Mr. Bean, the Holohan Awards, Eating and cooling & the future of fossil heating

archibald tuttle

Coffee with Caleffi was a great success at AHR yesterday (as was our second annual eating and cooling breakfast albeit chicago ice closed the first two locations we visited and kept our 'crowd' to a minimum, but we ended up at maybe the best breakfast in Chicago, Yolk at 1120 South Michigan. I had the 5 egg omelet and they bring you pancakes with it! Puts me in memory of the Kid from Brooklyn (language alert-not ready for prime time).

But speaking of not ready for prime, something Robert Bean said at the Holohan Awards yesterday put me in memory of a famous Saturday Night Live segment with Father Guido Sarducci reflecting on cautions that Bush 41 had delivered to the nation about the threat from instability in Central America.

The butt of the joke was that Bush had spoken the truth about how close Central America was to Texas but that most rational people wouldn't lose sleep over that. And Robert Bean, who has contributed to the West Hydronics Conference in Canada and was on the podium as Canadian affection for hydronics was recognized was about to deliver a similarly accurate observation that is, nonetheless, of limited import for our industr.y.

One typical tension that came out in the panel were the odes to sustainability that are at some odds with maintaining the market for hydronics. So never afraid to be the skunk at the garden party I asked if sustainability didn't also mean keeping people warm with fossil fuel heating for the foreseeable future.

Robert answered with a wonderful rhetorical point I hadn't considered directly: fossil fuels (NG and propane) have flame temperatures of 3560 degrees and we only need 100 degrees, implying that fossil fuel heating as long practiced is way off the mark in sustainability.

Respectfully, I thought it was a good but not necessarily a useful point. As with Father Sarducci's realization that Bush was correct about how close Central America was to Texas but that this didn't mean Texans should be losing sleep over it.

Ironically, some of the discourse in the panels, given the focus on water as a heat exchange medium, celebrated the more affectionate european (and canadian) attitudes towards hydronics versus the American love affair with scorched air. This is a lot like the folks who whine about how europe has all these fancy fast passenger trains and America doesn't, while ignoring that devotion of track capacity to passenger service in Europe means they don't move anything like the extent of freight that American does by rail!

In fact, the American ideas in heating seem a lot less scorched lately as the most affordable, reliable, efficient heating source I know of is a condensing gas furnace. We should be a damn sight more interested in how to affordably align installed base and new hydonic and steam offerings with that very real competition than playing with notions of fuel cells and CHP (combined heat and power) implied by the low oxidation temperatures Robert Bean covets– arriving about the same time as cold fusion from what I can see.

I tend to disagree slightly with Bean's formulation although it is essentially correct. I think we need maybe 211 degrees, just sayin, but the difference between combustion flame temp and desired water/steam output tempts is enormous. But what that difference says about the progress in heating technology even a century ago is significant. Despite combustion temperatures of 3560, we're looking at boiler stack temperatures in the range of 200 to 250 degrees in an industry know for its safety in providing comfort from fossil fuels. Given the limitations of heat transfer we are extracting an enormous amount of heat energy with very little waste so the temperature of combustion is a lot less relevant unless systems meant to oxidize fuel at much lower temperatures necessarily implied much lower cost, which they do not!

To wring the most from fossil fuels, we need condensing exhaust; and we won't get that on steam systems, or many hydronic systems. There I see stack temps in the 400s or low 500s. That is still an incredible amount of heat extraction and regulation of a process producing flame temps going on an order of magnitude higher. And you know what we are beating: every form of fossil electric generation! Yet they want to force our industry onto electrics? The focus is completely misplaced.

For once, I'd like to go away from one of these meetings thinking that somebody in AHR was not angling for rent seeking subsidies for presently ineffective technologies, but wanted to do the best for our installed base of homes and equipment. I do see that in the products on display, but much of the rhetoric is to the contrary.

The balance of cost and performance are starting to make electrically commutated pumps look worthwhile, although I got a chuckle out of John Barba when I showed him a pic of one of our boiler rooms that still has two dry rotor pumps from 1970 running loops. Despite my distress at the full court press to get rid of cast iron in favor of low mass condensing boilers, without regard whether the emitters are returning condensing temperatures, I was impressed that boiler manufacturers have started modulating boilers to control stack temperature (this is as much or more with protecting PVC stacks in mind as raising efficiency although the two go hand in hand). This pushes us away from themostatic setbacks and towards constant operation consistent with outdoor temps, indoor response, etc. And I saw cast iron condensing boilers.

