3 ms·

And yet people I know are moving to Texas to avoid Winter, while still working for the same company and org. Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than i

by jmclnx 4y ago

And yet people I know are moving to Texas to avoid Winter, while still working for the same company and org. Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool. Wonder how these places will fare in 10 years time, or will some people in the south pretend the rising heat is "fake news".

manmal 4y ago
> it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool Is it? Solar panels without any buffer battery should be a cheap energy source for an AC. There's also the possibility of using an air-to-air heat pump that warms in winter and cools in summer. Coupled with solar energy that should work quite well in Texas.
- JaimeThompson 4y ago
  I think you would want a small amount of battery just so the AC units wouldn't be damaged by rapid restart cycles but I am far from an expert on this.
  - manmal 4y ago
    Fair enough, I agree! Or a supercapacitor. Some EVs also allow bidirectional charging now, that‘s a pretty big buffer „for free“ as long as it’s in the garage at home.
xyzzyz 4y ago
> Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool. This really depends on what two places we are comparing. It’s definitely cheaper to heat your house in Bay Area than to cool it in Texas, but the story becomes different when you compare Texas with, say, Minnesota.
stefan_ 4y ago
Huh? Heating from 0 to 22 seems more energy intensive than cooling from 35 to that same number. Not to mention most heating is done through the equivalent of resistive heat, while ACs are overwhelmingly heat pumps.
- apcragg 4y ago
  That's very much not true about heaters. The most common systems in the US are gas, heat pumps, and oil. Resistive heat is nearly always an emergency backup in places that get meaningfully cold for any amount of time.
  - megaman821 4y ago
    Resistive heating is more efficient than burning gas for heat. Gas has been historically cheap, so burning it has made economic sense over using electricity. Heat pumps are kinda what the sound like. Pumping 30 degrees of heat inside to keep warm takes more energy than pumping 20 degrees of heat outside to stay cool. Heating costs will come to dominate residential energy usage as people electrify their homes. A/C will be number two or possibly number 3 behind water heating.
    - apcragg 4y ago
      Efficient doesn't really mean anything without an thorough understanding of the local energy grid. Distributed solar mixed with wind and some gas peakers? Sure, probably better from a GhG perspective to use restive heat, even if it isn't cheaper cost wise. Running your house on a coal heavy grid with long transmission lines? Yeah, gas is probably better in the short to medium term unless you can get a good deal on solar panels and storage. All of that's kinda moot though since modern heat pumps are insanely effective, relatively cheap to install, and work down to sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures using only air-source exchangers.
samatman 4y ago
> Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool This is a strange hint given that it's false, and this is easily looked up. https://www.raleighheatingandair.com/blog/is-a-heat-pump-more-effective-at-cooling-or-heating/ https://www.raleighheatingandair.com/blog/is-a-heat-pump-mor... That just happens to be the first link I found, everyone will tell you the same thing. A degree of cooling is about five times as efficient as a degree of heating. It's easy to see why. A heat pump gets its heat from either the ground or the air, either way this has to be amplified considerably because they are colder than the comfortable temperature. Heat pumps running backward, air conditioners if you will, merely concentrate the heat and expel it. Making matters worse, the amount colder than ideal which cold climates get is far lower than the amount hotter which hot climates achieve. Making matters even worse than that, cold climates such as the Midwest still require air conditioning, just not for as many months. Bottom line: Texas is cheaper to keep at a given interior temperature than Ohio. It isn't even close.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  I imagine the design of the house in question matters a lot, as well as the contingency issue, i.e. people aren't prepared for ever more common freak weather events in their locale, such as a deep freeze in Texas or a heat wave in Ohio. These can have disproportionate impacts for the unprepared (pipes bursting, heat stroke, etc.).
  - samatman 4y ago
    It won't though, the statement I'm replying to is normalized to one house. There's just no cheaper way to heat a house than to cool it, energetically speaking. Economically, sure, maybe you have a back lot and cordwood, who knows.
ceejayoz 4y ago
Hundreds dead: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/02/texas-winter-storm-final-death-toll-246/ https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/02/texas-winter-storm-f... $16k heating bills: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/texas-storm-electric-bills.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/texas-storm-electric-b... Texas can’t handle the cold, either.
- salawat 4y ago
  Let's take a look at the report... https://www.dshs.texas.gov/news/updates/SMOC_FebWinterStorm_MortalitySurvReport_12-30-21.pdf https://www.dshs.texas.gov/news/updates/SMOC_FebWinterStorm_... I'll be damned, lookat that. Most in Metro areas that have completely mismanaged their grids! I figured Austin would probably be the the worst given I got to see that idiocy with my own eyes. If you weren't in an Urban center, odds were you were hunkered down, and even then, you had people like me that were calling around checking on people to make sure they were alright. I'd hazard a guess there may have been some factors at play where many people didn't have sufficient experience with cold weather ops to know what kinds of community efforts to organize. And besides which, we Texans can be a stubborn bunch, at times to our own detriment. Other boots on the ground reports: Dallas had power suspiciously seemingly divided along income boundaries. (Most affordable housing areas were load shed while higher value residential areas kept their lights on). Austin's water system bit the dust. So did Lockhart's. I don't want to hear a thing about it from an out of stater. Especially since frigging ERCOT/The PUC was apparently mostly run by them. One getting caught assuring Wall Street their energy futures would be safe. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/wall-street-profited-off-texas-blackouts/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/wall-street-profi... And they were appointed by that idiot Abbott. Bloody corruption and incompetence at it's finest.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    “The deaths were mostly where lots of people live” is a take, I suppose.
robonerd 4y ago
> Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool. The problem is people insist on heating their homes far beyond what is strictly necessary. They demand a 25 C / 80 F indoor experience in the dead of winter so they can walk around inside in shorts like it were summer. Modern homes require heating to prevent pipes from freezing, but anything much more than that is pure luxury, not a necessity. Turn the heat down to 10 C / 50 F, then buy more blankets for your bed and some long-sleeve shirts for during the day. If you have an infant or elderly person in the house that need more heat, you can heat individual rooms a lot cheaper than an entire house. The power goes out completely, you can even double-bunk to stay warm. That isn't considered comfortable in modern culture, but our not-so-distant ancestors used to think nothing of it. It's certainly better than freezing. If freezing to death is a real concern, then you're in a survival situation and need to stop obsessing with comfort. Elderly people living alone are at the greatest risk, but none of this is an insurmountable problem, particularly if a community has the wherewithal to plan for it before it happens. However to make people change their behavior will probably require rationing. Without rationing, everybody feels entitled to luxury and will greedily take as much as they can, collapsing fragile grids and generally wasting energy on robust grids. If you have common sense and think ahead, cold temperatures are easy to survive. The scenario you should fear is the power going out during high-humidity heat waves. You can wrap yourself with more blankets if you get cold and survive near-arctic conditions, but if you've got a 40C wet bulb heatwave and no power to run AC, you're in seriously dire straights. Stripping nude won't help, evaporation cooling stops working, and staying in the shade won't keep you cool enough to survive. If the power is out, many people won't even have access to cool tap water; their only option would be to jump in rivers and lakes.

