In the 1950's, when they were talking "clean", it's not the kind of "clean" we're talking about today. Clean for them is that you didn't have to deal with coal dust or fuel oil in the home.
Arguably however, GE was also building nuclear at the time, (As was westinghouse), and those are "Clean" in the sense they were (And are) carbon neutral. But yeah considering the early half of the 20th century was dominated by coal soot and other smog related soiling, electric was definitely cleaner.
I live in the province of Quebec, Canada, where 99% of the houses are all electric but we have state-run hydro electricity that has been powering the province since the late 1800s. We have much more severe winter conditions for four + months of the year but we have the infrastructure in place to take care of our electric network in the worst wintery conditions... Except for the 1998 ice storm. But that was a once in a 100 years situation.
@@snarkylive That's alittle generalizing "into a land of not much". It's hard to say hydro-electric is destroying significant natural area ... look at what humans have done so far
The linemen of HydroQuebec are TOP NOTCH!! Many times when I lived in NH and we had big storms, the crews from Quebec would come down to assist. 100% the best crews I've come across in terms of equipment and professionalism.
I do want to point out that large power plants are also significantly cleaner than many small coal powered furnaces. You can look at pics of London from the early part of the last century for examples.
Yes, anyone who can remember a house with a coal bin in the basement would know that for the consumer it was VERY dirty. The electric companies were using marketing but marketing isn't necessarily a lie.
Having survived several week-long power outages here in the upper midwest, I can tell you that not all your fossil fuel appliances will work without electricity. If your gas water heater is power vented, it won't turn on unless the vent is operable. Neither will your gas furnace, nor your oven. You basically have your cooktop that you can light manually and that's it. So in terms of surviving another freeze, state of the art gas appliances might not be the help you are looking for. Your issues with the marketing of electricity as "green" is warranted, but to my eye it doesn't compare with the greenwashing marketing of natural gas. I do enjoy your channel. Thank you for the work you put into it!
A couple of 1500 VA UPS will power a midsized furnace blower for 24-48 hours. A 550 VA UPS will take care of the water heater vent (or you can just install it differently). A regular gas oven will work, but a convection gas oven won't.
@@wisenber newer ovens have electronic ignitions and can't be lit manually. Only ovens that have pilot lights will remain operable. The only point I am hoping to make is that in electrical outages your gas appliances don't really provide back up. Virtually everything has a circuit board and if it does it won't operate without some form of electric backup.
@@markohand6430 Electronic or piezo ignition? Gas appliances that will work off grid can be had, but you have to make a deliberate effort to find them. It's a shame that most seem to be designed where redundant energy sources are rendered moot. That being said, many part of TX lost their gas as well when the pipelines didn't keep up.
Green washing? I’ve never heard, nor seen fictional information on natural gas from an actual fossil fuel company or trade organization. OTOH, I’ve seen plenty of complete falsehoods from the green movement. Most of the early predictions from actual client scientists have now been proven false. I believe we have a carbon problem. I believe the rhetoric from the anti property, anti science, anti freedom LEFT has become the problem with progress. Peak oil was a myth, that was used to get policies All sides need to double down on the truth while reducing the snark and hate. You can’t convince the other side while insulting them. If you truly believe in a need for change, the place to start is on your own side.
Belinda: Thank you for bring back memories!!! My parents build a new home in 1965 and it was a "Medallion Home", 100% electric. In our case even water as we had a rural well. So if we lost power we lost ALL services. The trouble came when electric rates skyrocketed in the mid 1970s. I can remember the Blizzard of 1978 with an Artic blast. Our electric bill was over $500 which would be like $2000 in 2021 dollars. In the summer of 1979 we added a brick chimney for a wood stove in the basement and a propane furnace for whole house heating. That system was changed in 2005 when my Father died. My Mother could not continue using the wood stove by herself. So we installed a heat pump system with a propane backup for severe cold weather. Her electric bills now average less than $250 a month year round. I will encourage your thoughts on wanting a multi-fuel home. Heat pumps for heating and cooling with propane or wood backup. Then an electric generator for backup during outages. My current house is a 150 year old farm house. We completely remodeled it in 2010. Maximum insulation and thermal systems. I have a high efficient heat pump system for the normal heating and cooling. My system does have propane backup for extreme cold periods. I have a backup generator that runs on propane. I also have a propane non-vented wall heater in the central part of the main floor. This heater does not use electric or electronics to operate. So it is set at 50 degrees as a doomsday backup. I have a 1000 gallon propane tank. That supply will run the generator for three weeks at full capacity. The wall heater will only use 250 gallons a month in sub-zero weather, keeping the house above freezing so all the plumbing is safe. P.S. Three years ago we went to our daughter's house in Florida over the Christmas holidays. We had an electric outage. When the backup generator fired it popped the breaker. So no heat system. That $250 wall heater kept our house from freezing. Cheap insurance. Low tech too for reliability.
I'm not sure this is that simply, technically yes, but the infrastructure has an ownership complication. I live in a state where the power utility has been spending millions to lobby the government to strip rights of home owners in terms of electricity. Once you centralize something heavily, others issues show up.
The problem is that most electricity in the US is from coal powered plants. Much better to go with something like LNG till that changes. Not much good if your house is green but the energy provided is not.
@@huejanus5505 LNG is methane. It's worse than coal for climate change (not smog) because of the leakage during capture. Better to stay with coal until non-fossil fuels arrive.
