4 ms·

In Northern Europe heatpumps are simply not effective (yet). Heating at colder nights means heating with electricity, where gas is 1/3 of the electricity price.

by chewz 3y ago

In Northern Europe heatpumps are simply not effective (yet). Heating at colder nights means heating with electricity, where gas is 1/3 of the electricity price. 100s of stories of people who converted to heat pumps (being oversold with less then perfect home insulations) and who are disapointed financialy. Southern Europe is different story.

bad_alloc 3y ago
This is false. The Nordics use way more heat pumps than the rest of Europe: https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/30/do-heat-pumps-work-in-winter-experts-explain-why-nordic-countries-have-installed-the-most- https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/30/do-heat-pumps-work...
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  A charitable reading of the parent comment is to focus on "converting". The Nordics tend to have their buildings designed for heat pumps from the start, or converted (and fixed up) a long time ago. I'm in a house in Germany and got it converted from gas to heat pump a couple of years ago. It took some adaptations to make that work, but on the flip side we obviously blasted lots of heat into the atmosphere before, which we're reigning in now (still work in progress). So yeah, conversions of houses not built to "heat pump spec" has follow-on efforts and costs that the heat pump hype didn't advertise. I had a rough idea what to expect and that it'll take a while to sort out everything, but if you went into the conversion with the idea that you're just replacing one part with another, you're in for disappointment.
  - dghughes 3y ago
    That reminds me of a house built here in SE Canada in New Brunswick. It's a super efficient home with quadruple glazed windows and walls 1m thick or something like that. The entire house is heated with a unit using the power equivalent to a hair dryer. Just for some perspective it can easily get to -20C or -30C in winter in New Brunswick. It's airtight and very well insulated but yes built that way from the start. https://www.ecohome.net/guides/1401/new-brunswicks-most-energy-efficient-home/ https://www.ecohome.net/guides/1401/new-brunswicks-most-ener...
  - chewz 3y ago
    Exactly what I have meant. New building code is heat-pump friendly but lots of people with older (not old just older) houses had been sold on heat pumps and now pay the price in electricity bills.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    > The Nordics tend to have their buildings designed for heat pumps from the start My grandma's house from the 1950's wasn't "designed for heat pumps", neither my other grandma's house from 1940. Neither was my mother in laws from the same period. You don't need to design anything, you just need a hole in the wall to run the cables. What does make the houses suited for heat pumps is the fact that Nordic houses are designed to keep the weather out. So when you heat/cool the inside, the house doesn't leak it all outside.
    - pgeorgi 3y ago
      > What does make the houses suited for heat pumps is the fact that Nordic houses are designed to keep the weather out. So when you heat/cool the inside, the house doesn't leak it all outside. Alright, my bad. Consider "designed" replaced by "suitable". Houses of a certain era in large parts of Germany (those with only a few days of moderate sub-zero temperatures) tend to have been built with a bit of air leakage capacity to avoid mold. Yes, that's wasteful, but since fossils were (and are) subsidized like crazy, you just heat a bit more and be over with it. That strategy doesn't work as well when you have less heat to work with. There are still people who argue that it's unhealthy to live in a properly insulated house ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I doubt you have a lot of that nonsense in areas that deal with freezing temperatures for months at a time.
      - theshrike79 3y ago
        Yea, the German insistence on "lüften" curing all ailments is legendary :D
  - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
    Do you have online resources I can browse through for conversions? I have a gas boiler -radiator piping built into the walls and people I talk to say the radiators wont work with heat pump level of temperatures so as in your case the system needs to be converted but how. What are methods and techniques?
    - pgeorgi 3y ago
      Nothing convenient. Bits and pieces here and there, tons of forums, a few videos, a bunch of books, a few specialists who gave good advice. The inbound temperature into the radiator network took a dive from about 70°C to about 40°C here (I _could_ push the inbound temp to nearly 50°C but by then I'm no better off than with resistive heating), and that's rather obvious when heating the rooms. The main advice everything came down to was "have a lot of surface that can heat" and from my experience that seems to be quite true. The house has a bunch of radiators that never ran in the nat-gas days, basically it was overcommitted on heating surface. Now they're pretty well used. Another retrofit option that I had in the back of my head was radiators equipped with a fan to move the air along the radiator surface more quickly (essentially creating "virtual heating surface"), but I didn't need those. Other than that, warm and cold parts of the house (e.g. basement) are more clearly separated. A FLIR camera module for my phone gave some hints on where heat escapes so that I could focus on the right spots. When a larger rework of a room is due (and there's a huge mess in any case), that's a chance to look into floor or wall heating there, connected to the same system. Once that's (mostly) done, I suppose the inbound temperature can be reduced some more, and I expect super-linear electricity savings from that (due to the way the heat pump works). In terms of costs, it comes out at about the same, although there are more options in electricity availability, and I suspect that pricing there remains more stable than with fossil fuels, so longer-term I expect operating costs to develop beneficially (even if that only means "remains flat"). TCO of the project, I don't know, but I was optimizing for long-term OpEx for various reasons. By the way: Heating engineers tended to dismiss the project, but the project started before there were any issues with gas supply, so "just use gas" was their go-to solution anyway (for the eco-conscious, they dangled the carrot of "it's H2 ready!", even though it's unlikely that the pipe work will ever support that). Not sure if the attitude of heating engineers changed in the meantime. In the end it was done by air conditioning technicians, and it can be switched between heating mode using radiators and AC with split system frontends, so this house covers cold winters and hot summers with just one external device (which pleases the historical landmark office)
