Tarah and I solved our haircut needs by learning to do each other's hair... Then when she left for England I further solved my needs by starting to lose my hair and switching to clipper cuts, hah. So that's one way to go, I guess? 👴
@@HelloKittyFanMan. What's the mileage of your current car, is that the same as the average car 50 years ago? The same goes for insulation, there are many types with greatly varying capabilities. Even though the building codes in many locations already have some insulation requirements, much more can be achieved beyond that (i.e. cooling through natural convection is a thing even in very hot climates).
Here landlords were able to collect the government rebate on all the heat pumps they put in their buildings if they were replacing oil heat. So pretty much every building that previously had a central boiler and hot water heat now has a heat pump on the side of each unit and the tenants now pay for the heat via their electrical bill. Since most of the landlords didn't lower the rent, it was literally a free upgrade for them that increased their profit margin.
I wish we could do that here. In Arizona many buildings don't have gas/oil lines because the winters almost never go below freezing so it's hardly worth it. Such buildings have electric as the only energy source. Which means the shitty apartments have resistive electric heat. And Arizona is fairly politically conservative, so there are no such government incentives to install heat pumps afaik. It's extra dumb when you consider landlords are required to provide AC (rightfully so given our swelteringly hot summers), and our AC units tend to be super powerful cause our summers get up to 115F and sometimes hotter. Add a reversing valve and you have a super powerful heat pump which is actually massively oversized for our winters and is more than adequate to get the job done, and will get excellent COPs with our relatively mild winter temperatures. Also this is one of the best places in the world for rooftop solar cause we get a LOT of sun. So this is perhaps one of the MOST perfect places in the world for heat pumps. But without laws requiring reversible ACs, it's never happening except for homeowners who decide to install such a system themselves. Same with rooftop solar here. Apartment buildings never have them, even though they should..
@@HyperSpify I'm also in Arizona (Phoenix area,) and honestly I almost never use central heating. Granted I live alone, but a resistive space heater in the one room I'm occupying is vastly more efficient than heating up the entire house even with a heat pump. I'm not going to say that applies to everyone, not even close, but the added costs of reversible heat pumps, even if not very much relative to the cost of an AC without it, still takes a long time to break even in Phoenix because of how mild our winters are. That's a cost that really doesn't make sense for Landlords to eat. It would make even less sense to mandate at a government level that houses and apartments have heat pumps, since that just makes housing more expensive for everyone.
economic options usually lag behind the fancy new stuff. With all options of new gas heaters and air conditioners being far more efficiency than the ones people grew up with ; people are reasonably comfortable with the "run of the mill model". Personally my heating bill is a fraction of the cooling bill, & we had 3 feet of snow sitting around for a month
@Michael Bishop I think you are being sarcastic but that is pretty much how it works in places with carbon taxes. Carbon gets taxed to reflect the cost of externalities (pollution, climate change, etc), which incentivizes energy sources with fewer externalities, and in the meantime there's a revenue sources to address environmental problems. Its pretty win win.
@@fredtaylor9792 The goal of a carbon tax is to price in negative externalities from carbon dioxide creation, not to increase revenue. So, if a carbon tax was implemented those people who are negatively affected by it need their taxes reduced in other ways. Eg. reduce payroll taxes or give a general tax credit equal to the average amount of carbon taxes someone in this person's area should pay. Ideally everyone will pay roughly the same taxes they do now but will choose less products or behaviours that produce carbon dioxide.
The ultimate combo could be combining that with hot water and a "Tesla Octovalve" style heat pump exchanger that can literally send refrigerant in any direction selectively or all together to the evaporators and condensers that are the inside fan, outside, fan hot water tank and pool.
@@skmo7105 you could buy a brazed plate heat exchanger of the right size and have a HVAC/refrigerate tech hook it up inline before the outdoor condenser, and then plum the water lines to the pool pump.
@@skmo7105 you could use an in between tank, so a heat exchanger with a circulating pump into a tank, with another set of coils that run through that tank which recirculates the pool water, making sure the coil with the pool water is adequately corrosion resistant.
Camp Yawgoog, a [Boy] Scouts USA property in RI once had a heating system for the nature center building that moved air through rooftop panels, feeding it down below the floor to a bed of gravel that acted like a thermal battery. Heat demand was satisfied by circulating air from the living space through a ducting system where it could pick up heat from the gravel. It all worked amazingly, but was seldom used tech for a summer camp and so fell into disrepair and was decommissioned in the early 2000's.
My thermodynamics teacher was an angry resentful french chemical engineer hired by the university to bring in research money. I might have learned how to use a steam table from that rat bastard but this set of videos really got me interested in thermodynamics.
20 years ago I had a coworker roll the cost of a geothermal system into their mortgage. They rarely paid more than $100/mo in electric (for the whole house) and after accounting for the extra monthly mortgage cost, still saw a positive cashflow from Day 1.
@@checksum00 How so? Here in MA I can get a 7 year HEAT loan for certain efficiency improvements, 0% APR, $0 closing costs. That sure seems like no interest borrowing to me. Factor in inflation and you effectively get free money to buy now pay later.