The biggest worry I have is that the government pushing the market towards electric will undercut these advances in steam and hydronic tech that can improve results for 10s of millions of homes and buildings. While in theory that is a big market, folks are being paid to ignore those improvements in favor of installing heat pumps. And the industry is made to treat its bread and butter as the poor stepchild. This is completely backwards from how it should be.

I started putting in radiant floors when only hippies did it in the 70s. And like the Deniro character in Brazil after whom my pen name is modeled, I have messed with heat pumps without the approval of central services for years now. I haven't cut my hair, and I haven't really changed my politics. I'm still questioning authority. Most of the people I marched in the streets with in the 70s are content to have become authority. I'm still questioning it, and appreciate the chance to do so at Coffee with Caleffi and anywhere else anyone will listen.

I know Erin takes care with these threads that can tend to the political, but I'm not even talking about the politics of climate, i'm talking about the politics of our industry. So i'm hoping you will chime in politely. Always willing to hear that I'm full of it (of course I like to think "it" is knowledge but for some i'll always be full of bull.) I don't know if Robert Bean is on here but if not I hope he joins us. Because I am interested in what he is talking about, but I think there is no current promise to these technologies and in a country where we have become obsessed with how expensive housing is, we have no business pushing new housing regulations that continue to make it unaffordable. And I don't just mean some outdates for restriction of fossil fuel in new construction, I mean indefensibily costly levels of insulation during renovation, etc. e.g my other favorite canadian, mike aka spray jones.

see you at the next eating and cooling.

brian

PS - already looking for the best breakfast joint in Orlando


What I would like to see at these meetings are people standing up agianst the idea of electrictrification as some kind of near term goal. Instead we tell ourselves, well they are only really busy banning fossil fuels in new a few progressive municipolities and states for new construction. So we will have a long tail of our industry providing replacement equipment for the entire existing base of

Mark Eatherton

I for one agree with many of your premises.

Thank you for expressing what so many people think, but do not say.

Robert has always been a progressive thinker, and he is not wrong, but I don't think he and other progressives are looking at the BIG picture as a whole. Until people accept the use of Nuclear Power as the final source (hot or cold, pick one) most of our electricity will still come from a source of combustion that occurs at a much higher temperature than needed, so what is the net benefit?

Electrification is being rammed down out throats by Bureaucrats running America, NOT the American people. Remember, THEY know (at least THINK they know) what is best for us. Them and unqualified City Council people with grandiose pie in the sky ideas that have no idea what they are talking about or what the impacts of their decisions will be... To them, there are no consequences for them amking bad decisions (NO NG for new construction for example)

Numerous problems loom large, and the most obvious one is the lack of grids ability to move that much electricity. I've always said, that regardless of the energy source, hydronics is THE BEST method of comfort and control, and that is still true, but the bureaucrats don't want us muddying up their water. And they KNOW that hydronics is best, regardless of the end terminal. It cost a lot less energy to move water than it does air. If we have to stay on the NG/LP bottle, why not do waste heat recovery at the source, and pipe it to the areas that need it? Like the Europeans have done so many times in so many places?

I don't have all the answers, but I do have solutions to lessening the loads on the grid if they want to go that way, and the answer is forced hydronics. The consumer will drive the bus of human comfort, and the markets will have no choice but to respond. I just hope we don't end up in the ditch or out in the weeds before everyone realizes what is being foisted up on. The WORLD just needs to wake up and smell the coffee.


The soap box is clear. NEXT!

ME

Hot_water_fan

To wring the most from fossil fuels, we need condensing exhaust; and we won't get that on steam systems, or many hydronic systems. There I see stack temps in the 400s or low 500s. That is still an incredible amount of heat extraction and regulation of a process producing flame temps going on an order of magnitude higher. And you know what we are beating: every form of fossil electric generation! Yet they want to force our industry onto electrics? The focus is completely misplaced.

