NYT on Heat Pumps

joeba

This reminds me of all the people that ran to Tankless HW heaters but never realized, that unless you did your own maintenance you have to pay somebody 300+ each year to descale it, clean/replace the flame rod, clean condensate, and air inlet plus the expense of all the fancy electronics on it when something goes wrong, not to mention no DHW for days. Now I see this craz for people paying big bucks for Bosch IDS 2.0 systems. When that control board blows, be prepared for sticker shock.

HydroNiCK

Jamie Hall said:

Pity it's behind a paywall...

 If you go to your computer or phone's settings disable JavaScript. Often times it prevents the paywall enabling you to read the article. Enable JavaScript After your done reading.

 Hamsters.  Hamster rebates are coming in 2023.

ajc72

One thing about all this keeps nagging at me:To my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong), all of these mini-splits are made in Asia. So we are going to happily gut an American heating industry and replace this American made equipment with throw away (because these mini-splits have become just that) Asian manufactured equipment. I'll begin to give this some consideration if there is a requirement that the stuff has to be made here.

leonz

My brother has to have his Asian made mini split repaired and he's looking at a $1,600.00 bill for a circuit board and labor.

fugmin

Maybe he should replace it at that price. How old is it?

Jamie Hall

leonz said:

My brother has to have his Asian made mini split repaired and he's looking at a $1,600.00 bill for a circuit board and labor.

And that's actually probably pretty reasonable. I've seen replacement boards for domestic equipment will over a grand, and some of the boards for cars now run over 10 grand.

pecmsg

leonz said:

My brother has to have his Asian made mini split repaired and he's looking at a $1,600.00 bill for a circuit board and labor.

Should have complained with NAFTA. 

That train left 40 years ago!

leonz

I gave up when I tried to convince them to install new gravity hot water heat or new steam heat in the buildings they own when they did all the rehab and insulation work to avoid all this mini split crap as their tenants have to have supplemental electric heat when it drops below freezing.

Absolute genius, absolute genius, when they could have installed one pipe steam heat at the same time and had a gas steam boiler the size of a large desk for the entire building and an electric water heater in each residence tied to each residential meter.

hot_rod

We live in a throw away society now. Mini splits are popular because of the inexpensive front end cost and the ability to heat and cool in one cheap box. Computers are being obsoleted much sooner now also their OS no longer updatable. Tough to get more than 5-6 years out of power tools, if used on the job. I still have a few of my dads WW2 era power tools!
Not many consumer products are engineered to last 20- 30 years anymore, 10- 15 seems to be the target.

While it is certainly possible to engineer and build 20- 30 year products, who would pay the price, support the repair components for 20 years?

hot_rod

While not know for modern technologies, the Amish are mini- splitting their way to comfort nowadays.

https://mechanical-hub.com/amish-embrace-solar-powered-mini-split/

The Steam Whisperer

When I ran the numbers for national usage, I ended up with a need to double the peak grid capacity for aHeat pump in every building (assuming a COP of 3 at design low temperature and a gas fired equipment efficiency around 70%, IIRC) and about 7 times more capacity to power autos, trucks and locomotives that currently use gasoline or diesel. IIRC, we use 17 million gallons of gasoline a day and around 4 millions gallons of diesel a day. Convert that to btu's and I applied a 30% efficiency number for IC engines and 100% efficiency for electric motors. I did not figure peak demands when everyone was charging at home, which is probably not that great of a factor since usage for other needs is usually lowest at night.

I agree that simply getting more efficient could cut our energy needs in half ( probably more) and increase the usable income for typical citizens. I've run basic numbers on heating energy needs for typical brick buildings in Chicago and sourced studies done in Chicago and simply insulating and air tightening the attics is good for around 25% or greater heating need reduction and adding Low e glass storm windows to original single pane windows should be around another 12%. Moving from oversized atmospheric gas boilers to properly sized power burner boilers should be another 20% ( the typical atmospheric gas steam boiler we run into operates around 55% efficient for the season) That 50% reduction could be easily achieved by lots of buildings.

For vehicles, My own 2017 Chevy Express Diesel work van is a great example. We get 21 to 22mpg in the city, up to the mid 30's mpg on the highway with the truck carrying its standard load of about 2500 lbs of tools and supplies. With the gas versions, City is 11 to 12 mpg and highway around 15. Almost no one is buying the diesel and saving about $3,000.00 per year in operating costs ( based on fuel cost around $3.00 a gallon).


If we are going to be serious about energy and emissions reductions, we can achieve far greater gains per dollar invested doing efficiency upgrades than investing in Heat Pumps to heat inefficient buildings. In fact, if you use both methods on a building, you should be able to achieve about a 95% reduction in heating emissions ( assuming heat pumps will some day be zero emissions) with about 1/4 the capacity need for heat pump installations, if you use conventional systems for design peaks.

JakeCK

I agree with you 100% @The Steam Whisperer but I just want to add when I ran my numbers I was only calculating using the average energy efficiency of cars and light trucks/SUV's. The only heavy duty vehicles that would be feasible with current technology would be trucks used to move goods across town. 

And it has always been recommended to tackle the building envelope before the HVAC, and finally looking into PV after getting all the other lower hanging fruit first. Of course if one is taking a more holistic approach, they can be done out of order if you know what the end result will be based on heat loss and gain calculations.