As a Canadian living in Ontario, I've had a very different experience when it comes to living in an all electric home/apartment, even during times of total blackout... a few have occurred. Prolonged, major outages have only occurred twice that I can remember: once during the ice storm of 97, and again in 2003 when the entire north eastern grid tripped. Don't take those dates as accurate, I might be off, but the events are well known. During the ice storm, massive sections of infrastructure... just fell down... lines, pylons, transformer stations... it was a literal mess. My Aunt's house in the middle of no where, took almost a month to be restored, major cities and town, a few days to weeks. Life returned to normal relatively quickly, but we have robust regulations and mandatory emergency response protocols. Houses with no electric and no alternative heating sources, were lent generator, and in some cases, those generators were fueled by the utility. Most buildings over a certain height, have mandatory backup generators to provide power to elevators... It's just never been an issue up here like it seems in Texas, and frankly, I'm not sure most Canadians really understand what's going on down there, we've never experienced a failure on the magnitude as you all seem to, even when we did have a crisis. Even much more northern communities, whom have frequent electrical interruptions, have provisions, backups, alternatives... and experience relatively brief outages... If any community went more than a few consecutive hours without electricity up here, heads would roll, we just do not tolerate ill prepared or ineffectual suppliers.
here, most electric companies are private companies. this means that they don’t want to “waste” money on updating equipment that’s old/ in bad shape but isn’t broken yet. in texas, for example, they’d been warned about potential issues with the grid for decades, but the power company just never did anything about it. and state governments - especially southern state governments - are loathe to “restrict” businesses, even if it’s hurting citizens.
In my old neighborhood (small neighborhood with only 12 small house) have diesel generator. We lived outside of Minneapolis, we used this for emergency situation during blackout. All the house there use electric appliances and stuff, except for 2 of the house who have gas stove (one of them change to electric after a few years). I think this would be a good alternative for emergency use during blackout for all electric houses.
As another Ontarian I only have a power outage for more than an hour maybe once or twice a year on average. Only had a multi day power outage when a huge chunk of North America went out in 2003. Even during storms it is unlikely that power will go out. I have never had a gas stove but have had gas water heater and furnace as well as fireplace. Personally I don't think having any gas appliance is necessary and if you need to on an all electric house you can use a backup generator. We have a generator but I doubt it works because we haven't used it since 2003.
Same for me living in QC. I just don't get this whole power outage regularly in US... I come from France, with a relatively isolated village, and we got maximum 2-3 blackout that never went longer than 2-3h I think. In QC, there was some power outage. The worst I got was from like 2 days because some guy burned the lines. And the there is that storm of 97-98 as you said but i was not there yet. I just don't get why you have such poor service. Why is it acceptable.
Verry interesting topic. I live here in the Netherlands in a tiny house with no gas or oil. Everything runs on electric power such as heating IR and induction cooking. An electric boiler that is supported during the summer with heat-pipes. It is not off-grid but nearly. Greeting from the Netherlands!
I moved from US to The Netherlands 6 years ago. We use both gas and electric. The houses are much smaller but can be quite leaky too. We want to build a passive house 🏡 but it will be very expensive here because of high building costs + extremely limited plots for new homes. May have to go to Spain or Italy to make it happen.
I live in southern France in an all-electric home, which I think works great. I was very surprised by how few all-electric homes there are in the US, I feel like they’re way more common here in France. The only difference is that I have personally never experienced a blackout in my entire life, the electric grid here is very reliable, and since 90%+ of our electricity comes from non-fossil fuels, it is actually very “climate friendly” to live in one.
Yep. Blackouts very rare even in rural areas in Europe in general. I do wish that other European countries would also do like France and heavily use nuclear energy. For some idiotic reason e.g. Germany has done excactly the opposite.
@@ukrytykrytyk8477 hardly embracing unfortunately, France is set to retire loads of their nuclear with overly optimistic claims about replacing them with renewables. France may well get less reliable and more expensive electricity if they have their way. Again though it is a good point that you don't need wasteful and environmentally destructive battery backups if you simply have a functioning government.
It's also true that your entire country is the size of some of our individual states. Put differently, on a localized level, it's perhaps more feasible to get to a higher percentage of all-electric homes...assuming that's a goal worth achieving. Also, the reliability of the electric grid can depend on location...rural, where power transfer lines run mostly above ground (and therefore subject to weather-related disruption), versus urban, where power transfer lines run mostly below ground. I've lived in all-electric homes, and those with mixed fuels...natural gas for heating (both air and water) and cooking. I prefer the mixed fuels approach, personally.
@@ScottHammet It's so insane when Americans use the idea that their country is large to excuse obvious faults. Large grids are more reliable! That's why the EU trades power between it's countries! America has a lot of reliable nuclear, lots of great hydro. The failures of the US are in it's politics not it's geography.
@@Alex-nl5cy I think you misunderstood my point. My point is that at a state level, there may be some in the US that approach a higher percentage of all-electric homes, and that would be a more appropriate comparison. It's just not an apples-to-apples comparison at a country level. And "obvious faults" is a subjective characterization unworthy of debate. Perhaps one day we'll get to nirvana where everything is powered by "green energy". That would be fine. In the mean time, I suspect the world will keep doing what it's doing, and making the best use of what resources are available.
One of the most important things you do is encourage people to not "demonize" the process, the industry, the material, the trade, and ultimately the market and people. etc. Nice touch. from Texas
Belinda, I came across your channel a week ago. I’m a physicist, I have been teaching at the college level for over 10 years. and I am also training to be an power grid electrical engineer (my father was one for over 30 years). You do a really great job reporting and stating facts, and being objective. You are very correct and accurate on your analysis. Please keep up the good work! I also wanted to compliment you on this dress. The whites and blues are very beautiful.