This is a good point: a combined heat and power gas generator would be a great solution at the right scale. Probably too big for houses, but maybe not too big for communities? 

However: the total efficiency of a heat pump exceeds a condensing gas heater even if the grid was 100% gas. The math is pretty clear now - a 50% (or so) efficient combined cycle in a 95% (or so) efficient distribution system powering a 250-300% (or so) efficient heat pump is simply more efficient than a 95% efficient boiler/furnace, even assuming 0 gas ever leaks on the way to the house. 

Yes, these are averages. I am aware everyone’s situation will be different, by hour. But this is the math which is leading to some of the trends we’re seeing.

DanHolohan

It was wonderful to be with old friends. Thanks!

archibald tuttle

@Hot_water_fan i definitely don't discount that heat pumps actually operating toward 3 COP are using less or at least not more fossil fuel even with a fossil heavy grid. But 3 is a nice ideal. now you gotta add in transmission losses on the electric lines that you don't account for when just comparing generation efficiencies and defrosting loads don't tend to be included if you are in a humid environment (like say AHR at chicago for the last 48 hours, no sun and drizzle around freezing.) And the point is they come out closer to even than the extent of subsidies being poured down this rabbit hole seem to justify.

And then there is the question of consumer economics not just ecologic efficiency. The standard resistance electric production is 3400 btu and lets say you are actually getting an average of 2.5 COP operationally. depending on climate, both cold and humidity. I think that is generous. So that means a kwh buys you 8500 btus for about 30 cents around here. meanwhile natural gas operating at 85%, forget really high nameplate efficiencies, is gallon so you need 10,000 btu input or about 10 cu ft. running at 85% to equal a kwh at 2.5 COP. so thats about 25 cents. propane is actually cheaper for me these days ( i buy a lot at once). paid $1.90 a gallon and you need about 1/9 of a gallon for that 10,000 btu operating at 85% to be equivalent to 1 kwh . thats 21 cents although I would think more typical costs for heating customers are up around the price of electricity on those assumptions. I think oil running at 80% (you can do better but I don't think it holds efficiency as well) that would work out to about the price of electricity assuming $4 a gallon.

New tight construction insulated (not necessarily superinsulated, see, e.g., link in OP to spray jones) I could see heat pumps alone; albeit i'd have a dual system since I discount my own labor. You could argue the extra investment not worth it for anyone paying full freight. But anyone who has a fossil system already, I'm arguing you maintain it and run it when your COP drops below 2.5 and as a back up in extreme cold, high humidity, if the heat pump goes down or during a blackout because fossil systems don't need much electricity to run.

For that matter, as @Mark Eatherton pointed out, we're dealing with a rampant push to electrification with no idea how the grid and generation will sustain the loads to come. blackouts could be more frequent and utilitilies may prefer to see customers switch to fossil during weather extremes to reduce peak loads (for once especially incentivizing that swith for those with stored fuel like heating oil and propane as this doesn't exacerbate the tug of war in natural gas markets between space heating and electric generation).

Then there is the maintenance question. Simple cast iron gas boilers, atmospheric or even power/conversion burners seem easier to keep operating to me. This is where getting refrigerant and refrigerant life right really makes heat pumps rise or fall in my opinion. With the current generation of high pressure refrigerants EPA has estimated the average life of a charge at 7 years. The last system I service it was 1.5 years and I couldn't find the leak but it had to be there (an aside, what do you think of accutrak). And at the rate we're going, even if they do make 7 or 10 years of charge life, by then you'll be advising the customer to replace the equipment for some that operates on a new refrigerant at that point. for the life of me I don't know when we see that cycle ending.

And I'll tell you something else about maintenance. When its 10 degrees and snowing out, or 35 degrees and raining, do you want to be outside charging a heat pump or changing a component on a boiler inside, even in a chilly basement. no comparison in my book!

We'll see where industry and customer acceptance is in 5 or 10 years. I think the penetration of electric vehicles, for instance, is dropping off.

