6 ms·

I don't know what you are talking about. It's literally as easy as buying a $15 electric space heater from the next store and plugging it into an existing wall

by jupp0r 4y ago

I don't know what you are talking about. It's literally as easy as buying a $15 electric space heater from the next store and plugging it into an existing wall outlet. The rest is just aesthetics. Electric water heaters are also affordable, small and easy to install yourself.

dbrgn 4y ago
Are you saying that hot water based central heating systems with radiators should be replaced by throwing an electric heater in every room? You can't be serious. There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  As a quick, temporary emergency measure? Yes.
  - j0057 4y ago
    I don't think there are warehouses full of electric heaters waiting on the off chance half a continent switches from central heating to this.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
      a) I think many people already have some heaters sitting around somewhere. b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months. c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  What's the efficiency of a 2kW electric heater? It's 100%, which is not terrible. If the electricity production of your country sucks, that should be fixed for other reasons than heating.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Actually, for most of Europe, it should be fixed specifically for the purpose of enabling electrical heating.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  These $15 space heaters have thermostats, you set a temperature and they heat the room until that temperature is reached. I'm sure you can get a $50 version that speaks smart home protocols of your choice so you can program schedules if that's what you want. Not sure how turning valves on several water radiators per room is more convenient.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    These cheap (seriously a $15 heater can’t produce enough heat to cover a room larger than a small bedroom) heaters also can’t be controlled with a central thermostat. Water radiators (or electric heat pumps, etc) can be controlled for the whole home, or by individual locations (without needing to manually turn valves). In fact, at least in the US, space heaters aren’t allowed to be automatically turned on by any means. They require a person to start it manually each time you want heat. Because they aren’t permanently installed, it is a potential fire hazard. A pet/kid/etc could run past it and knock it over. If that happened near a blanket or pillow, the fabric could catch fire. I can’t imagine being able to buy something less safe in Switzerland.
    - jupp0r 4y ago
      I really don't know what else to tell you. This is $20 on Amazon, has tip over protection and a thermostat. Of course there are inexpensive wall mounted options available that you also plug into a wall outlet. These are super popular in Scandinavia. Portable Electric Space Heater with Thermostat, 1500W/750W Safe and Quiet Ceramic Heater Fan, Heat Up 200 Square Feet for Office Room Desk Indoor Use https://a.co/d/2uD3YJu https://a.co/d/2uD3YJu
      - mbreese 4y ago
        I said a central thermostat. This is the context I was referring to. As in a remotely controlled heater where the thermostat is on the wall as opposed to on the device. This is what you’d need to use to keep a home heated while you aren’t there. I happen to have a space heater on right now next to me. It has a very nice remote app on my phone. And it is very clear that the heat function only works from the device itself (due to a legal requirement to support UL 1278). If your cheap heater has a built in thermostat that turns itself on, that’s great… while you’re there watching it. But I can’t say that’s something that I’d ever feel comfortable leaving always plugged in. They are only ever supposed to be used while attended - for a reason. The updated version of the product you linked to (2022 digital version) even has an automatic shutdown timer. You have to manually start it again after that shutdown. I also have a permanently installed electric heater installed in the wall in a different room. It does have a permanent thermostat that can start/stop automatically. It’s quite a different beast from a $20 space heater with its own circuit back to my breaker box. It works pretty well, but portable, it is not. It was also much more than $20. But, back to your original point — are you really suggesting replacing the entire German heating infrastructure with $20 ceramic heaters from Amazon? How is that a remotely viable solution? These are devices meant for heating a small office. If you want to heat an apartment or house or city, you need different options. And changing those over takes time and more consideration than buying a bunch of $20 space heaters.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  I don't believe your apartment in Switzerland only has one 16A circuit it can draw from, that wouldn't be up to electrical code in most European countries that require one 16A circuit per room. No expert in Switzerland electric code specifically though. The last apartment in Germany I lived in (1 bedroom 1 bathroom) had 4x16A circuits and separate 3x16A for the electric kitchen stove.
- stevage 4y ago
  Do you have a source for them being banned? I could only find an article saying they were being phased out by 2025. https://www.thelocal.ch/20120925/swiss-mps-back-ban-on-electric-heaters/ https://www.thelocal.ch/20120925/swiss-mps-back-ban-on-elect...
- Miraste 4y ago
  >the efficiency is terrible I've heard a few people say this, but it's not true - the efficiency of electric heaters is 100%. They're only detrimental when they run off of fossil-fuel based power plants. Instead of making silly laws banning symptoms, our focus should be on removing the pollution at its source.
  - noctune 4y ago