@@xVolta someone is always footing the bill for the interest, you are either putting the responsability of your debt and all buyers of that product, or entering into an agreement that has so stiff penalty that the lender still make money. No one loan money for free,b because no one can get loan for free, not even governments. Looking at your example (mass save) without digging in 22 pages of documentation, it look like these loans and interests would most likely be backed and paid for by governmental program. It's not because YOU don't pay the interests that there's no interests. You are simply offloading your responsability on the back of someone else, in that case it would be all MA tax payers. That's the case usually for things like home improvements. The rest of the cases are usually covered by inflated product costs, or with very steep penalties if you ever make a mistake during the loan.
My dad was watching something on HGTV today where they installed a geothermal heat pump in some house as part of a renovation. So the word is spreading!
Liquid-Liquid heat exchangers are used in planes too, they use the hot oil in the engine to warm up the fuel before it get's into the engine (this system getting ''frozen'' fuel has lead to plane crashes)
These follow up videos are very appreciated. I get the feeling a bunch of people voiced their concerns which drove this video. The idea of treating your home as a thermal battery is a really good idea. I might try this myself and spend this summer working on improving the insulation of my house. Kinda daunting considering it's my first home and I live by myself.
Yes, you are right. In an ideal world, the heat pump reversible system would be fitted as standard in all domestic apartments and housing. I like the way you present the argument. Thanks.
Complicating things, the electric and gas utility in my area (National Grid US/Rhode Island) tend to impose temporary rate increases on gas in the summertime, and especially electricity in the wintertime. I suppose it all encourages renewables at least indirectly, but on the surface it would almost seem to discourage the use of electricity-fueled winter heating solutions in my middling northeastern climate.
I love that you broke your promise on the other video “being the last one”. Actually, you can go on and on about anything and I will still love it! Edit: okay, more on topic, I live in a “high” building (24 floors) in Amsterdam and all apartments use geothermal heat pumps. So this is in fact feasible, in contrast to what you said in the main video. Of course this is a new building with the best insulation properties, thermal glass and solar panels, but the entire building is 100% emission free because of it!
Imagine a 36Story condo home unit being modernly built in this century (2007) without ANY heat pumps installed in it... entirely consisting of AC units... and STUPIDLY no wiring ability to change to heat pump... resistive heat ONLY installed in every unit... 210N. Church St. Charlotte, NC... mind boggling.
Where I live, there's an experimental heating/cooling project on the waterfront where they use many boreholes drilled into bedrock to store winter ocean water for summer cooling. I refined the search, it can be found with 'Alderney Five Project'.
So I'm a landlord and the reason why I don't install high efficiency systems is that people won't pay for them. I can't recoup my costs through higher rent because people really aren't that interested in them. People will pay for granite counter tops but not for ground source heat pumps. Even Section 8/HUD won't pay more rent for higher efficiency appliances. At best, my local energy co will give me $50 for paying an extra $1000 for a hybrid water heater. If there was a fairly simple to advertise energy costs and tenants actually gave a shit about them, it might help.
That is true, a fair amount of people won't pay an extra 50 a month even if their energy bill will be 1/3 of a normal rental. I do get what he's saying though that it may decrease the amount of "non-payees" with lower utilities, however, you'll always get the scammer.
@@epiccollision I think carbon taxes are great. They optimize for taxing negative externalities and will be very useful for tackling climate change. The tax burden will fall on my tenants, not me though. People overwhelmingly don't shop for TCO unless it's made painfully obvious.
@@TheRaven7 Uh... no. Just because you have an income stream does not mean you will recoup your costs. The most obvious problem is that all these things require replacement periodically.
Me, minding my own business watching videos; "There's a long line of hoes between where the kegs are kept".. My girlfriend chiming in out of nowhere: "That's what she said."
Dang that's a great point about the decision making of the landlord. It's worthwhile consideration for not just the heater, but all around expenses that they might see no benefit from given a shallow look.
I toured a campus back in the 90s that used a glycol loop through the entire campus. All heating/cooling traded from this source. that included refrigerators and freezers. It greatly reduced the heat and cooling input needed overall. Heat pumps have become much better, and cheaper. There are materials issues that make it more difficult to change for the coil on a furnace type commonly seen in homes with central air. As most homes are built by contractors, the initial cost drives this market. as they are looking to maximize their profits by building as cheaply as possible.
Here in Sweden, we tossed out oil burners in the 1970s and 1980s. Today heating is done by * District heating (hot water circulated in cities, heated by burning non-recyclable materials, so we have only landfills for porcelain, concrete and such, not the ones full of plastic items you see all over the world), and VERY advanced cleaning of the exhaust gases, including removal of the dioxines (extensive studies was done in the 1980s and 1990s). * Air-to-air heat pumps, they now have SCOP (Seasonal COP) up to 5+ (~4 in Cold climates) and SEER around 8-10. * Geothermal with heat pump, and a complete installation (drilling 70-100+ meter), the heatpump etc, provided you have water based radiators to hook it up to which most houses have, cost, with labour and all, < 20 000 USD. * Newer houses, starting some 15 years ago, are extra insulated, very airtight using plastic about 5 cm in from the wall papers, and use a heat pump for the ventilated air, to put that heat energy back in the radiator water loop and into the hot water reservoir. Our house, built 2012, is like that, and over 10 years, we have used 61 000 kWh for heating + hot water. An avg of 6,1 MWh per year. In snowy Sweden, with up to 1 meter of snow for many months of the year, and here we have temps down to -30C for weeks on end some winters. Most winter days hover around -5 to -15C in this area, from Nov to April... So that is a VERY good number. We're looking at building a second house, they are EVEN MORE insulated, 40 cm in the walls and 60 cm in the ceiling, plus heat pump tech. - Some also just burn wood and have electric radiators, but those are mostly converted to heat pump tech when the owner gets older and can't cut firewood the entire summer... * Solar is coming strong here too! My house is net zero, including two battery electric cars, that we drive as much as we can, because it is so fun! :) *Triple glazing is a standard since the 1980s or earlier. Unbelievably to see foreign builds with 1 or 2 panes only, with full aluminium frames, that just GIVE AWAY the energy (also in hot climates)... Oh, yeah, insulation of houses, again, is very important. As is shading in warm/hot countries, to avoid that heat coming through the windows. But houses must be insulated cleverly, to avoid moisture inside the walls, due to the Dew Point! The best kWh is the saved kWh!
