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#heat#more#system#ground#energy#pump#heating#air#drilling#water
Discussion (56 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
As a renter, I have no incentives to invest thousands in my home's betterment because I will have lost those when I am gone. As an owner, I have no incentives to make my apartment/house better because I don't live in it and I don't pay the energy bills.
Something has to be done about that if we want to combat climate change. I know in France it is now forbidden to rent again or sale when the renter leaves if the home's energy grade is F or G (A is best) but it is probably loosely enforced/easy to circumvent. And it is too damn slow ! This is for regulation but maybe there are other levers ?
As a renter I would basically have to wait for energy prices to skyrocket for it to make economic sense. I hate this situation.
Maths: 85% discount on fancy new waterheater, which also dehumidifies and cools your house (passive result of heatpump).
TVA usually offers this promotion between Thanksgiving and NYE. You can order online from HomeDepot, or walk into a local store [0]. This ends up costing LESS than a new traditional resistive-type heater.
[0] either method: they DO verify SFH (by more than just ZIP code) -- duplexes and contractors not authorized/allowed
The AO is a much cleaner/simpler/nicer install. The Rheem stupidly requires duct adapters (for small-space, <700sqft "closet" installations). AO won't last as long, but at $250 who cares?!
If you get one, just make sure to get the dimensioning right. They are WAY more complex to plan, install and maintain than traditional heating.
I was not familiar with this term before, had to look it up.
And yet in Austria, most apartment buildings in big cities are still heated by burning heating oil, gas or even firewood. Worst of the worst for air quality.
Walk through Graz in sub-zero winters and it's like you're breathing in a barbeque bonfire. Even your clothes smell like soot when you get home if you've been out too long. Which is bizarre to me, considering how much posturing and chest thumping Austria is doing about how green and anti-Nuclear they are yet they love burring wood and oil. Male this make sense please.
Sure, rich people in the bacon belt living in single family homes in the suburbs or rural areas, have heat pumps, solar panels on the roof and a Tesla in the garage, but that's a different story compared to those living in the city stuck in the fossil fuel stone age, where they have no choice over their rented building's heating method.
How do you convert the city's apartment buildings to heat pumps? Is it a technological limitation? Money limitation? Bureaucratic and political limitation? All of the above?
Best way to get around this is making heat pumps more accessible (easy to get, financing options), as well as legislation (banning gas/oil heating).
Firewood and heating oil isn't cheaper, it merely has lower upfront cost in exchange for a higher total cost. An efficient governance system (whether that's capitalism and banks with loans or renting out the hearpumps or a centrally planned replacement program or anything else) would figure out the financing and save the system money by updating.
Technology can make the incentives even larger. Excess money can make it easier for the governance system to reach the solution. But it's at the point where without any improvement to either an ideal system would figure out how to make the switch happen.
That means they are sometimes economically incentivized to choose an option with lower initial cost but a higher running cost. Governments can/do bend these incentives via taxes but it can be hard/expensive to renovate old complexes (and that part cannot directly be offloaded by the landlord).
- No outdoor unit that looks awful in many settings
- works well, even in the coldest winter, without a spike in electricity usage, COP 5
- very reliable with long durability
- super quiet, no ambient noise
- 20% more efficient
Currently, drilling is very disruptive in retrofits, but there is progress in compact techniques that might change the equation.
Disclaimer: angel investor in https://www.flexdrill.at/
[1] https://www.borobotics.ch/
It works great, but it's hard to see a way to it making sense for most folks here.
So I'm looking at a backup gas boiler to take load of the heatpump/ground loop (house has radiant heat).
And they are not quiet. 5-Ton water to water compressors are not quiet.
And the control system (HDX) and amount of expertise required to keep the thing running is a major barrier to getting low cost maintenance.
Maybe a 2026-designed system will work better and actually live up to the hype you talk about, but there are decades of poorly designed and discarded ground loop heat pumps that have "poisoned the well" if you will.
Other type is permanent change that persists year over year. Haven't lived here long enough to measure this. But if you pull more heat from the ground in the winter than you put back into it into summer (we use a water to air compressor for AC in summer), then yes, it can happen and does happen. Don't know if we are in this bucket yet.
Sorry to hear this, it seems like a great system to me but you have to have the capacity right. I'm planning on getting one in the next year but the drilling will be more than we need and we opt for no glycol (yet) as that also gives us headroom
Currently system is running 20% methanol to combat the 29degF EWT (entering water temp) in deep winter. House is in Zone 6a.
One thing I learned in researching all of this is that use of ground source over many years can move the bulk ground temp permanently. (House also has water-to-air water furnace for AC). If heat pulled from ground in winter is not sufficiently replaced by heat added during summer, can move bulk ground temp over time. (If densely packed residential ground loops ever became a thing, I think this is a real risk.). But I am not sure if we have this issue at our place, still in first year, not enough data points.
If you're building the apartment building you have the choice to drill for the entire building, and the number of units that benefit mean this is much more cost efficient than with single family homes.
https://x.com/AO7186252340513
https://bsky.app/profile/showpiece.bsky.social
This a no-brainer for buildings with high energy use. But we looked into getting a heat pump last year but it doesn't pan out because our house (15 years old) has a very low energy use and we would not recover the costs (about 20K euros after subsidies) for 20+ years.
while they purposely end climate-change research including destroying billions in observation satellites by deorbiting them
the history written about this decade is going to be wild, if we survive it
It's a bit shit that hits poorer people relatively more than richer people. Governments can reduce this impact by subsidizing sustainable alternatives (like heat pumps). It's still leading to inequality (unless you give more subsidy to the poor), but at least overall people will hopefully benefit.
Is it possible that some non-trivial part of that number comes not from increased efficiency but from losing some energy-dependent industries?