Residential heating with electricity is insane. But if you do it, when delta-t is moderate, a heat pump is better than resistive heating. A heat pump can be designed so that the waste heat from the pumps and such is dumped indoors, just as the resistive equivalent would be. But if it's designed primarily for cooling, that's not a desirable feature, so dual-use heat pumps, especially cheap ones, aren't exactly optimized for heating.
We use natural gas, and don't have a/c.
John
I live in a warm part of California. There are more than one members of extended my family living in places where brass-monkeys are not left outside very often.
Crawl spaces aren't the norm in cold places short of the artic. The basement is where the furnace usually placed. When you get into places with permafrost. the houses once again have gaps under them but the furnaces and ducts are placed inside the heated space.
The ducts being outdoors is only done in warmish places where the extra room inside the house is considered a bigger value than the better heating duct methods.
News==----
Does that mean that they keep their canon balls inside, too?
-- Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to prove it. Member of DAV #85. Michael A. Terrell Central Florida
Yes.
It is also where most cars plug in, walking across a lake is considered normal, people never stay up all night or work all day.
Had gas heat (furnace and hot water) at the old house... I miss it except for safety issues. We certainly have no CO issues now ;-)
What WILL you do when global warming arrives ?:-)
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
We have resistive heat in the apartment we're in now. A heat pump would be nice. It doesn't matter all that much because we're only planning on staying for one winter. At least electricity is cheaper here.
The house we just sold in VT had natural gas heat and a few "window" ACs stuck through the wall (one 2T one 7500BTU in the bedroom). The price of natural gas was going up pretty sharply, but nothing like electricity.
-- Keith
Sure, ya' gotta keep your powder dry too.
-- Keith
REAL heat pumps use a heat exchanger immersd in the lake underneath the dock.
-- Paul Hovnanian mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ Deja fubar: The feeling that you\'ve made the same mistake before.
We run the heat all year here.
We just took a walk on the cliffs and damned near froze to death. The only thing that saved us was the Irish Coffee. And the middle part of the US is being re-glaciated.
John
Wet talcum powder is useless! ;-)
-- Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to prove it. Member of DAV #85. Michael A. Terrell Central Florida
Took #5 granddaughter to her favorite Greek restaurant tonight... big time shivers whilst walking outside :-(
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
Check out the exposure of the political dishonesty behind the claim that Al Gore claimed to invent the internet, such as at snopes.com.
I conmsider that to be Republican distortion worse than that actually committed by Al Gore here, since he was the main force in Congress working to expand into what was then often called the "Information Superhighway" from the Arpanet.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
Icecapped or merely suffering winter weather no worse than has been experienced before in those areas in the past century?
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
They don't really pump it backwards, a valve interchanges the outdoor and indoor heat exchanger coils.
The heat pump is extracting heat energy from the outdoor air mass and delivering it into the heated space at elevated temperature. The electric heater is extracting energy through your meter and delivering that into the heated space. The only energy extracted through the meter by the heat pump is overhead required to run the extraction and delivery process, also called the pumping process and the impetus for the use of
*pump* in *heat* *pump*. Obviously this is far less than the electric heater uses to delivery the same amount of heat, actually about 1/5 the amount for modern residential units. The compressor limits the temperature differential the heat pump can handle efficiently. When the outdoor air becomes too cold, the unit will kick in either a fossil fuel or electric heater furnace and the free ride is over.
Air-to-heat-sink transfer
Heat-source-to-air transfer
The "efficiency" is so thrilling.
Sounds like Al Gore "Consensus Science" to me ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
It is not the various media exchanging heat that is so important as the temperature differential of the two sealed system heat exchangers. There are only so many candidate refrigerants with adequate latent heat and compressors available to do the job. The type of heat pump you're talking about is circulating a glycol type of fluid through an underground or underwater pipe field and then to the heat exchange with the refrigerant. Because your outdoor side exchange temperature is constant for practical purposes, you end up with year round operation in either mode. The glycol circuit is not a complicated Mollier cycle as with the refrigeration, it is a simple hydronic circulation of fluid through a loop without phase change. If it's something you have to have, there are ample ASHRAE certified refrigeration ME's who can put together a custom design with off-the-shelf components. Consultation and design would be fairly cheap, but the actual installation... that's another story.
My only point is that "reversible" AC/heat-pumps are crap for heating when it's cold... exactly when you need it.
In Arizona you used to be able to buy "dual-paks"... AC with an electric (or gas-fired) furnace. You don't see them anymore for some reason.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
The original complaint about heat pump heating was the relatively cold plenum temperatures, maybe 80oF for a 70oF room, this feels like ice, especially when it's dry. Compare that to the 120o-140o of the fossil fuel furnace. They've since done some things to up the heat pump working temperature, but I don't know what it is.
That also depends on where you put the reference. If the heater is powered from nuclear energy, the efficiency is quite high. If the electricity comes from a coal powered electricity plant, then the efficiency is rather low.
-- Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) Bedrijven en winkels vindt U op www.adresboekje.nl
It depends on where you live. In Sweden they have a lot of electricity coming from dams. So electricity is cheap there.
Over here energy prices are grazy. We pay about 200 euro's per month for electricity, heating and hot water (where I live all houses are heated using cooling water from an electricity plant). I'm thinking about getting a boiler which can use scrap wood or coal :-)
-- Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) Bedrijven en winkels vindt U op www.adresboekje.nl
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