In America we build cheap and run expensive. I totally agree with your policy views, you are on the right path. I''m in the remodeling biz, and it is an uphill battle to get homeowners to spend now on future savings.
I hope people noticed it, but the background (TVs) changed pictures once in a while. That's very cool, and I hope you can make it have a different one for each square.
He did a whole video on the setup, actually, and he can do different pictures for each square, it just requires him to actually go and stitch them together manually
@@killerbee.13 that's true. I'm just saying that I hope he does it where it changes to something else over time (like it just did in this video), but each square would have its own image/color. I did see the setup video already btw.
@@1701Wren They're screensavers from the Chromecast!? This is what I get for not owning/using one at all. xD I was aware that the TVs were hooked up to Chromecasts (he mentioned it in the video), but I didn't know they had screensavers.
I love your quirky sense of humor, and the way you provide factual information while being entertaining. The blooper reel at the end you put in all your videos is also pretty funny, and shows you're human, too... Keep up the great work!
I live in a location where air conditioning is a 'nice to have' and some home heating is needed in the winter. I have an in-ground pool, which rarely gets above 23C, and some pool heating would also be nice to have. I have been toying with using a reversible heat pump that can cool my house and heat the pool in the summer, and draw heat from the pool water to heat the house in the winter. In the winter, the days are warmish (20C), so the pool warms up during the day (and I dont care how cold it gets at night because I don't use it). There are heat pump systems available to do either job, but the combination does not exist. My main sticking point is the length of the refrigerant lines, but the math seems to indicate that it would work. I could keep the refrigerant lines short with an intermediate water or glycol circuit, but that adds pumps and additional electrical cost. I think such systems have been done on an industrial scale, with lakes.
I had the same thought. There is a system from hotspot energy that claims to work with heat pumps (not just AC units). In theory, it would work in winter how you describe but they don't lay out that scenario clearly.
@@Gorgula Thanks - I saw a video of this system on "This Old House", but their link to the product was broken. They had an unusual layout, with the pool pump very close to the AC condenser. I think most installations would need an intermediate water or glycol circuit. Our winter is starting soon - I will monitor normal changes in the pool temperature to give me some data for the winter operation.
Simon Whistler gave ya a bit of a shootout on BusinessBlaze, talking about DivX. Tho he was referring to your video on Flexplay (disposable/ self-destructing DVD)
I've had a geothermal heat pump installed in Northern Colorado recently, paid about $45K for the whole deal (new home construction). The external heat pump was about $21K, in part due to the extra pump components to build up the head pressure needed to get the exchange fluid moving through lines that drop 300-ish feet down and back up. There were cheaper options, but those came with more noise and/or lower reliability (which is what I infer from the much shorter warranties - like 1 to 3 years for the cheaper options compared to 50 years for the one I bought).
Very expensive. That's strange! Here in Sweden, we tossed out oil burners in the 1970s and 1980s. Today heating is done by * District heating (hot water circulated in cities, heated by burning non-recyclable materials, so we have only landfills for porcelain, concrete and such, not the ones full of plastic items you see all over the world), and VERY advanced cleaning of the exhaust gases, including removal of the dioxines (extensive studies was done in the 1980s and 1990s). * Air-to-air heat pumps, they now have SCOP (Seasonal COP) up to 5+ (~4 in Cold climates) and SEER around 8-10. * Geothermal with heat pump, and a complete installation (drilling 70-100+ meter), the heatpump etc, provided you have water based radiators to hook it up to which most houses have, cost, with labour and all, < 20 000 USD. * Newer houses, starting some 15 years ago, are extra insulated, very airtight using plastic about 5 cm in from the wall papers, and use a heat pump for the ventilated air, to put that heat energy back in the radiator water loop and into the hot water reservoir. Our house, built 2012, is like that, and over 10 years, we have used 61 000 kWh for heating + hot water. An avg of 6,1 MWh per year. In snowy Sweden, with up to 1 meter of snow for many months of the year, and here we have temps down to -30C for weeks on end some winters. Most winter days hover around -5 to -15C in this area, from Nov to April... So that is a VERY good number. We're looking at building a second house, they are EVEN MORE insulated, 40 cm in the walls and 60 cm in the ceiling, plus heat pump tech. - Some also just burn wood and have electric radiators, but those are mostly converted to heat pump tech when the owner gets older and can't cut firewood the entire summer... * Solar is coming strong here too! My house is net zero, including two battery electric cars, that we drive as much as we can, because it is so fun! :) *Triple glazing is a standard since the 1980s or earlier. Unbelievably to see foreign builds with 1 or 2 panes only, with full aluminium frames, that just GIVE AWAY the energy (also in hot climates)... Oh, yeah, insulation of houses, again, is very important. As is shading in warm/hot countries, to avoid that heat coming through the windows. But houses must be insulated cleverly, to avoid moisture inside the walls, due to the Dew Point! The best kWh is the saved kWh!