by jmclnx 4y ago

manmal 4y ago

> it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool Is it? Solar panels without any buffer battery should be a cheap energy source for an AC. There's also the possibility of using an air-to-air heat pump that warms in winter and cools in summer. Coupled with solar energy that should work quite well in Texas.

JaimeThompson 4y ago
I think you would want a small amount of battery just so the AC units wouldn't be damaged by rapid restart cycles but I am far from an expert on this.
- manmal 4y ago
  Fair enough, I agree! Or a supercapacitor. Some EVs also allow bidirectional charging now, that‘s a pretty big buffer „for free“ as long as it’s in the garage at home.

xyzzyz 4y ago

> Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool. This really depends on what two places we are comparing. It’s definitely cheaper to heat your house in Bay Area than to cool it in Texas, but the story becomes different when you compare Texas with, say, Minnesota.

stefan_ 4y ago

Huh? Heating from 0 to 22 seems more energy intensive than cooling from 35 to that same number. Not to mention most heating is done through the equivalent of resistive heat, while ACs are overwhelmingly heat pumps.

apcragg 4y ago
That's very much not true about heaters. The most common systems in the US are gas, heat pumps, and oil. Resistive heat is nearly always an emergency backup in places that get meaningfully cold for any amount of time.
- megaman821 4y ago
  Resistive heating is more efficient than burning gas for heat. Gas has been historically cheap, so burning it has made economic sense over using electricity. Heat pumps are kinda what the sound like. Pumping 30 degrees of heat inside to keep warm takes more energy than pumping 20 degrees of heat outside to stay cool. Heating costs will come to dominate residential energy usage as people electrify their homes. A/C will be number two or possibly number 3 behind water heating.
  - apcragg 4y ago
    Efficient doesn't really mean anything without an thorough understanding of the local energy grid. Distributed solar mixed with wind and some gas peakers? Sure, probably better from a GhG perspective to use restive heat, even if it isn't cheaper cost wise. Running your house on a coal heavy grid with long transmission lines? Yeah, gas is probably better in the short to medium term unless you can get a good deal on solar panels and storage. All of that's kinda moot though since modern heat pumps are insanely effective, relatively cheap to install, and work down to sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures using only air-source exchangers.