Belinda, +1 for your videos; I am a regular follower. I live in a self-build (or at least self-designed and PMed) passive-class house in the UK. We do have a in-hob 2 ring propane ring backup (which we've never used), but I made a design decision to go all electric before finalising the build: induction hobs, electrically heated PCM-based storage DHW, a 3kW resistive heater for our water based UFH in our ground-floor slab, MHVR, and a heating profile planned by my own RPi-base home automation system The slab is the sole heat input source for our 3-storey dwelling (other than warm bodies and other waste heat). I designed in for the later addition of an ASHP, but after 3 years occupation I can't make an economic case for adding one. Our current system is truly zero maintenance. We have use a green Time of Use tariff; so switching to an ASHP for slab input and a CoP of 4 rather than 1 will only save us perhaps $400-500 p.a. at an upfront installation cost of 10× that. I did have a heating outage 3 months back -- which was easy to fix, though the heating was off for 2 days before we noticed that the internal temperature had dropped and so realised something was wrong with the heating. We keep the whole house at 22½-23°C 24×7 year-round. When the house is this warm, you really don't miss an open fire. :-) BTW, I kept a very close control of our build costs, and we did most of the design, PM, procurement, plumbing, interior woodwork, and HVAC ourselves. There were +/- on costs. but overall the costs were a wash; there really wasn't cost premium for building to this spec, but the devil was in the detail of execution. I think that your reservations about an electric only solution are primarily a reaction to the uncertainties and lack of consumer orientation of the unregulated Texas energy supply market. IMO, this is a pretty much a uniquely US scenario that is quite alien to people living in the rest of the 1st world.
Terry Ellison, Europeans are well ahead of North Americans with energy conscious house design. I know I have a business helping people retrofit their houses to Net Zero in Ottawa Canada. I am interested in the DHW storage tank with PCM. Could you advise who is the manufacturer?
This might be different and off topic , but I watch your videos not only because of how interesting and well informed they are, but there are those little bits of GENERAL ADVICE you give , that only an engineer can can give ( reminds me of my late father ) thank you
I'm in favour of an all-electric home for several reasons: 1) efficiency, even if your power comes from coal or gas - having a heat pump more than compensates for it: A good coal or gas powerplant converts 60%+ of energy into electricity. Let's take 7% loss on the grid. That leaves 55.8% of power. However, a heatpump properly buried in the ground always has a 180%+ efficiency, and so you get at the end more than 100% of the heat energy of that gas that was burned at the power plant. Same efficiency or even better on most days in the American south! 2) significantly increased fire safety and lack of risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, if there isn't a single gas pipe in your home. 3) you can power it in lots of ways, diversifying your sources of power can be done all by yourself, and every addition you buy over time is improving everything else. For example: you can buy solar panels to reduce your daytime electric bill and a chance of your neighbourhood blackout. Later you can buy a house battery and hook it up - now you got more stable power that extends into the night if the battery is big enough. Later you can buy a gas generator hooked up to gas mains - you still got no gas mains in your house, so you don't increase fire or poisoning risks, while still taking advantage of gas. Now you have a way to charge the house battery at night! And later you buy a small household wind turbine, if it's allowed - and you might be able to operate completely off the grid, with all previously purchased power methods working together! Just gotta make sure their fluctuating input power lines don't feed directly into your house, going through a big beefy stabilizer instead :D
The home I grew up in was a typical low-cost 70s ranch style home. Everything was electric because we don't have natural gas in the area. But, we always had a wood stove with a couple cords of firewood ready to go. There were only a few times during my childhood that we lost power, and never during something like the texas freeze, but we were very grateful to have that stove. If I have the option, I'm definitely having one in any of my future homes.
Lithium iron phosphate batteries are available for $100 kwh... even if you don't put solar panels on your roof , you can buy as much energy independence as you want. Whole house inverters start at $2500
@@ukrytykrytyk8477 this is a correct response. Our highly insulated house in the countryside can lose power for days and the pipes will not freeze, all it takes is a person running a heat source for an hour to reset; we have a portable word stove to do that.
A Sol Ark inverter with a fortress power battery is about 10k and could give you days of power for critical circuits. 🙂 But the key is having an efficient house and redundancy plan as everyone has pointed out.
Greetings from Scotland. I’m gradually gearing up my house towards the “electrify almost everything” philosophy. Solar panels on the roof, induction cooker coming next. Batteries are being provisioned for in the future. But I say “almost”. While my propane boiler will eventually be replaced with a heat pump, there’s no way that I’ll be retiring the wood burning stove. I fully appreciate the value of having redundancy in terms of heating.
I've been watching a few videos on this channel lately. Much respect. Just a few random comments. I'm a big fan of induction cook tops and highly recommend them. Low energy use since almost all the heat goes into the pot and relatively little into the surrounding area, reducing load on the air conditional. I completely agree with not being dependent on one single energy source. I'm happy I have a natural gas fireplace that operates with out electricity. I rarely use it, but if the power goes out, I can keep my home comfortable. Regarding solar and grid tie, yes, if the grid goes out you can't extract energy from the solar. The system needs something to separate your internal electrical network from the grid. The Tesla power wall system will do this and you can keep lower consumption devices in your home operational indefinitely when combined with solar.
Reminded me of back in the 70s when my dad was building his dream home. Being an electrician naturally it was, other than a fire place built more for form than function, an all electric home. That is until the energy crisis hit in the late 70's and the electric bill sky rocketed. It did not take long before what was meant to be a store room became a room containing a wood furnace. So between that and mom's love of the fireplace my name was officially changed to "get wood". Oddly I still burn wood even though I have a modern propane furnace. We like the steady heat from the wood stove and my honey enjoys watching the glow of the fire. Anyway I think your on the right track. Experience has taught me that some redundancy is always a good idea.