When I was a kid, I remember we lived in a relatively uninsulated brick house. The thermal mass meant it was well into the summer before it got hot in the house, but as soon as it started to get warm, all the windows were open at sundown and got closed at dawn.
yeah the "100 companies" argument is... difficult. For example aluminum and fertilizer production are both very energy intensive and make up like 3% of global energy use each. Concrete production is up there as well. But, we need those materials, and they use the most efficient processes we know, this isnt evil megacorp dumping poison into he water
Thanks to you I now have a mini split in my basement. I was running a space heater in winter (NY) and a window AC in summer. After seeing your videos on the topic I had a 12k BTU unit installed and love it. No more trips to the fuse box. The temperature more consistent and a lot less noisy. No regrets! Can't wait til summer. The window unit was so loud and inefficient. It would reach temperature, turn off, then turn right back on 5 minutes later.
The too deep warnings are atleast an hour long tangent each, as they require lots of background involving policies and their effects. While he could probably keep it interesting, at that point he might as well just make a documentary.
60 cents? LOLOLOLOL $9.99 during the texas cold spell. It would have been cheaper to go to Cancun for the week... I think some people actually did that.
Usually here in Illinois the residential hourly-rate option pricing is 1 to 15 cents a Kwh before fees and taxes. During the Texas debacle I saw it jump as high as 30ish cents per kwh which I had never ever seen in >15 years on the rate plan. Nothing as horrible as the $9.99 kwh rates in Texas thankfully. Sometimes, rarely we even have -negative- pricing for brief periods, when there is overcapacity(?) in the grid. A few cents or tenths of cents negative prices, literally paying you to use the electricity. (Thankfully all the added fees and tariffs mean even negative Kwh prices will still cost me something....).
For those wondering, the reason nuclear is considered a base load is that when reactor power is drastically reduced in a short time, neutron-absorbing isotopes build up and prevent the reactor from restarting for about 3 days. If you try to force it (say by removing all the control rods) then yes it will restart, but it will be pretty unstable (think Chernobyl).
Nice addition! I also wanna add something: If you did this, yes, there is a good chance you end up with a molten core, but unlike Chernobyl, everything would be contained. All you did at this point is ruining a 5 bn dollar asset 🙃
@@Kitsudote Yes obviously engineering standards have improved since Soviet times. Meltdowns do not occur, and even if they did, they would "turn a Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island", to quote the Simpsons. Also the neutron economy of the reactor is constantly being monitored by a real-time computer system. It will not let you override the control rods manually if the reactor is in an unsafe state, the computer will just say "nope" and refuse to even attempt to start the reactor in an unsafe manner.
Just a quick tip: would be very useful to have an overlay on the video with your numbers and calculations when you are saying them. It would be much easier to follow, especially for non-native speakers. Sometimes, I struggle to parse the English numbers and calculations in my head in real time. Anyway, thanks for your dedication to the topic!
@@kndztr he’s saying in general (and this is where knowing native English comes into play) he’s putting as little effort into it as possible. If somebody says they are not going to prepare for something do you really think they are going to try hard 🤔 no
Tenants don't calculate operating costs into their monthly expenses. THAT'S the problem. What's a landlord supposed to say? "You see, even though I charge higher rent, you'll spend less because my apartment is very efficient. Trust me."
Replace "trust me" with a simple but accurate explaination of why this is so, and encourage them to actually look into it while shopping around (emphasising that they'll have more money left over to spend on other things total, because if that's not true you're an idiot) and it should work out most of the time... Except, of course, this is the USA we're talking about,where people can't seem to grasp that "higher taxes that cover healthcare" is less money than "lower taxes that don't cover healthcare plus super expensive health insurance (that then refuses to actually pay for most things)"... Sometimes even with the numbers right in front of them, so...
Heat pumps are all the rage here in Denmark at the moment. The government heavily subsidises (installation of) them and we get considerable discounts on electricity prices once we've got one installed. Us being powered heavily by wind power, this of course makes sense. But watching these videos is really what makes me appreciate not just the environmental impact, but also the efficiency of and engineering miracle that is the heat pump. My house is heated through natural gas (unfortunately we're not attached to the decentralized heating that a large proportion of our country is), so I've been looking into upgrading to a heat pump mainly because of the financial incentives of the government subsidies. But now I just want one because they're sooooo cool! Thanks for explaining the ups and downs so thoroughly and entertainingly. You've got a new subscriber :)
For geothermal, your typical residential sizes are 4 and 5 ton. The most expensive have variable speed compressors, Waterfurance is around $18k, hydro-temp is around 12k. Most geothermal HVAC units have a desuperheater to preheat domestic hot water, a dedicated or integrated water to water unit can provide 100% of the hot water. During air conditioning, it's like free with DHW. I agree, the units are likely overpriced when considering the air sourced units have the same components. Maybe it is production volume. The next efficiency gain, after variable compressors, for modern heat pumps will be utilizing Turbo-expander-compressors, replacing adiabatic expansion with isentropic expansion.