willvarfar 3y ago
This is not my own experience nor the experience of every other homeowner I know in my corner of rural Sweden (and it's a popular discussion topic). I don't know of a single disappointment story, nor is it a thing in the local media. Heat pumps are very cost effective and me and most other homeowners I know have, over the last couple of decades, completely migrated from wood to heat pumps. In fact, there might not be that many homes who'd convert left to convert. The House construction locally has definitely tanked this last year. Much fewer projects.
- lagrange77 3y ago
  Do you use it as part of a geothermal system, or are you talking about extracting the heat from the air? My thermodynamics class is some time ago, but pumping the heat stored in arctic air to a sufficiently high level for residential heating sounds indeed like an electric heating effectively.
  - geon 3y ago
    Yes, when you get down to -20 C or so, the efficiency drops below 1. Depending on the model. I think air heat pumps are more common due to their low price. They are easy to install and work well as a complement to other heat sources. Geothermal is popular too, but the installation cost is significantly higher.
  - D13Fd 3y ago
    Modern air source heat pumps are fine. Where I live it's hard to even find someone who services ground source heat pumps. Ground source works slightly better but the install cost is so much higher that it's rarely worth it.
- Arnt 3y ago
  Digressing a bit... there's something weird about these stories. I come from rural-ish Norway and live in a big city in Germany. Lots of people here in Germany are quite willing to tell me that heat pumps don't work in the area where I come from, where I have many friends with heat pumps. Their confidence amazes me. I don't understand how they can be so confident.
distances 3y ago
They are massively popular in Finland, so clearly they work in the Northern Europe. Gas isn't even a competitor there, the other main option is district heating. Basically all other forms (mainly oil, direct electric heating) are on their way out.
zelos 3y ago
In the UK it's more pronounced. I pay £0.28/kWh for electricity and £0.069/kWh for gas, so as I understand it installing a heat pump will end up increasing my energy bills unless its coefficient of performance is over 4.
- teamonkey 3y ago
  And in the UK the regulation that bans new gas boilers doesn't come in until 2025. Despite all the new homes being built in the UK, most are still being built with gas central heating.
  - benj111 3y ago
    The ban is on single fuel gas boilers. New ones will have to be able to use hydrogen.
    - mytailorisrich 3y ago
      If the UK had made the strategic decision to stick with nuclear we would have much more electric installations (like they have in France) and it would be easier for homes.
    - ajb 3y ago
      They're floating the idea of an outright ban, including 'hydrogen ready'. See Sec 4.1.2 of https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/the-future-homes-and-buildings-standards-2023-consultation/the-future-homes-and-buildings-standards-2023-consultation https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/the-future-homes...
- sim7c00 3y ago
  in my country new homes come with solar panels and heatpumps usually. if you are unlucky not to earn litteral shit-tons, you can only rent as house prices are through the roof.. with that rental contract comes extra service fees for heatpump and solar panels. those costs are about 10 times higher than savings from not using Gas and having the panels... and they persist for the entirety of the contract. so basically you are off much more expensive. --- for the climate they say >.> ... i can see people getting much less excited to go for green options, simply because its not affordable especially for regular or low income homes... it's just another scheme to get ur money. - it's maybe a bit harsh opinion, but its hard to draw any other conclusions. Send billions upon billions for War, and have households collapse by forcing these kinds of tech on people without any subsidies or help to pay for them. I hope soon to move away from the western countries. i work in IT on a nice salary and i can't even afford to live here anymore :/
xoa 3y ago
>In Northern Europe heatpumps are simply not effective (yet). That's not what I've heard of even air, but to be clear, you are talking air source right? I'm near the Canadian border in northern New England and am getting ready at work to have another vertical ground source (geothermal) heat pump put in, and those are very effective year round. Well loop is around 515' (~155m), which is on the longer side but not a big deal by well drilling standards (which is why lots of well drilling companies have been expanding into heat pumps in the last 5 years and availability has sky rocketed). The price is definitely much higher than air source for now, maybe always will carry some premium, but the major government incentives here help significantly and of course the reliability is high. There are a few minor other bonuses as well I guess, like aesthetically speaking once done there can be nothing to near nothing visible outside. There are a few other strategies (horizontal ground, water source, semi-open) that some are looking at too but around here simple vertical closed looks likely to end up as the majority due to economies of scale, it can be done anywhere vs needing more/special land, and like I said leverages an existing industry. It's neat to see coming along, so perhaps longer term that'll offer an option in Northern Europe too.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by chewz 3y ago

bad_alloc 3y ago

This is false. The Nordics use way more heat pumps than the rest of Europe: https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/30/do-heat-pumps-work-in-winter-experts-explain-why-nordic-countries-have-installed-the-most- https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/10/30/do-heat-pumps-work...