    100% efficiency is terrible compared to the 600% efficiency of a heat pump.
withinboredom 4y ago
Ugh. I wish it were that simple. The wiring in my home won’t take more than a single space heater before blowing a fuse (every plug in the house is on the same circuit) and I wouldn’t trust a $15 space heater with my life.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Where is your house located? It's not up to electic code in any country I've lived in.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    Most electrical codes only require updates (to bring the system into compliance) when there is work being done. So if you don’t need to add a circuit, your home may still be wired as if it were the 1950s (or earlier!). This is part of the hidden cost and complexity. For someone like the parent, you’d have to rewire an entire home. How long do you think that will take? If you seriously wanted to move an entire country over to electric heating, you’ll have all sorts of these edge cases. There simply isn’t a way to make a switch like that in a rapid manner.
    - jupp0r 4y ago
      The average home can use a water kettle and a gaming PC at the same time, you are making some super rare edge cases seem like the norm. I've seen lots of old buildings and none was wired so inadequately that you couldn't heat it electrically.
      - withinboredom 4y ago
        Yes, my home is wired from ancient times. Last year we had monthly blackouts in our home. It took multiple electricians to figure out that our home wasn’t wired to code, and finally to learn that two wires had melted together and were a fire hazard. It was easy to replace them but, impossible to rewire the house to bring it up to code. All the walls would have to be ripped out, which just isn’t feasible on a realistic budget. The service coming in from the neighborhood is only rated for 25 amps too. They’ll have to lay new cable to get 50 amps and support a heat pump. There’s been some talk on the block about pooling money to pay for it, but nothing serious yet.
cycomanic 4y ago
As long as you are using fossil fuels to generate electricity using electric space heaters is counterproductive because you actually produce significantly more CO2 than just burning the gas directly (this applies to France as well btw). The space heater comment also let's me to believe that you never lived in a country that requires proper heating. Now heatpumps are a different issue, however they require to upgrade insulation as well.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric. Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays? I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    > The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric. Sure it does, it directly effects prices. Also the efficiency affects how much CO2 you generate, you don't win anything if the absolute amount of CO2 goes up. > Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays? Because the system has a big inertia? AFAIK there are no western countries who generate 100% of their electricity fossil free, Norway and New Zealand come quite close but are not 100%. For most countries its still around 30% at least which is fossil. > I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy. OK then do the exercise, the price for electricity is ~0.28 kWh, how much would it cost to heat that cabin for the year (and we haven't heated water yet).
fomine3 4y ago
Please don't. Heat pump FTW.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Of course that's more efficient but won't matter (from an environmental perspective, might still make economic sense) in a few years when all electricity comes from carbon free sources. If this won't be the case then heating will be the least of our problems.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    I think you're optimistic if you think we'll have zero carbon electricity production in a few years, at a scale that will allow us to replace all NG and oil heating with electrical, especially without heat pumps. Even if we make it a primary priority, and try to maximally ramp up both wind, solar and nuclear production (+ storage as needed), I don't think we will be able to do it in less than 30 year, 20 at best.
bcrl 4y ago
No, that isn't a realistic option. My grandparent's place over in Germany is a huge 3 story place heated by a hot water boiler system and plenty of rooms. There's absolutely no way that you can heat that place with electric heaters in every room without blowing fuses constantly, and if you switch over to an electric boiler, there's a good chance the connection to the electrical grid is inadequate as it was installed 70+ years ago when life was very different. Europe is not like north American as older housing stock is not easily retrofitted without significant costs being incurred. Plus there are plenty of high density buildings as land is precious and expensive, so we're not talking about 1 story bungalows being the norm. This is what happens when towns have already existed in place for centuries.
- trashtester 4y ago
  My house is similar to that of your grandparents. The house was built 70 years ago, and originally it had a coal fueld boiler, which was switched to a heating oil boiler (twice, I think) with the one in place when I bought it also having a 6KW electrical backup coil. In 2020 my country (Norway) made it illegal to use fossil fuels for heating, so I had to upgrade my grid connection and buy a couple of space heaters to account for the days where 6kW is not enough. At the time (2020), electricity was still very cheap here, due to Norway being self supplied with almost-free hydropower. Now that we're able to export all our surplus electricity (and then some), and we're seeing German electricity prices here, I suppose I need to get a heat pump. TLDR; Given a couple of decades, it's perfectly possible to move the population away from fossil fuel heating IF you have large amounts of affordable electricity.