We burned a lot of wood last month. It kept my family warm when the electricity was off. Great videos. Keep up the good work. Keep asking questions as to what marketing folks are doing.
I absolutely love watching your videos, they're very informative, and not hard on the eyes :) I really enjoyed watching the one on the insulation types.
I think it is important to point out that during the winter storm in Texas, natural gas prices went to the moon and many people were settled with insurmountable utility bills. Currently the wife and I are targeting an all electric home, with wood burning fireplace and a battery back up.
I live off the grid. I'm changing my kitchen over to all electric and getting rid of my LPG stove and oven and replacing them with induction and a small electric oven. My hot water is a hybrid solar and wood fired system. The wood fire that's just outside my lounge in the workshop that heats my hot water also heats water for my hydronic underfloor and radiator heating in my house. I've designed my house to need very minimal heating and cooling anyway. If I run out of power for my kitchen there's always a gas bbq.
I have an all electric home built in 1982. Enjoyed it all along. I also have 14 solar panels by Sunpower, with one Tesla Powerwall which covers about 50% of the yearly energy cost. I live in a Dallas suburb, and this house was bought right after it was built. We enjoyed it for 42 years. Then came the blizzard and the black out which lasted for 56 hours. Our power failed. The battery kicked on, and in two hours the battery cut off at 54% of the capacity. We had to move in with our relatives for almost 3 days. When we returned I noticed that the panels were covered with 4” of snow. They were not producing at all. Also, when the sky is gray production drops. I still believe we made a wise decision in in having the solar system. Thank you, I enjoy your vlogs.
Greetings Belinda from Cincinnati. We just built a production home, we are happy to be diversified. My teaching experience was being without power for 9 days after hurricane ike made it's way up this way (still as a cat 1). My neighbor across the street had power after just 3 days.
Thank you for putting out this information, I have been in the construction industry for over 30 years and I have always wondered the requirements for the medallion on my parents home.
We live in an all electric 1,800sf house in Georgia and our average monthly power bill is $125. I too worry about power outages, so we are pricing a whole-house backup generator to run off propane. A 500 gallon LP tank can run the entire house for about a week. We've never been out of power that long, and I'm considering running a line for the stove and converting it to gas. I always enjoy your well-thought-out perspective.
I wouldn't want to give up my gas stove, and we've had a gas water heater in the past, too. The way our gas furnace is set up, the basement never gets very warm; but we have a fantastic fireplace down there, and it can heat the entire 400 square foot room. It helps that I love splitting wood, stacking it, and playing with fire in general. You're so right about the fun of having a real fireplace! Diversification is an excellent hedge against power outages.
You said everything I told my wife about our all electric home. Choosing the right energy provider make a world of difference. A new community here in red oak is providing gas and electric. I too will be getting a gasoline/propane generator and propane heaters. Stocking up on fire wood too. Good presentation.
I built in rural Colorado years ago and power outages were to be expected, so I used propane fueled water heat and had a gas fireplace as well. The only drawback was that the circulation pump on the heat system was electric. I've always cooked with gas when I had the choice. Induction is really being pushed here in Ecuador, but they are fragile, need specific cookware and still fall short of the specificity of temperature which gas allows. I would argue that Induction and Gas run shoulder to shoulder on paper, but in the real race, gas wins out - look at professional kitchens; they're gas. As always, I appreciate your balanced, reasonable, full-perspective approach - keep up the good videos.
All my life until early this year I had lived in all electric homes. I was honestly pretty nervous moving into a home with gas heating because I didn't know what to expect. It's a smaller change than expected, the cost difference is so subtle in my area. When the units eventually reach end of life and die I'll probably move to an electric heat pump with a gas emergency heater and a hybrid water heater. Having a natural gas fireplace and grill is really nice, though. I don't miss chopping wood, and I don't miss buying propane bottles. I don't know why electric heat pumps took so long to catch up to air-conditioners in popularity. The difference between the two is literally a single valve.
Great VID! yes up in Grt North West lots of homes were all electric homes in 50's! Why not look at all hydro electric power at that time. My battery back ups came in real handy. I originally got them when my mother was still alive make sure everything could still run for a while.
All electric home Northern California Coast with a pellet stove in the front room. Tesla Solar, 3x Powerwalls, split duct, heat pump water heater. 100% solar 8 months of the year with 30-60% savings from Oct/Nov-March (depends on cloud cover). 3x Powerwalls electricity 5-7 days during a power outage….although solar panels usually recover the deficient. Pellet stove creates great comfort at low cost during the winter…about 20 bags of pellets for 4 months at a cost of $6-7 a bag. Great channel, thanks for the information and your hard work! :-)
I never brought house without mixed energy for this reason. The only thing I want to add to my place is battery and fire place just in case a Texas happens here. Also geo cool system
Just met someone a few days ago who had their power, water, and gas shut down during the Snowpocalypse. They had a natural gas generator. I had a gasoline generator - I had heat and a powered living room and they had to stay in a hotel - but stores around me started running out of gas - Wal-Mart only had 93 octane left... but, much to their credit, they dropped the price of 93 octane to match 86 octane, so I bought $20 worth of gas - which was about 14 hours of running time for my generator (6500W, about half loaded). Multiple options are always nice to have, but you never know what's going to happen.
As much as I dislike fossil fuel powered grids, I have to admit that gas stoves are definitely the best. Plus the mini split with gas furnace combo seems to be a good heating mix for most climates right now.
The new electric Ford F150 has a battery large enough to power your home for 3 days. It's like having two or three Tesla Powerwalls that double as transportation.