samatman 4y ago

> Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool This is a strange hint given that it's false, and this is easily looked up. https://www.raleighheatingandair.com/blog/is-a-heat-pump-more-effective-at-cooling-or-heating/ https://www.raleighheatingandair.com/blog/is-a-heat-pump-mor... That just happens to be the first link I found, everyone will tell you the same thing. A degree of cooling is about five times as efficient as a degree of heating. It's easy to see why. A heat pump gets its heat from either the ground or the air, either way this has to be amplified considerably because they are colder than the comfortable temperature. Heat pumps running backward, air conditioners if you will, merely concentrate the heat and expel it. Making matters worse, the amount colder than ideal which cold climates get is far lower than the amount hotter which hot climates achieve. Making matters even worse than that, cold climates such as the Midwest still require air conditioning, just not for as many months. Bottom line: Texas is cheaper to keep at a given interior temperature than Ohio. It isn't even close.

photochemsyn 4y ago
I imagine the design of the house in question matters a lot, as well as the contingency issue, i.e. people aren't prepared for ever more common freak weather events in their locale, such as a deep freeze in Texas or a heat wave in Ohio. These can have disproportionate impacts for the unprepared (pipes bursting, heat stroke, etc.).
- samatman 4y ago
  It won't though, the statement I'm replying to is normalized to one house. There's just no cheaper way to heat a house than to cool it, energetically speaking. Economically, sure, maybe you have a back lot and cordwood, who knows.

ceejayoz 4y ago

Hundreds dead: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/02/texas-winter-storm-final-death-toll-246/ https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/02/texas-winter-storm-f... $16k heating bills: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/texas-storm-electric-bills.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/texas-storm-electric-b... Texas can’t handle the cold, either.

salawat 4y ago
Let's take a look at the report... https://www.dshs.texas.gov/news/updates/SMOC_FebWinterStorm_MortalitySurvReport_12-30-21.pdf https://www.dshs.texas.gov/news/updates/SMOC_FebWinterStorm_... I'll be damned, lookat that. Most in Metro areas that have completely mismanaged their grids! I figured Austin would probably be the the worst given I got to see that idiocy with my own eyes. If you weren't in an Urban center, odds were you were hunkered down, and even then, you had people like me that were calling around checking on people to make sure they were alright. I'd hazard a guess there may have been some factors at play where many people didn't have sufficient experience with cold weather ops to know what kinds of community efforts to organize. And besides which, we Texans can be a stubborn bunch, at times to our own detriment. Other boots on the ground reports: Dallas had power suspiciously seemingly divided along income boundaries. (Most affordable housing areas were load shed while higher value residential areas kept their lights on). Austin's water system bit the dust. So did Lockhart's. I don't want to hear a thing about it from an out of stater. Especially since frigging ERCOT/The PUC was apparently mostly run by them. One getting caught assuring Wall Street their energy futures would be safe. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/wall-street-profited-off-texas-blackouts/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/wall-street-profi... And they were appointed by that idiot Abbott. Bloody corruption and incompetence at it's finest.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  “The deaths were mostly where lots of people live” is a take, I suppose.

robonerd 4y ago

> Hint, it is cheaper to make your house warm than it is to keep it cool. The problem is people insist on heating their homes far beyond what is strictly necessary. They demand a 25 C / 80 F indoor experience in the dead of winter so they can walk around inside in shorts like it were summer. Modern homes require heating to prevent pipes from freezing, but anything much more than that is pure luxury, not a necessity. Turn the heat down to 10 C / 50 F, then buy more blankets for your bed and some long-sleeve shirts for during the day. If you have an infant or elderly person in the house that need more heat, you can heat individual rooms a lot cheaper than an entire house. The power goes out completely, you can even double-bunk to stay warm. That isn't considered comfortable in modern culture, but our not-so-distant ancestors used to think nothing of it. It's certainly better than freezing. If freezing to death is a real concern, then you're in a survival situation and need to stop obsessing with comfort. Elderly people living alone are at the greatest risk, but none of this is an insurmountable problem, particularly if a community has the wherewithal to plan for it before it happens. However to make people change their behavior will probably require rationing. Without rationing, everybody feels entitled to luxury and will greedily take as much as they can, collapsing fragile grids and generally wasting energy on robust grids. If you have common sense and think ahead, cold temperatures are easy to survive. The scenario you should fear is the power going out during high-humidity heat waves. You can wrap yourself with more blankets if you get cold and survive near-arctic conditions, but if you've got a 40C wet bulb heatwave and no power to run AC, you're in seriously dire straights. Stripping nude won't help, evaporation cooling stops working, and staying in the shade won't keep you cool enough to survive. If the power is out, many people won't even have access to cool tap water; their only option would be to jump in rivers and lakes.