This video, along with your heat pumps and other energy efficiently related video's, have really made me more aware of how importat it is and will be moving forward. I'll definitely keep this in mind when I'm to the point of home ownership
I live in an apartment, and we have a shared waterborne heat system. It used to be run by a central oil furnace, but the city phased in regulations heavily taxing fossile fuels used for heating a few years back, so the association upgraded to air to water heat pumps, geothermal heat pumps and converted the furnace to run on biofuels for the coldest days. Regulation works. My parents have waste heat from a garbage disposal station. Only downside is I don't have an air conditioner for those few days each year when it'd be really nice to have one.
Companies do it all the time. They charge different prices for the same item depending on what device the item is put into. Case in point, porter cable makes a power tool for sanding drywall called a power sander. The electric motor in it cost anywhere from $200-300 to replace. The exact same motor was in a electric drill you could buy for $79. These prices are a few years old and I think they stopped making that drill.
Something you see often is companies (although I see it more with repairs) factoring a portion of the cost savings into the price. If a thing has a cost of operation of $100 over its lifespan and the nearest competitor is $1000, they will charge $700 for the thing and tell you you are saving $200. Wot a bargain! I am often amazed at how the cost of repairs often comes around 15% less of buying the thing used. Generally this means there isn't enough competition in that market segment.
I think I remember reading somewhere that a surprisingly small number of companies actually produce the equipment (like 2 or 3), and then everyone else dresses it up and rebrands it. So that could lead to higher supply prices. Car batteries are like that too.
Imagine how good the world would be if every company was hard capped at 15% profit (of course with laws to deal with edge cases and risk). Like of course the laws wouldn't be perfect and there would be loopholes, but what a change in the world we would see.
I live in NW Iowa and during the peak of the polar vortex we hit -28F (-33C) two nights in a row not including windchill. In fact the "warmest" we hit that whole week was -3F with lows in hovering in -15 to -20F range. Aside from events like that I do think a heat pump would absolutely cover the needs for heating and likely cooling during spring and fall and could certainly handle many of the milder winter days and supplement on the nasty ones.
Suggestion: add water-to-air into this conversation. I had water-to-air in Jacksonville, Florida. I had my own well, so it was very inexpensive to run the system.
I've considered that for cooling, but I don't want to run my well pump all the time. As far as the used water, my downspouts run underground to a stream out back.
For a short explanation of the maths: 1) Any unit of energy can be converted to any other unit of energy (BTU, Joule, and KW-hr are all examples; conversions can be found quickly with Google) 2) Over a given amount of time, a building will require some amount of energy to maintain temperature. a) If you know how much fuel was used, you can calculate that energy 3) Once you know how much energy it takes to heat your building, you can use that to calculate how much it will cost to heat each year using any heat source. Example: A house uses 500 gallons of propane each year to heat the home. [Volume Used] Each gallon of propane contains 91,502 BTU (26.82 KW-hr or 96,539 KJ) [Energy Density] [Total Energy Use] = [Volume Used]*[Energy Density] = 500*26.82 [Total Energy Use] = 13,410 KW-hr [Energy used by heat pump] = [Total Energy Use]/[Coefficient of Performance] = 13,410/4 (assumes COP of 4) [Energy used by heat pump] = 3,352 KW-hr Cost comparison: 500 gallons of propane @ 2.00 $/gal ---> $1000 to heat house with Propane 3,352 KW-hr @ 0.15 $/KW-hr ----------------> $502 to heat house with Heat Pump Take the initial cost of a heat pump, divide it by $500, and that gives you the number of years for the Heat Pump to pay for itself. Replace the values with those for your fuel type (energy density, cost/volume, volume used), and you should be able to come up with an estimate. If you're not sure, checking your units can help find mistakes! Many people don't realize that you can multiply and divide units just like numbers. [Energy] = [Energy Density] * [Volume] [BTU] = [BTU/Gal] * [Gal] -------------------> The [Gal] cancels out, and both sides match! If you track your units in this way, you can be pretty sure you're getting the right result.
This is well outside my wheelhouse, unfortunately, and I have no idea how energy might be billed in other places. Luckily, Google's gotten pretty good at letting input something like "2.3 therms to kWh" and spitting out an answer, so hopefully that tidbit can help you.
The most important formula for heat pumps and similar thermodynamics devices is the efficiency and Carnot (ideal) efficiency. Note that cop is just efficiency allowed to be greater than 100%. For heat pumps: COP = Qh /(Qh - Ql) (actual) COP = Th / (Th- Tl) (ideal or max) Q is heat measured in BTU or kWh or kJ. T is temperature in Kelvin or Rankine (need to have 0 at absolute zero). L and H refer to the cold and hot sink respectively. Basically the smaller the temperature difference you are maintaining the hogher the cop, and hence why in cold climates air source heat pumps can struggle. Real heat pumps suffer from inefficiencies which makes the actual cop less than the ideal or carnot value, but the ratio of actual / ideal is how good your device is in general. (Ex 66% / 67% is basically as good as you can get) As far as deciding break even points you convert your price of fuel from $/(unit fuel) to $/(kWh) or any common base. Then your break even point is COP ≥ ($/kWh electricity) / ($/kWh fuel) So if electricity is twice as expensive as fuel for the same amount of energy you need to have a cop of at least 2 to break even. I hope this helps.
