3 ms·
I don't really consider myself an expert, honestly. Part of my frustration with the bent of this kind of conversation is how hard it makes it to really suss out
by stormbrew 5y ago
I don't really consider myself an expert, honestly. Part of my frustration with the bent of this kind of conversation is how hard it makes it to really suss out answers to these kinds of questions honestly.
That said, I live in an area where most home heating is done by natural gas delivered to homes and installed a heat pump last year. I had a lot of trouble finding an hvac company that would do it because it's still quite uncommon where I live, and even they had a lot of misinformation about it. I had a lot of reasons for doing this both related and unrelated to climate change:
- The heat dome demonstrated that our house, which is relatively new and built to modern standards so is designed to soak up heat like a sponge, could not be comfortable without AC in a summer like that, of which I expect many more in the future.
- If I was getting an AC anyways, there's literally no reason not to have a heat pump and use it for heating in the milder months and reduce my direct use of gas to only when it's absolutely necessary (ie. the last few weeks where we've had a shockingly long cold snap).
- And if I was going to run AC I should absolutely have solar as well so I'm not using grid energy to power it (where I live grid energy is very much dominated by coal and natural gas, though coal is thankfully reducing quickly).
- Even though the energy mix is mostly GHG-emitting where I live, down to some specific temperature (probably around -10 to -15C with the expensive heat pump I got), a heat pump simply uses far less electric energy than an equivalent amount of gas burned in the house. It's quite a big difference. It doesn't look like it because electricity is priced much higher per kWh-equivalent than gas.
But I think there's a lot of more complicated things people 'should' do as well? Since my house is new, the trees on the lot are quite small so provide very little shade in summer. Hopefully this improves as they grow, and maybe we'll plant some more. We're also probably going to install awnings on the windows that are more or less positioned to block direct sunlight in the summer and let it through in the winter. Generally finding ways to passively heat and cool your house is the best thing you can possibly do and even though I'm doing the above as part of electrifying, I plan to do a lot more of the other sorts of things as well.