Ms Carr, You said it in your video: "Never put all your eggs in one basket." Your gas company continued to deliver their product even when the power company could not. Another point: my understanding regarding heat pumps is that they are very efficient in warm and hot climates, but go to straight resistive heat at temperatures near and below freezing. That's why you don't see many heat pumps in northern latitudes. If you insist on building an all electric home, I suggest you design a "living" core in the home that can be heated with a kerosene or gas heater. I also suggest you design the plumbing so you can gravity drain the system when the pipes are in danger of freezing. These small resilience factors will help you weather the emergency with minimal discomfort and may even enable you to help your neighbors who are not so well prepared.
Great vid - Thanks! We live in a motorhome. We can: A. Plug into the power grid B. Use the backup generator C. Run the coach motor for power and heat D. Use propane for heat, water and cooking So we were not inconvienced at all by the storm. We felt bad for those who were.
I’m definitely still happy to have an electric only home, i want it to be net 0, but i will want a backup generator, and a fireplace, as well as a battery and solar. The battery and solar will work most of the time, but having a generator for -25 weather just in case is just smart. And a fireplace is fine, i don’t really see why it would not be.
@@jesterblackdog definitely want something that can be airsealed, 100%. although I wonder how airtight that really can get. That said I don’t want gas because gas lines require maintenance and are their own pain and I don’t need gas for anything else so I want a wood fireplace for one ambience two back-up if all else fails.
@@jesterblackdog there are systems that solves this problem. We have a double airtight shunt in our chimney wich cuts the leakage to negligible levels.
wow thanks for the memory. In the 1970s my parents purchased a new Centennial tract home in N. Dallas area and it was all electric complete with the Medallion emblem next to the front door! My father survived the blitz as a teen in London and witnessed countless natural gas explosions including the house next door (not to mention bombs and falling shrapnel). It is one thing to have the electricity fail when your being bombed to smithereens but gas lines are even more precarious. Hence he refused to have a natural gas furnace home.
I agree with your concerns about all-electric homes. I have a semi-remote cabin that is connected to the electric grid. My heat pump can take care of the place in all seasons but I still installed a wood-burning stove to be used on really cold days or back up if no electricity was available. For cooking my back up to the electric range is an outdoor propane-powered BBQ grill. This grill also has side burners which I normally don't use but would come in handy in emergency situations. I will be adding a dual fuel generator in the future. Also considering having some solar power abilities eventually. I hate relying on one source for my energy.
My in put- the way solar panels have got cheaper and the IMMENSE fall in the price of LiFePo4 cells build your solar first. Will Prowse YT channel and his community website will see you save massive amounts of money
Belinda (if I may), i get where you're coming from but would still go all-electric including with a heat pump. (Disclosure: I live in Climate Zone 6, sub Arctic.) What I'd do first is insulate and seal to a PassivHaus standard, then choose the smallest and least complicated heat pump i could find. Then for backup, if concerned with cold, I'd get a small wood stove with good venting/flue technology to control particulate. You're right that energy is a paradoxical and complex field, which is why i love working in it. Natural gas has some great qualities, and some renewables some wasteful qualities. However, natural gas and coal have already killed many times more humans than any other energy source. We really do want and need to decarbonize and your concern is for an event which just happened and remains rare and short-lived where you are. I'd focus more on insulating and maybe re routing and redesigning your piping system. Maybe there are better backup plans but I'm more than fine with losing power because we've considered the scenarios in advance.
@@Sekir80 Quite right. Things clicked for me once I realized that building to code or to ‘the standard’, means that doing anything less than that is actually illegal. I’m amazed that some builders can advertise proudly that they ‘build to code’. That’s almost embarrassing for the real professional, I assume.
@@acchaladka Oh yes! Where I live the code (probably the term used code than standard) is strict, but as I learned more on american codes, like your Climate Zones I'm not that confident anymore. I can't even fit my country to your Zones, so I need to look it up.
@@acchaladka So, after some grind I figured out that our code transaltes to your R 24 for the main walls. The design we'll start to build soon is ~ R 44. It seems I've got a pretty good insulation planned. I'm excited to see how it will translate next winter. :)
@@Sekir80 , I recommend putting most of your insulation outside of the cladding (rock wool if you can afford it). many high-insulation homes can have problems with moisture because they can't breathe. any mistake in insulation or any roof/window leak in a modern high-spec house cannot escape and will generate mold rapidly.
I largely agree but it seems like having an all electric (or mostly electric) home seems like it has the most flexibility for having on site back up systems. Is it legal / safe to have a large cng reservoir in a traditional residential property? Though as usual I found your video to be informative and interesting. Thanks.
more common is propane or diesel-powered generators. I personally prefer propane as it can sit in the tank for 20 years+ and still be good. Just fire up the generator a couple times a year to exercise it and your good. The problem with batteries and other forms of backup power is the stored energy will degrade over time whether used or not which is wasteful.
I grew up in the rural south. Everybody had a (liquid) propane tank which had to be refilled every few months by a tanker truck. The tank was about 3ft diameter and 8ft long. This ran stoves, central furnace, water heater. If you wanted a backup system, then propane tank + continuous duty generator would be your answer, or even a natural gas generator. Natural gas furnace, stove, and hot water heater. While I've had lots of power outages (storms, someone hit a power pole, etc) I have never had a natural gas outage. Having natural gas appliances/heat/hot water, you reduce the size generator you need.
I totally understand being independent from a powergrid especially in winter for heat. Having a wood fireolace saved us from freezing during the 1997 montreal ice storm. We were out of power for 2 weeks.
My house is new and all electric, during one of our ice storms this last month we did lose power for a couple hours, temp dropped a degree or two. Ask the people around Boston how fun it is to have explosive levels of gas pumped into so many homes the fire dept stops coming for fire only. Electric is easy to replace source on, Sunbelt does deliver generators.
