5 ms·

My parents live 15 minutes out of town in North Western Ontario and they end up paying $1000-$2000/month in winter to Hydro One for heating, even though they ha

My parents live 15 minutes out of town in North Western Ontario and they end up paying $1000-$2000/month in winter to Hydro One for heating, even though they have a well insulated house. You are pretty much screwed. They know people who got solar and the government promised them a certain rate, and then went back on their word and those people got boned as they could no longer afford their 40k installations over 25 years. I've never heard anything good about Hydro One.

Scoundreller 5y ago
Wood, oil or propane not an option? All should be cheaper than resistive heating.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Oil tanks are dangerous and unpleasant things to store and maintain, and very dependent on road viability for the once or twice yearly top up. I've known plenty of people in the North East that used oil for heating and they all hated it, and I bet it's easier to get an oil truck to top up your tank in Massachusetts or Maine than it is in Ontario. Oh, and the oil tank is an explosion hazard if you need to do any work on it. Wood heating is a lot of labor. It's sustainable if you have forest land, but still a ton of labor. Even pre-seasoned and delivered wood takes a lot of work. The general rule of thumb is that you need to envision literally filling your living space with wood in order to have enough to heat your home with wood burning stoves. Wood just doesn't put out the BTUs per pound that oil, coal, or other petroleum products do. Propane seems to be the go-to, but I know very little about storing and running your house off of it. I think in the future the answer is going to be geothermal, or "ground source heat pumps". They work like reversible AC units that use ground temp water to extract heat from. They're more efficient than regular ACs, allowing you to heat your home with ~1/3 the electricity of regular resistance heating, but the installation costs in suburban areas are extreme due to the deep wells needed. If you live in rural areas though you can use shallower trenches to lay the tubing down below the frost line, making this a much more viable choice.
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    Sounds like they’re quite happy with the value provided by $1500-$2000/month from heating electrically. Alas, if your home is well insulated, a newer wood stove should do the trick, but if moving it from a stack outside and cleaning ash is too much, I get it, stay electric. Propane is delivered just like oil, but can be stored outside. Usually you get them refilled more often, so if road access is an issue, it’s not a great primary.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      Propane freezes. It takes some extreme temperatures to do so, but it does so at temperatures experienced in rural Ontario.
      - p1mrx 5y ago
        Propane freezes at 86 K; the lowest recorded temperature on Earth was 184 K. There are a variety of things that can go wrong at low temperatures, like what happened with natural gas in Texas, but the propane itself isn't going to freeze.
        Scoundreller 5y ago
        As long as your tank is big enough, yes. The issue is propane is stored as a liquid, and when you draw it, it boils (and it must boil) but the evaporation makes the tank colder than ambient. Boiling point of propane is -42C. When it’s -30 and you’re drawing a lot of propane… yeah, your evaporation rate may suffer. Interestingly, a stiff wind is helpful here to warm the tank up to -30 (if it isn’t buried in wind-blocking and insulating snow…) Propane tank heaters are a thing for this reason. The issue in Texas was that you have regulators and pressure reducing valves, but going from high pressure to low pressure is cooling, leading to frozen valves/regulators because it wasn’t designed for liquid infiltration and the cold temps generated.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      Probably less "happy with the value" and more "the capital costs of installing something more efficient are too high".

Scoundreller 5y ago

Wood, oil or propane not an option? All should be cheaper than resistive heating.

ashtonkem 5y ago
Oil tanks are dangerous and unpleasant things to store and maintain, and very dependent on road viability for the once or twice yearly top up. I've known plenty of people in the North East that used oil for heating and they all hated it, and I bet it's easier to get an oil truck to top up your tank in Massachusetts or Maine than it is in Ontario. Oh, and the oil tank is an explosion hazard if you need to do any work on it. Wood heating is a lot of labor. It's sustainable if you have forest land, but still a ton of labor. Even pre-seasoned and delivered wood takes a lot of work. The general rule of thumb is that you need to envision literally filling your living space with wood in order to have enough to heat your home with wood burning stoves. Wood just doesn't put out the BTUs per pound that oil, coal, or other petroleum products do. Propane seems to be the go-to, but I know very little about storing and running your house off of it. I think in the future the answer is going to be geothermal, or "ground source heat pumps". They work like reversible AC units that use ground temp water to extract heat from. They're more efficient than regular ACs, allowing you to heat your home with ~1/3 the electricity of regular resistance heating, but the installation costs in suburban areas are extreme due to the deep wells needed. If you live in rural areas though you can use shallower trenches to lay the tubing down below the frost line, making this a much more viable choice.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Sounds like they’re quite happy with the value provided by $1500-$2000/month from heating electrically. Alas, if your home is well insulated, a newer wood stove should do the trick, but if moving it from a stack outside and cleaning ash is too much, I get it, stay electric. Propane is delivered just like oil, but can be stored outside. Usually you get them refilled more often, so if road access is an issue, it’s not a great primary.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Propane freezes. It takes some extreme temperatures to do so, but it does so at temperatures experienced in rural Ontario.
    - p1mrx 5y ago
      Propane freezes at 86 K; the lowest recorded temperature on Earth was 184 K. There are a variety of things that can go wrong at low temperatures, like what happened with natural gas in Texas, but the propane itself isn't going to freeze.
      - Scoundreller 5y ago
        As long as your tank is big enough, yes. The issue is propane is stored as a liquid, and when you draw it, it boils (and it must boil) but the evaporation makes the tank colder than ambient. Boiling point of propane is -42C. When it’s -30 and you’re drawing a lot of propane… yeah, your evaporation rate may suffer. Interestingly, a stiff wind is helpful here to warm the tank up to -30 (if it isn’t buried in wind-blocking and insulating snow…) Propane tank heaters are a thing for this reason. The issue in Texas was that you have regulators and pressure reducing valves, but going from high pressure to low pressure is cooling, leading to frozen valves/regulators because it wasn’t designed for liquid infiltration and the cold temps generated.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Probably less "happy with the value" and more "the capital costs of installing something more efficient are too high".