Formula for natural gas, though keep in mind, that even the best heat pumps will struggle to have COP >= 4 when the outside air is about 45F. Drop down to 32F and you are looking at COP of around 3 for the very best as far as I know. Cost of electricity per kwh / (cost per therm / (29.3 * FurnaceEfficiency) ) = COP In my case $0.135 / ( $0.65 / (29.3 * 0.90)) = 5.47 COP So, a heat pump (air source, or ground source) will always cost more to operate, regardless of outdoor temperature. My furnace is 19 years old (hence the 90%) so when its replaced in the next 3-5 years it will likely be a 97% efficiency or higher furnace making the minimum COP for a heat pump to be viable for a mere 8-12% of my heating load (I have data to support this) even more unattainable. Best thing for me to do is when I re-side my home (50yrs old and due for siding). - add 2inch eps to the exterior, add house wrap, upgrade the handful of windows that are still original, and most importantly, install exterior thermal shutters, preferably some that can shut themselves at night, though AFAIK such things aren't really commercially available.
My house in summer has infinite efficiency, outside there might be 35°C (95°F) and inside we’re still very comfortable, in fact we don’t have any air conditioners, and if we had them, they would always be off. It's a very old farmhouse with a big porch facing south, so it’s shaded all day, and 70cm (27 inch) thick walls made of stone and cement. This eliminates the need for AC. They knew how to do it in the old days
I discovered your channel about a month ago. You might notice a spike in traffic to your "why does a switch click and clack" episode. I've pointed 4 cohorts of teenagers to your episode and having them discuss (to me as an evaluation) WHY a switch makes a snapping noise. Bravo, sir. I'm hoping your applied science will inspire them to explore other mundane (yet fascinating) engineering topics.
You can also add more thermal storage to your house for offset A/C and Heat by adding water tanks around the house. The water in the tanks will act as very high capacity storage vs just air and wood. Putting a tank/bucket of water in the garage will also keep it from freezing as quickly in winter.
Until the prices come down there NEED to be good government programs to defray significant chunks of the cost. Bottom line is money (like you said). It's an effort that needs to be lead by regulation but that's an uphill battle. Though we need look only to Europe to see how it's completely and utterly successful.
In 2001 it cost us $500 more to install a heat pump vs. cooling-only, so for us it was a no-brainer. We used it as our primary heat source down to about 40 degrees because our gas hot water system's large-diameter iron pipes meant over an hour of running before the radiators were hot - not very practical on mild days when we needed to take the chill off. As a bonus, the heat pump saved us from frozen pipes twice when our boiler failed while we were away.
I like you. I also like how you clearly have been starved of a haircut like the rest of us non-elite/connected people. Even though you aren’t an electrical engineer and I happen to be, almost everything you say makes perfect sense. Especially with regards to heat loss, heat transfer, storage and U values per watt loss etc. So you seem to really make out in lamens terms the electrical work required in order to exchange hot air for cold air and viceversa That complicated thermodynamics yet at a rudimentary basis it can be explained and you seem to be exceptionally well at explaining things like this well and digestible to your average western citizen. So I only can offer you praise - sure I have criticism like this stupid freedom units you use for measurement rather than metric but over all that is minimal. So I say go on educating the knowledge hungry masses amongst your audience.
Must not be from America. We’re back to such normality the media is back to “white people bad” whereas we heard almost none of that last year even though homicide rates were actually up. I…it’s like criminals dont follow laws and rules or something…. Let’s ban their guns that are already mostly illegal
There are cold storage tanks, you basically freeze an amount of water at night or whenever electricity is cheap and then use that thermal mass to cool the building during the day when it is both warmer and the electricity is more expensive. Corporations use these sort of AC systems all the time since they both consume a lot of cool air and a lot of electricity during the day and they have spent a lot of time trying to mitigate both of these cost.
60 cents per kilowatt hour? Isn't that quaint. Some parts of Texas were getting charged in the tens of dollars per kilowatt hour. Isn't deregulation just grand? How would the oil execs buy another fleet of yachts otherwise?
Nice to see I am not alone overthinking problems like that. The bad energy effeciency of my home drives me nuts, but my landlord needs money for expensive cars to show off, not for investing in something actually useful.
Great video! Three notes. 1. Nat gas $/therm can be 33% higher than the bill claims once you factor in the monthly service fee (that you pay every month, even in summer when you only use a couple therms). Electricity has a monthly service fee too, but you can’t really shut off electric service to your home, you can electrify and shut off gas so the fee should be factored into the $/therm. 2. Some gas systems charge by CCF, but it’s almost the same as therms. 3. For home heat batteries you should really look into phase change materials (PCMs). These are waxes or salt solutions that melt at a comfortable temperature (say 79 F). You “charge” them by melting them in winter or freezing them in summer. Then you turn off your HVAC and let them freeze/melt and keep your home near their melting point temperature as they do. That way you don’t have to get too hot/cold to charge your house, and the energy stored/released by changing phase lets them store a lot more energy in the same amount of mass. Would love to see you research them and do a great video on them.
I think Alec should try doing one of those lava lamps as the WHOLE background. Or some sort of constantly shifting amorphous blob(s) An ameoba from 'Journey to the Microcosmos' might be a good start.