Interesting point! Keep in mind: a natural gas powered furnace is NOT diversification of heating your home if that furnace is relying on electronics! If our home cut off of electricity gas burner goes with it!
All electric home is definitely the way to go. Even if it's being fueled by natural gas generation, that's still a big step down from the carbon intensity of coal - and unlike a home that uses gas, an all electric home will get cleaner as our power generation infrastructure gets cleaner. It's true that you're just moving the problem to another point, but that point is a central point shared by thousands of homes, which is significantly easier to tackle than trying to make all of those homes less carbon intense one by one. And all of that assumes that you're only getting power from natural gas. Where I'm at, we're getting a third of our power from nuclear, so the old argument about "what about the power generator" is even less compelling here. If you're (justifiably, in Texas) worried about power outages, then a backup generator isn't terribly expensive, and even with the added cost of that you'll probably still save money in the long run - don't forget that electricity is often cheaper and more price-stable than natural gas.
Where I live you can setup your solar panels so you can use them when the power goes out, but they usually aren't because it costs more. So it might be worth investigating if it can be done where you live.
I agree with you about wood heat. It is much better than electric heat. We had a wood-burning stove when I was a kid. The heat was very comfortable, but it was a LOT of work.
Electricity all the way! Having a Powerwall would make it a bit less risky (maybe even having an electric car with car-house power transfer). For comfort and redundancy, a fire stove is the best addition for a house. The only downside are the complications with the chimney in a modern, well insulated house. Takes a bit more effort and money to make it airtight, but electricity and fire are without a doubt the most resilient energent combination for homes. And wood fired stoves have become much more efficient and cleaner burning with the use of modern materials that can withstand high temperatures in the combustion chamber. Great video Belinda!
I think I'd lean towards something else for backup power, at least until batteries are definitely being recycled or use something other than lithium. They're not great (although not the worst thing, don't get me wrong). I feel like if the backup is truly for emergencies, the better thing to do is something like a propane or gas generator. The impact of filling a few cylinders of propane during rare emergencies is likely much less than a powerwall (which you'd need a few of if you actually want to last more than a day or two in cold weather). But, a wood stove is nice for aesthetic reasons and does have the side benefit of being a backup.
I have an all electric home. A 5000 watt generator and two heavy duty extension cords keeps the refrigerator and pellet stove running. We use a little camp stove for cooking. No hot showers but even if the power is out for a week it’s good enough to carry on. The most important thing is to implement a simple back up that fits you and your home before you need it.
Great easily digestible videos as always. I would not do an all electric home again even though I am an electrician in the DFW area. Thankfully we now have a fireplace in our current house and were able to weather the storm (literally). To me the ideal climate control system would be a Bosch geothermal unit pared with a wood stove because fireplaces loose most of their heat up the chimney. Please research and do a video on this topic and again great work.
Build all electric for sure. Also build passive solar and super insulated with a lot of thermal mass. If this is done correctly, it will take days with no sunshine or power for the temperature to come down.
I'm in the process of designing and building a house. I always planned on having three sources for heat, a wood burning fireplace, electric heat pump system, and a propane boiler for in floor radiant heating. As technology advances and I'm able to use solar and storage, I can always convert the radiant heat system to use solar/electric boiler.
If you're building new, wouldn't you seal and insulate more than enough to eliminate needing a radiant system? The fire would be more than an adequate backup.
@@ericscott3997 Yes, I don't plan on skimping on insulation or air sealing, but living at over 6,000 feet in the southern Rockies, there is nothing like having a warm floor in the winter. It isn't a necessity but more of a want. Burning wood will definitely offset the cost of propane and electric.
@@jackskellington6cs ground source heat pump might work a bit better, and systems also come with underfloor heating. Don't know about the costs in the us though.
Belinder, Agreed, several sources of energy for your home has many advantages. In Western Oregon we just had an ice storm that caused our power to be out for almost 3 days. We live in a rural area (5 houses on a 5 mile long road) and we are not top priority for restoration of power. Natural gas is not available in our area. We run an oil furnace but also have propane for the cook top and a fireplace insert. We also have a wood fireplace. During the outage we can keep warm and protect the pipes from freezing with the propane fireplace insert and the wood stove. The cook top has an electric valve that prevents it from running without power (dual fuel type cook top and oven). We cooked on a camp stove (the camp stove and small propane canisters are something to always have pre-staged and available). I also have several small generators (3K-5K) that are either gasoline or diesel. Not enough to run a whole house, but enough to keep the refrigerator and freezer cold and some lighting. Note that a diesel generator can run on the oil for the oil furnace. It is just #2 fuel oil that is dyed red and does not have the "road tax" applied. We have a 175 gallon tank so always plenty. We are on a community water service with gravity fed pressure so water was not an issue. If on a well, a decent size generator capable of running the well pump, freezer and refrigerator would be very nice.
My power went out for 5 days, but I have natural gas, so I was able to run my stove, furnace, and hot water heater of a invertor I have in my truck.. It was in the low 30s... But it wasn't that baf
When I first began my electrical career in the late 80's, I worked with a gentleman and my primary job was removing the old electric "storage" heaters installed by the local power company back in the day. It came with an elaborate system that heated bricks inside the storage heating device during non-peak generation times and supposedly radiate that heat back to you during peak times. The water heaters were set up the same way. Completely off during peak times, and only on during non-peak times. It was a great concept, but we usually would remove them all and replace them with standard baseboard heat. They too had plaques, but I assume that was our electric company (PP&L) just hamming it up mimicking the 50's They also had the random odd thing like fully lit house numbers and fully lit door bells (24/7). We live in an older duplex that suffered from the all-electric heat phase. Frankly, I turned off the electric heat breakers and we use space heating and electric blankets when it's super cold. We cut our electric bill in half over using baseboard. The key is keeping the RH up above 40% I prefer 48%.
