, and use them to explain why you can't get energy for free.

(Using hydrogen as a way to store and transport energy is OK-ish, except there seems to be some significant technical hurdles that were being glossed over. Of course, using _anything_ to better store and transport energy just means that you're taking the smog out of LA and putting it into Indian Country, in the form of coal-fired powerplant smoke.)

Den mandag den 16. maj 2016 kl. 22.52.18 UTC+2 skrev Tim Wescott:

with the big advantage that a powerplant can have very effective filters and scrubbers

-Lasse

True. But when you read an article on "hydrogen power" it's not about storing power made someplace else using hydrogen. It's about how molecular hydrogen is going to magically appear, and we only need to figure out how to use it.

yeh, that is just silly and storing hydrogen isn't exactly simple

-Lasse

big snip, but it works ok.

NT

I have natural gas heating, but it will not work if I lose power. It needs electricity to run the solenoids and fan.

How does your neighbor overcome that problem?

There is no reason "geothermal" (I assume you mean "ground source") heat pumps have to exhaust cool air. You can pump it as well as you can the outside air. Easier, obviously.

It comes from charging lead-acid batteries, of course. Duh ;)