Meanwhile, on the innovation side, I'd kind of like to see a heat pump system with selfcontained refrigeration like a chiller set up with A3 refrigerant and using glycol to transfer heat to fan coils indoors. we all know how to run and pump liquid and the current choke point on refrigerants is flammability. I know glycol has a btu penalty and the better the heat exchanger the better the result. I'll tell you one thing after staying in a hotel in Chicago with heat pumps, the bathrooms were friggin freezing. If you have glycol while the most likely common exchange would be fan coils which would also provide air conditioning, you could have some loop through the bathroom and kitchen floors or walls up to chair rail kind of thing and you'd get the advantage of radiant where it would be most noticeable. Here I'm with @Mark Eatherton and others who point out the advantage of the density of water and its ability to heat mass in the building giving higher comfort with lower temps.

Anyway, the point is that a self contained outdoor A3 system wouldn't need to have the kind of charge limitations currently being imposed in the US that are keeping these great refrigerants out of heat pumps (notice the europeans, who we so often credit with being sophisticated and bureaucratic have notably higher charge limits. are we just weenies her? not to go all controversial but those same sophisticates in europe tend to have like 12 week limits on abortion whereas the case that overturned roe v. wade in the US was about a 15 week limit. now reaction to that case has brought varying limits to almost outright bans in varying states, but one wonders what would have happened if the issue hadn't been litigated as all or nothing. i use this not as a pro life or pro choice soapbox, but in wonderment that we have such retentive limits on A3 refrigerants).

Notwithstanding my belief that many of our regulatory limits are excessively cautious in america, the history of self contained manufactured heat pump appliances, e.g. refrigerators, air cons, etc. is that the charge can last for decades if not forever. And in the case of the A3 refrigerants the significantly lower operating pressures favor charge retention and equipment life in my book.

It's not that I don't have ideas, but they usually aren't the ones being pushed with rebates using my **** money.

Hot_water_fan

@archibald tuttle I received no subsidies. It made sense, for my utility and situation, to ditch gas. It just cannot compete here, anymore. Basically the shipping costs have increased too much. All situations are different, but generally as a regions kWh/person increases, distribution and transmissions costs really start to fall. 

I included grids losses in the quick and dirty calc! 5% losses and a COP of 2.5 with a 50% efficient Combined cycle puts you 25% ahead of the most efficient furnace. Seems substantial! 

I think very few heat pumps are subsidized historically. They’ve been around for decades and vastly outnumber boilers, well before any legislation. Whether they’re more or less reliable, people have moved towards them and away from boilers, mostly because Americans want AC. A cast iron boiler, even if it lasts until 100, can’t provide that. That’s a huge selling point in the US. 

I love the hybrid fossil + heat pump set up. I will never demand anyone goes 100% electric if they don’t want to and I think that opinion is widespread, even if the occasion news headline says otherwise. 

archibald tuttle

@Hot_water_fan your are a fan . . . eer man . . . of integrity. round these parts subsidies taken straight from our utility bills are checks for $1000 a ton and climbing for heat pump installs (nevermind federal tax credits). the attached promo for rebates came up in my facebook feed because I attended AHR.




I don't disagree that you save a modest little CO2 if you actually operate 2 COP or better and I think most equipment is capable of that today for a decent proportion of the season depending on climate zone–despite my distaste for R410A, much prefer R22 on my ice cream :-). But you don't see the kind of monetary savings that will get people wholesale converting. Rather you'd see some slow adoption as folks realize they could get some central air out of the same install. That seems like a perfectly sensible rate without subsidy. My issue is that the regulatory decisions (of which these rebates are a part) are kneejerk and not well thought out. These heat pump rebates follow years of condensing boiler rebates issued regardless of whether in service of emitters that had a remote chance (if not none at all) of providing condensing return temps.

and no small cohort of my friends who are choosing heat pumps are already getting gross subsidies from the grid for solar! and they are of course going to use those savings to power their subsidized heat pumps at night–you know, when its cold–pushing up peak electric demand when their solar is not contributing and thus pushing up prices for everyone, an additional cost to other ratepayers besides the direct subsides, so they are burning the system twice. now this is government policy. I can't exactly blame them for taking advantage of it. incentives are meant to get people to do just that.