I agree that one should not limit ALL energy to a single source. I am buying a property in Arizona and wish to generate my own power via wind turbine, solar panels and with many redundancies built in to the system. For instance, an on-demand tankless water heater is a great idea, but in sunny Arizona it's silly not to take advantage of the sun to passively heat the home hot water and the swimming pool during the day. Once you've installed the pipe it's essentially free heat. The greatest challenge is to throttle it back since it is very easy to surpass 120 degrees (50 degrees celsius) safe operating temperature. With excellent design it is also possible to drastically reduce the NEED for power. By using Earthship style "cooling tubes", high venting transom windows, proper shade structures and landscaping, and taking advantage of the huge potential of adobe thermal mass, a well-designed home reduces demand by 90% even in building zone 5 cold high desert. Its a LOT easier to run on back-up batteries or a generator when you only need 10% of what the average household needs. I agree with you also about the fireplace. A house is not a home without a hearth. (Hominids have been using fire for over 2 million years, so it's pretty primal). Although, it is possible to get a Rumsford fireplace with make-up burn air drawn from outdoors, that is powerful enough to heat my (planned) 1,400 square foot house on it's own when every other source of power fails. Love your content, keep up the good work!
Excellent analysis as always. All electric is the most practical for most. It is what I have although I wish we had natural gas service in my neighborhood. Living in a hurricane prone area, I believe that the most practical solution for most (that can afford it) is a propane or gasoline generator. My whole house 16kW generator has been a life saver many times. It supplied power to my house for two weeks after Hurricane Michael. An important side benefit was our ability to run the heat pump (part time) and remove the moisture from the house. It prevented the formation of mold from water intrusion.
What are the options for Solar/wind/water powered homes with battery backups? Can you live fully off grid and how difficult or expensive would that be? Thank you for all of your videos. They are very well researched and delivered in a way that is very easy to understand.
Hello Belinda, I'm new to your channel and am very intrigued by your explanations on various building aspects. I'm in the foundation industry as a screw pier site supervisor and would be very interested if you could do a pro v con video on the difference between steel screw piers vs conventional concrete piers. Thanks
There have been a bunch of papers now that highlight the very high levels of pollution generated by natural gas appliances within the home. Burning natural gas in the home just isn’t healthy. It is past time we switched to all electric homes, at least for new construction. Even if the power plant is using natural gas, that burning is not done in your home and the emissions controls are very different than what happens in the house. Plus, the grid is getting greener and so an all electric home’s carbon footprint also gets greener. Adding solar and batteries helps reduce the reliance on the grid.
I am looking at building a new all electric home in a few years. I totally agree that you need to think about what happens when the utility power goes down. I am planning on solar and battery backup, but have also thought about a wood burning stove as an additional backup. I just need to figure out how to make that work in a high efficiency home. One nice thing about well insulated homes is that they don't take that much power to just keep warm. Heating water and food become the big power users.
Keep up the great videos!! I live near Seattle,Wa. I'm a residential electrician. I've looked into a lot of alternative energy sources and I believe A all electric home is the answer for me,with a propane back up generator!!! You can all ways add alternative sources to the home!! I've been reading that they have banned natural gas in the California bay area and Seattle on commercial buildings. working around these homes in the Seattle area, you always smell gas!! never concentrated enough to sound alarms. But enough to know that I don't want it!!! Thanks again!!!
Belinda- After living through the Sylmar and Northridge earthquakes with the help of a gasoline-powered generator, I decided NEVER to be without an alternate energy source. Recently, I purchased a used 8KW light tower. After refurbishing it, I can run the whole house minus central A/C for days without "shore power". I am in New Mexico now where the grid has been wonderfully stable, but I have become very comfortable having a backup plan. In a future move to a remote mountain cabin, this little light tower will go with me. Sorry if this is off topic, but you made me think then rant. Love your videos.
Really appreciate your take on this. I personally have been thinking it'd be really nice to have an induction stove and heat pump powered by an off-grid combination of solar, wind, and hydroelectric (which of course would only be viable on a larger parcel of rural land)--but then having a rocket mass heater as a backup for cooking and heating the home--which could be fueled by a combination of wood scraps from a workshop or coppicced/pollarded trees in an agroforestry system. Proponents of rocket mass heaters claim that by burning wood and then also burning the smoke in a secondary chamber, rocket mass heaters produce 90% fewer fossil fuels than traditional wood stoves. Of course this is a pretty incredible claim, and I'd love to hear your take on them, given your expertise.
Thanks for making all of your videos. They're very interesting. It's interesting that you brought up the marketing of milk and milk alternatives. I've formally studied nutrition, so I can relate to your frustration about marketing, but from a nutritional perspective. You're right with your example about milk and milk alternatives. Dietary professionals haven't changed their opinions about those foods, because the science hasn't changed, but the people selling those like to pretend things are different, through misleading marketing (or outright lies, sometimes). One thing I learned from being taught how to research, people need to check the sources of people's claims. Sometimes that means having to search back four or five layers of references to find out a particular study was done by a company that sells products, rather than from impartial scientists.
For housing built off the grid, solar+battery bank+ all electric everything+ a wood stove that you can cook on seems to be a popular option. Those stoves don’t fire up often, but boy are they nice when they do. Propane also can be used in place of wood.