We bought a MASSIVE, overkill one of those liquid-to-liquid heat exchangers a while ago for around 600€. Far bigger than needed in a normal heat pump. These are standard industrial parts that are used everywhere. This was for a whole-house PASSIVE COOLING system that uses the COLDER temperature of the ground during summer to cool the HOUSE at the cost of running just 2 regular water pumps for several kW of cooling. No Heatpump required. This was retrofitted to our existing ground-sourced heatpump system that provides heat and hot water for a large house. (COP 4.8 for heating)
100000% Yes!!! It's driven me crazy for YEARS that they still make AC-Only units. Adding heat pump functionality is such a tiny cost compared to the rest of the machine. And while he didn't specifically say this, but I'm talking about all air conditioners. Central Air, mini split, vehicles, RVs, window units, portable air conditioners, boats. ALL of them! Even if they weren't more efficient very often, from a public policy perspective, it makes us more resilient in the event of various disasters, shortages, or energy crises.
We just installed a Mitsubishi Zuba system in Ontario Canada. The installer also does geothermal. He said with the advent of the zuba he is steering people towards that rather than geothermal. For the efficiency gain it’s not worth the extra price. Also the system is designed for Canadian winters and shouldn’t need to use the resistive heat strips - but because of the building code they must be installed. I was pretty pleased because, while not cheap, it wasn’t that much more than the quotes we got for a decent gas furnace with A/C. Apparently it is a mix of control technology and indoor/outdoor units purpose built to work together rather than the more modular approach to heat pumps and air handlers. That said - to my eye it just looks like an electric furnace with a heat exchanger and a typical outdoor unit.
One thing to add about natural gas bills. Some utilities charge fixed monthly service fees no matter how much gas you actually use, so you are being hit with that even in the middle of the summer. Also if you rent a propane tank, take those costs into account too.
@@SignalStealer My point is the "lockdown" is a myth. Also, I don't know where you live that they're closed. You must live in one of the hellholes like New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles.
Thank you for mentioning windows! I have two large bay windows that get the morning sun. In winter, it changes by about 10 degrees right by the windows, I have blinds, but don't use them a whole lot. I do use the extra heat to grow plants, as long as I remember to take them out of the window at night. My dad has a system where it can take heat from different parts of the house and put it to other areas so he uses the windows to his advantage, opening the curtains in the day and taking that heat into cooler rooms. It's really cool, but he sells those systems, so he knows a lot more about it than I do and how to make the most of the space. I'm in a smaller, older, house, that also happens to have insulated floors...
I found a company that was silently taking all of the government subsidies and still charging their clients full price. If I had disposable income I'd have found a lawyer to charge them with crimes against humanity.
I fully agree with the theory that costs need to reflect ALL emissions, cradle to grave. Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean you aren't making that trash. If it makes a ton of trash to build/use/recycle the thing you're buying, it should cost more. If it produces a ton of atmospheric emissions to make/use/recycle the thing you're buying, it should cost more. If someone produced 20 tons of solid trash a month, you can be damn sure the waste disposal company would be charging them much more than someone who makes 1 ton of solid trash a month. Gaseous emissions (trash) are not done the same way.
No no, you don't want to make it hot. Heating or cooling, the Target is in the 18-26 degrees c range (normally, anyway, specific use cases may call for other temperatures) It's just, you know, some people live in places that drop substantially bellow 0c in winter. Others live in places that can exceed 40c in summer. Neither is a desirable temperature for your living spaces.
2:34 "If you are at a restaurant and say there are beer taps that are far from the room that the beer kegs are in, well there's a long line of hose between where the kegs are kept and the tap." Oh, the places my college partying mind went!
How about you actually go interview some AC manufacturers about why they don't make AC units reversible so we can hear more than just you pontificating in a weird little bubble constantly wondering, but never going out and asking - let alone making that journey part of your content. Just some friendly constructive advice!
I live in Texas, and I found out that I had a heat pump system in my house after the winter storm. I assumed I had a gas furnace because my heating costs were so low. Luckily, my home is well insulated and it never got below 60 degrees when the power was out.
I'm a little jealous, tbh. I'm up in Iowa and live in an old house with radiators. Even with the power on, it was 43 in my bedroom during that cold snap.
As a landlord who barely scrapes by.. no.. just no.. I understand the logic but that's with the assumption every landlord is a land baron. Some of us are just trying to not lose our home we have after marriage or family death.
Exactly, General. Everybody assumes that all landlords are filthy rich. I was a landlord too, and not rich enough to weather the economic storm of 2008.
I know this video came out a long while ago but I’m a commercial/industrial hvac tech. Water source heat pumps are extremely common in sky scraper buildings. They have the exact same heat exchanger as a geothermal heat exchanger. If you’re interested I could call a supply house and get you a price for us contractors to purchase a geothermal unit. Most hvac contractors over price the hell out of a geothermal unit. 20k seems extremely high for just the unit.
Electricity market nerd here. We’re both in PJM interconnection (at least I think you are if you’re reasonably close to Chicago) and a sizable portion of the eastern RTO does use electric heat. So our prices do take note of cold snaps when resistive heaters come into play
I installed a heat pump water heater about 2 years ago. My electrical company gave me a $400 rebate and I calculated that I'm saving about $300 a year compared to my old electric water heater. I am sold on this stuff and will eventually be installing a heat pump for my whole home AC. I live in the south so it makes complete sense to do so. Also, being fully electric I do not have another option other than another huge "hair dryer" to warm my house. Love talking about this stuff and even have a coworker that might be switching his gas water heater to a heat pump.