by jupp0r 4y ago

dbrgn 4y ago

Are you saying that hot water based central heating systems with radiators should be replaced by throwing an electric heater in every room? You can't be serious. There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
As a quick, temporary emergency measure? Yes.
- j0057 4y ago
  I don't think there are warehouses full of electric heaters waiting on the off chance half a continent switches from central heating to this.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
    a) I think many people already have some heaters sitting around somewhere. b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months. c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.
jupp0r 4y ago
What's the efficiency of a 2kW electric heater? It's 100%, which is not terrible. If the electricity production of your country sucks, that should be fixed for other reasons than heating.
- trashtester 4y ago
  Actually, for most of Europe, it should be fixed specifically for the purpose of enabling electrical heating.
jupp0r 4y ago
These $15 space heaters have thermostats, you set a temperature and they heat the room until that temperature is reached. I'm sure you can get a $50 version that speaks smart home protocols of your choice so you can program schedules if that's what you want. Not sure how turning valves on several water radiators per room is more convenient.
- mbreese 4y ago
  These cheap (seriously a $15 heater can’t produce enough heat to cover a room larger than a small bedroom) heaters also can’t be controlled with a central thermostat. Water radiators (or electric heat pumps, etc) can be controlled for the whole home, or by individual locations (without needing to manually turn valves). In fact, at least in the US, space heaters aren’t allowed to be automatically turned on by any means. They require a person to start it manually each time you want heat. Because they aren’t permanently installed, it is a potential fire hazard. A pet/kid/etc could run past it and knock it over. If that happened near a blanket or pillow, the fabric could catch fire. I can’t imagine being able to buy something less safe in Switzerland.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    I really don't know what else to tell you. This is $20 on Amazon, has tip over protection and a thermostat. Of course there are inexpensive wall mounted options available that you also plug into a wall outlet. These are super popular in Scandinavia. Portable Electric Space Heater with Thermostat, 1500W/750W Safe and Quiet Ceramic Heater Fan, Heat Up 200 Square Feet for Office Room Desk Indoor Use https://a.co/d/2uD3YJu https://a.co/d/2uD3YJu
    - mbreese 4y ago
      I said a central thermostat. This is the context I was referring to. As in a remotely controlled heater where the thermostat is on the wall as opposed to on the device. This is what you’d need to use to keep a home heated while you aren’t there. I happen to have a space heater on right now next to me. It has a very nice remote app on my phone. And it is very clear that the heat function only works from the device itself (due to a legal requirement to support UL 1278). If your cheap heater has a built in thermostat that turns itself on, that’s great… while you’re there watching it. But I can’t say that’s something that I’d ever feel comfortable leaving always plugged in. They are only ever supposed to be used while attended - for a reason. The updated version of the product you linked to (2022 digital version) even has an automatic shutdown timer. You have to manually start it again after that shutdown. I also have a permanently installed electric heater installed in the wall in a different room. It does have a permanent thermostat that can start/stop automatically. It’s quite a different beast from a $20 space heater with its own circuit back to my breaker box. It works pretty well, but portable, it is not. It was also much more than $20. But, back to your original point — are you really suggesting replacing the entire German heating infrastructure with $20 ceramic heaters from Amazon? How is that a remotely viable solution? These are devices meant for heating a small office. If you want to heat an apartment or house or city, you need different options. And changing those over takes time and more consideration than buying a bunch of $20 space heaters.
jupp0r 4y ago
I don't believe your apartment in Switzerland only has one 16A circuit it can draw from, that wouldn't be up to electrical code in most European countries that require one 16A circuit per room. No expert in Switzerland electric code specifically though. The last apartment in Germany I lived in (1 bedroom 1 bathroom) had 4x16A circuits and separate 3x16A for the electric kitchen stove.
stevage 4y ago
Do you have a source for them being banned? I could only find an article saying they were being phased out by 2025. https://www.thelocal.ch/20120925/swiss-mps-back-ban-on-electric-heaters/ https://www.thelocal.ch/20120925/swiss-mps-back-ban-on-elect...
Miraste 4y ago
>the efficiency is terrible I've heard a few people say this, but it's not true - the efficiency of electric heaters is 100%. They're only detrimental when they run off of fossil-fuel based power plants. Instead of making silly laws banning symptoms, our focus should be on removing the pollution at its source.
- noctune 4y ago
  100% efficiency is terrible compared to the 600% efficiency of a heat pump.