It seems to me that a lot people confuse energy storage, energy transition, and energy usage. I actually think an all-electric home is substantially easier to keep powered during some kind of crisis because you only have to worry about providing it with one "type" of energy. I used to live in an off-grid house that was "powered" completely by propane. It had a 500 gallon propane tank that was filled a few times a year, a propane hot water heater, fridge, and stove. Plumbing was gravity fed from a spring. The one big thing missing was lighting. The house did actually have electrical lighting and outlets but we'd have to run a generator to power them and we rarely did, instead relying on gas lamps after dark. Honestly it was a really nice setup but it definitely left an impression on me about different "forms" of energy and I think it's clear in this day and age that electricity is the most complete and ubiquitous form of energy. So I'll always go with electric. A side note about intermittent and sustained power outages: having a battery backup for a home is definitely more expensive but your house will never lose power even momentarily when the grid goes out for a short while. Which to me is very worth while. In a very long outage like Texas experienced, I see off-grid setups as the only real protection and, as I think you mentioned, that's only possible with all-electric houses.
4:00 mark you are spot on. As you mentioned with food as example there is science for most every view and then people bicker that their facts are the right facts because theirs are from science. And you sum up the issue well.
Me too and I am going all electric a multi split for heating and cooling,a water heater with heat pump built in , a dryer with heat pump built in, HRV with heat pump built in and if all the appliances do not give me enough savings I will put pvt solar panels on a roof to boost efficiency of a multi split with heat they produce during a day and to cover other needs with electricity from them
Thank you for showing the stove with downdraft air-filter circulator, but darn are they expensive (time to make one myself!). Keep up the good work! I have 2 stoves in my home design, one electric, one on gas. Both are 2-pit stoves. Since I work from home (and always will), I use solar panels (no battery pack) to power the electric stove, small 10kg (22lbs) gas tank when cooking needs to be done at night.
I'm with you, Belinda. I rely on natural gas for heating, new solar panels for most of my electricity, battery backup on the offgrid solar (manual transfer switch) and an outside wood burning stove for backup heat (I hate smoke in the house). I may get a small 2.4ton split heat pump which can run off my solar panels during blackouts. Forget selling electricity to the grid. They no longer want it and some places are penalizing people who install solar on their homes!
Great video! Those old electric baseboard heaters were a great source of childhood injuries too, LOL! It's a great point about the need for backup power. We had a wind storm a few months ago that knocked out power for a week and fortunately, a friend of ours had an extra gas generator that helped us keep our food preserved and allowed the kids to use zoom for classes. After that experience, I bought a gas generator and also investigated solar panels and battery backups for the house. The solar and battery solution was so expensive that we opted to hold off. I would love to have a carbon neutral and pollution free future, but to those people thinking we can just cut off fossil fuels fail to see why fossil fuels still run the world: they are still more energy dense and use less energy to extract than all electric green technologies. Unless we can have a significant advancement in nuclear power, maybe Thorium or Fusion, I don't see fossil fuels being replaced anytime in the next few decades. Also... airplanes... I mean, people like jet travel... just saying.
Born in 1961, but several of the homes around us were still heated with coal. Our house was heated with oil and we were far ahead of many.. lol... I remember to this day how horrible the smoke was coming out of chimneys when I was a kid. I also remember several chimney fires. I was born and raised in Western NY. Right on Lake Ontario. We had power outages and ice storms and water main freezes and along with those freezes they would shut off natural gas just incase.... Our fireplace had been converted to a natural gas fireplace, but in those days they were very sketchy, so ours was never used. I have lived in Tampa Bay, Florida since 1994' and have been through several power outages and yes, several freezes. I have a lot to say about solar and the BS POLITICS behind NOT being able to use our solar panels when the grid is down. It is all GREED!!!!!!! I would love to do a one on one with you on all of this one day, but for now, I will say this: Homes must be built FAR BETTER than they are today in most parts of this country. ALL HOMES should be built with a storm room or rooms that can stand up to any weather and provide security and comfort. A kitchen and master bedroom with bathroom that can be powered by batteries, generator (ON DEMAND). Solar powered homes with battery back-up, but maybe each home with solar that normally runs off from a single transformer shares a battery bank. Maybe also a generator. How about every high power line and power station now has it's own solar. We have thousands and thousands of miles of power line roads all over Florida and this country. Why aren't they lined with solar panels and battery banks to maintain each section they provide for now???? We deal with hurricanes, high winds, flooding, smoking hot temps and freezing temps here and the occurrence is more and more often, but instead of making real repairs to everything, politicians are blaming the other party... WHY???? Because those companies are the ones with the real paychecks for those same politicians... When we ALL understand that, we can ALL work at LOCKING THEM ALL UP!!!!!
In the northeast I diversified my house with 3 totally independent heating system. Pellet, oil and heatpump. Pellet and oil I can run on a 2000w generator or inverter and heatpump is my big gen. So 3 systems 3 different power sources. Zero worries about a multi week even
Great info Belinda! Using one energy source for a home is a BAD idea. We have a farmhouse in upstate ny. It has a woodstove which we use all winter long. Also, radiant heat, I think its fuel oil. We also have a Kohler back up generator which was just used last week when a huge wind storm came through and knocked out our power. We used to use a pto tractor driven generator when power went out years ago to get the cows milked. That think was terrible. It worked fine but need to run the tractor at high rpms to run the generator so it was very loud and not easy to hook up. And we have a propane cooking stove/oven. We are neve without heat or a why to cook which is most important for times of power loss.
The house my Mom owned had that medallion home badge on the breaker box.... It had a natural gas furnace when we moved into it in the mid nineties. LOL so somewhere between being built in 1952 and 1995 someone desided electric heat was not the best. LOL. But it's nice to know what that badge was for.