You are right on the mark about systems being basically the same, the compressors are the same. The expansion valve needs to be a bi-directional type and you have to add a reversing valve and defrost board to convert a unit from straight cool to heat pump. Also for better efficiency you should add a check valve to isolate the subcooling loop on the outdoor coil when in heat pump mode. I have seen a system converted to heat pump before with about 6 hours worth of work, that was reworking an existing system. If this was the standard for all systems the price difference would be negligible from current prices of straight cool systems. Other problem with current market is not many people look at the long run payback of air source heat pumps/ground source heat pumps, they just buy what's cheapest right now.
I like the talk on consumer side problem solving, here in Europe, especially near the Atlantic coast, heat pumps are perfect. Better still, we have large bodies of water that never freeze, just pull the heat from the sea... Something else that was on my mind recently was using thermal energy storage in molten salts and such. Seems much better than many of the other solutions such as batteries or pumped storage... You could install a system with these reservoirs in existing power plants, just chuck out all the fossil fuel burning equipment and keep the steam turbines to be run by a big vat of hot salt... All the infrastructure is already there.
That's an interesting way to do it. There's also some cool small scale applications of TES using solar and/or stirling engines, like what's described in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Be3FckQoDws.html
I’m a midwesterner (Central Indiana) and both homes I own have heat pumps! One is Geothermal, and one is Air (with gas e-heat). Geothermal can run even on abysmally cold days, but the air one would run 24/7 in sub-20F weather so it wasn’t worth it to not just run gas instead.
You are right to question that huge cost estimate. the differential cost for the equipment should be pretty minor for residential systems, [Inside blower+AuxHeat+Dx Coil, Dx Piping out to exterior compressor and it's coil/fan] vs [Inside blower+AuxHeat+compressor, + pump] and water piping + some level of geo testing to size the outside field + the outside piping, installed] All but the testing & outside piping installed are pretty close in cost. Your huge estimate might have been for one of the older systems (or current, but larger systems, not-residential), that had the fluid in direct contact with the ground, or it was directly pulled from the environment (lake, pond, etc.). In that case the water is often chemically bad enough that the fluid-side has to use a stainless heat exchanger between the environmental water and the water inside.
I personally was pretty interested when LTT did his whole upper floor in a multiple unit mini split. Seems like a really good way to heat/cool a house.
I'm in Pittsburgh and my natural gas is billed in MCF (thousands of cubic feet). 1 MCF of natural gas = 10,270,000 BTU = 300.98 kWh (including energy from condensation of combustion products) or 930,000 BTU = 272.56 kWh (excluding energy from condensation).
I know a pastor of a church who as part of a transition to more financially sound management switch to a a peak usage power purchase plan. However they had a lot of heating done with electric baseboard units so he programmed them to stagger on one by one heat up the rooms and go off one by one avoiding a peak demand and storing that heat in the room for later use for one day. Then the subsequent days at those rooms were not used could drift back down to an ambient temperature since they were unoccupied. Thermal storage has been more forgotten than anything it was quite common in earlier systems like draft Cooling in old houses and not cutting all your trees down put a house in as they both protecting shade.
I have a friend who showed me how he used his home as a battery. When he had the house built, he opt to have one of the best installation materials installed. I spent the night at his house and he heated up the house a little bit on the hot side temporarily and then turned it all off as we turned in for the night. He said when you get up in the morning you'll notice it's still warm, even though the heat pump was turned off in the late evening. The next morning my mind was blown. I didn't even need to put on a heavy robe. Just walked out with my socks and pjs. I live in an apartment, and I have to run the heat all night just to keep from shivering. Yes, I agree, we renters have no control over what they LL installs. I would so love to have solar panels on our roofs. High efficient hybrid hot water heaters. And most of all, heat pumps.
My place (a middle unit condo in New England) was built with resistive electric cove heat only, with no provisions for ductwork or a boiler. In order to install gas heat, I would've had to run propane ($$$$) or get a pipe run in from the street (also $$$$). I also would have had to figure out a venting solution no matter what combustion heating system I tried to install. An air source heat pump was the most logical solution for my situation, so I had a multi zone Mitsubishi installed last year. I left the old heaters in place for now, but didn't have to run them at all this winter. I was able to keep my place warmer, and my electric bill went down DRAMATICALLY compared to last year. (I was keeping it in the low 60s and not heating some rooms, just to keep the bill under control when I was using resistive heat. With the heat pump, the whole place was set to 67 all winter.) It never gets cold enough here to dip the heat pump's COP near 1.0; most of the time our daytime lows only get in the teens, and Mitsubishi says my unit's COP there is around 2.5. It wasn't cheap to install by any means, but the consistent heating (and never having to deal with window ACs again) is well worth the cost.
Last year when California suffered from several unprecedented heat waves I bought a portable air conditioner to make up for my struggling dying A/C that I had been putting off replacing. It cost about $500 from Costco, but it is a dual hose and it has a heat mode, so it is also a portable heat pump. It is great in that regard, but the big downside is draining the condensation, in A/C mode it vents the water to the outside with the hot exhaust. In heat mode, it can try, but that cold air is only taking a little of the water, the tank can fill up, you can connect a hose, but unless you have a drain on the floor you're probably draining to a pan that could fill up as well. So it is efficient at making heat, but the water, that's an issue.