withinboredom 4y ago

Ugh. I wish it were that simple. The wiring in my home won’t take more than a single space heater before blowing a fuse (every plug in the house is on the same circuit) and I wouldn’t trust a $15 space heater with my life.

jupp0r 4y ago
Where is your house located? It's not up to electic code in any country I've lived in.
- mbreese 4y ago
  Most electrical codes only require updates (to bring the system into compliance) when there is work being done. So if you don’t need to add a circuit, your home may still be wired as if it were the 1950s (or earlier!). This is part of the hidden cost and complexity. For someone like the parent, you’d have to rewire an entire home. How long do you think that will take? If you seriously wanted to move an entire country over to electric heating, you’ll have all sorts of these edge cases. There simply isn’t a way to make a switch like that in a rapid manner.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    The average home can use a water kettle and a gaming PC at the same time, you are making some super rare edge cases seem like the norm. I've seen lots of old buildings and none was wired so inadequately that you couldn't heat it electrically.
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      Yes, my home is wired from ancient times. Last year we had monthly blackouts in our home. It took multiple electricians to figure out that our home wasn’t wired to code, and finally to learn that two wires had melted together and were a fire hazard. It was easy to replace them but, impossible to rewire the house to bring it up to code. All the walls would have to be ripped out, which just isn’t feasible on a realistic budget. The service coming in from the neighborhood is only rated for 25 amps too. They’ll have to lay new cable to get 50 amps and support a heat pump. There’s been some talk on the block about pooling money to pay for it, but nothing serious yet.

cycomanic 4y ago

As long as you are using fossil fuels to generate electricity using electric space heaters is counterproductive because you actually produce significantly more CO2 than just burning the gas directly (this applies to France as well btw). The space heater comment also let's me to believe that you never lived in a country that requires proper heating. Now heatpumps are a different issue, however they require to upgrade insulation as well.

jupp0r 4y ago
The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric. Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays? I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric. Sure it does, it directly effects prices. Also the efficiency affects how much CO2 you generate, you don't win anything if the absolute amount of CO2 goes up. > Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays? Because the system has a big inertia? AFAIK there are no western countries who generate 100% of their electricity fossil free, Norway and New Zealand come quite close but are not 100%. For most countries its still around 30% at least which is fossil. > I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy. OK then do the exercise, the price for electricity is ~0.28 kWh, how much would it cost to heat that cabin for the year (and we haven't heated water yet).

fomine3 4y ago

Please don't. Heat pump FTW.

jupp0r 4y ago
Of course that's more efficient but won't matter (from an environmental perspective, might still make economic sense) in a few years when all electricity comes from carbon free sources. If this won't be the case then heating will be the least of our problems.
- trashtester 4y ago
  I think you're optimistic if you think we'll have zero carbon electricity production in a few years, at a scale that will allow us to replace all NG and oil heating with electrical, especially without heat pumps. Even if we make it a primary priority, and try to maximally ramp up both wind, solar and nuclear production (+ storage as needed), I don't think we will be able to do it in less than 30 year, 20 at best.

bcrl 4y ago

No, that isn't a realistic option. My grandparent's place over in Germany is a huge 3 story place heated by a hot water boiler system and plenty of rooms. There's absolutely no way that you can heat that place with electric heaters in every room without blowing fuses constantly, and if you switch over to an electric boiler, there's a good chance the connection to the electrical grid is inadequate as it was installed 70+ years ago when life was very different. Europe is not like north American as older housing stock is not easily retrofitted without significant costs being incurred. Plus there are plenty of high density buildings as land is precious and expensive, so we're not talking about 1 story bungalows being the norm. This is what happens when towns have already existed in place for centuries.

trashtester 4y ago
My house is similar to that of your grandparents. The house was built 70 years ago, and originally it had a coal fueld boiler, which was switched to a heating oil boiler (twice, I think) with the one in place when I bought it also having a 6KW electrical backup coil. In 2020 my country (Norway) made it illegal to use fossil fuels for heating, so I had to upgrade my grid connection and buy a couple of space heaters to account for the days where 6kW is not enough. At the time (2020), electricity was still very cheap here, due to Norway being self supplied with almost-free hydropower. Now that we're able to export all our surplus electricity (and then some), and we're seeing German electricity prices here, I suppose I need to get a heat pump. TLDR; Given a couple of decades, it's perfectly possible to move the population away from fossil fuel heating IF you have large amounts of affordable electricity.