Indeed the UK has most of our questionable ideas in play but also an incentive approach that I had friends try unsuccessfully to bring across the pond for resistance heating that I thought made sense. Very simple tech I would have liked to see on display at AHR, going slightly against Rob Bean's grain on temperature, but it's another path up the mountain in the right direction I think. You'll notice this too is a subsidized program but it is a potentially really simple solution to peak winter loads without going esoteric on the technology. You heat bricks during the day to over 500 degrees with electric resistance coils when there is excess reserve capacity and lower rates and then recover the heat at night. this makes a hell of a lot more sense from a quick investment standpoint for load shaving in my book. and it might save ratepayers money by lowering peak demands and costs even thought it is totally old school tech.

did you put your air source(?) heat pumps on the south side of the building. I'm looking at real world operation and fighting coil icing so I'm always looking for the right mix of sheltered install with good air circ and potential for sunny side help with winter ops and maybe thinking frank lloyd wright overhangs to shade them during AC op. it is very difficult to track how humidity affects COP from my experience but I try to use careful outdoor placement screening and covering as ways to limit need for defrost and to avoid evaporating in the coldest locations of the micro climate around the house.

I celebrate industry folks who are making themselves guinea pigs and looking for the best installs and operation of these units. Their experience should go a long way to improving best practices and the industry could do a lot more bottom up work to gain the benefits of this disseminate work on practice. I think this technology has great potential but I think we don't really have best practice sorted out and we shouldn't be subsidizing it to the extent we are–and perhaps that is not happening as much in southern climes or more politically sensible areas than where the coastal elite determine utility policy and then complain that utility costs are too expensive for the poor so yet more subsidies should be extracted from the middle class.

Decent installs in the right climate are a slam dunk, same as good mating of condensing boiler and low temp returns or condensing furnaces. I'm also looking for better servicing protocols (not to mention that a lifetime of servicing fan coil units makes me wonder if folks with minisplits understand the need for filter maintenance). Understanding charge maintenance on these units with receivers is more difficult and generally requires a complete pumpdown and recharge and they are operating at higher pressures that challenge charge retention more. I'm holding my breath on installs for the last half dozen years to see when my festidiousness on installs is going to be overcome by the natural tendency of this stuff to want to leave the system.

You and I are on the same page on hybrid systems, but there seems to be limited industry interest in advancing controls for hybrid systems that can pair temp, humidity and real time operating characteristics with shoulder decisions about when to call the fossil half of the equation. I could see secondary hydronic coils in split system air handlers for instance. Didn't see anyone with that technology at AHR but maybe someone else did? Weil Mclain was a minor exception to this at the show developing a hybrid hydronic system. But this is generally out of vogue because elites are all or nothing about carbon and electrification (I respect that you are much less didactic on the subject and are making your own path).

That thought brings me back to what I was talking about comparing electric and hybrid cars lately. It used to look like Toyota was yesterday's news and Tesla was the IT thing, now the shoe is on the other foot. I'm actually glad the stock didn't crash before Musk bought Twitter but gonna be tough sledding for him to stay the richest man. But I always thought the Toyota pathway–despite my frustration with the red triangle of death on my old priuses, was thes best way. Takes advantage of electric technology while backing it up with proven ICE performance and capable of providing backup generation for homes in increasingly unstable grid circumstances when we've barely scratched the surface of the kind of loads they want to add.

To be fair, it was Ford and not Toyota that thought to commercialize this idea whereas we have to hack Toyota's to do it–albeit not a difficult hack since the native prius voltage is around 250. The thing about these stories from the Texas freeze is the kind of surprise at the notion that hybrid vehicles are generators . . . duh. (Now this Toyota v Tesla thing is an opinion piece. Guy could be short Tesla, although i don't see that disclosed. This has been a long running debate in finance circles. I don't pretend because something suits my priors that it is true or can't be critiqued. But I think there is some fire to this smoke–not sure if it's burning at 3560 degrees :-)

And my point about developing useful hybrid approaches is that I suspect it won't be long before utilities are going to be begging people to call backup, esp. oil and propane, during cold snaps and other emergencies. Instead of having policies designed to create more such circumstances in the name of preventing the emergencies of climate change we ought to look before we leap. So legislating for electric only and thus against hybrid systems in new construction is all the vogue at the moment but short sighted (now every house with an existing fossil system is an opportunity to go hybrid, but new home/building construction provides an opportunity to ideally integrate systems from scratch and those opportunites are being scotched . . . with apologies to fans of outlander :-).