pgeorgi 3y ago
A charitable reading of the parent comment is to focus on "converting". The Nordics tend to have their buildings designed for heat pumps from the start, or converted (and fixed up) a long time ago. I'm in a house in Germany and got it converted from gas to heat pump a couple of years ago. It took some adaptations to make that work, but on the flip side we obviously blasted lots of heat into the atmosphere before, which we're reigning in now (still work in progress). So yeah, conversions of houses not built to "heat pump spec" has follow-on efforts and costs that the heat pump hype didn't advertise. I had a rough idea what to expect and that it'll take a while to sort out everything, but if you went into the conversion with the idea that you're just replacing one part with another, you're in for disappointment.
- dghughes 3y ago
  That reminds me of a house built here in SE Canada in New Brunswick. It's a super efficient home with quadruple glazed windows and walls 1m thick or something like that. The entire house is heated with a unit using the power equivalent to a hair dryer. Just for some perspective it can easily get to -20C or -30C in winter in New Brunswick. It's airtight and very well insulated but yes built that way from the start. https://www.ecohome.net/guides/1401/new-brunswicks-most-energy-efficient-home/ https://www.ecohome.net/guides/1401/new-brunswicks-most-ener...
- chewz 3y ago
  Exactly what I have meant. New building code is heat-pump friendly but lots of people with older (not old just older) houses had been sold on heat pumps and now pay the price in electricity bills.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  > The Nordics tend to have their buildings designed for heat pumps from the start My grandma's house from the 1950's wasn't "designed for heat pumps", neither my other grandma's house from 1940. Neither was my mother in laws from the same period. You don't need to design anything, you just need a hole in the wall to run the cables. What does make the houses suited for heat pumps is the fact that Nordic houses are designed to keep the weather out. So when you heat/cool the inside, the house doesn't leak it all outside.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    > What does make the houses suited for heat pumps is the fact that Nordic houses are designed to keep the weather out. So when you heat/cool the inside, the house doesn't leak it all outside. Alright, my bad. Consider "designed" replaced by "suitable". Houses of a certain era in large parts of Germany (those with only a few days of moderate sub-zero temperatures) tend to have been built with a bit of air leakage capacity to avoid mold. Yes, that's wasteful, but since fossils were (and are) subsidized like crazy, you just heat a bit more and be over with it. That strategy doesn't work as well when you have less heat to work with. There are still people who argue that it's unhealthy to live in a properly insulated house ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I doubt you have a lot of that nonsense in areas that deal with freezing temperatures for months at a time.
    - theshrike79 3y ago
      Yea, the German insistence on "lüften" curing all ailments is legendary :D
- 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
  Do you have online resources I can browse through for conversions? I have a gas boiler -radiator piping built into the walls and people I talk to say the radiators wont work with heat pump level of temperatures so as in your case the system needs to be converted but how. What are methods and techniques?
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    Nothing convenient. Bits and pieces here and there, tons of forums, a few videos, a bunch of books, a few specialists who gave good advice. The inbound temperature into the radiator network took a dive from about 70°C to about 40°C here (I _could_ push the inbound temp to nearly 50°C but by then I'm no better off than with resistive heating), and that's rather obvious when heating the rooms. The main advice everything came down to was "have a lot of surface that can heat" and from my experience that seems to be quite true. The house has a bunch of radiators that never ran in the nat-gas days, basically it was overcommitted on heating surface. Now they're pretty well used. Another retrofit option that I had in the back of my head was radiators equipped with a fan to move the air along the radiator surface more quickly (essentially creating "virtual heating surface"), but I didn't need those. Other than that, warm and cold parts of the house (e.g. basement) are more clearly separated. A FLIR camera module for my phone gave some hints on where heat escapes so that I could focus on the right spots. When a larger rework of a room is due (and there's a huge mess in any case), that's a chance to look into floor or wall heating there, connected to the same system. Once that's (mostly) done, I suppose the inbound temperature can be reduced some more, and I expect super-linear electricity savings from that (due to the way the heat pump works). In terms of costs, it comes out at about the same, although there are more options in electricity availability, and I suspect that pricing there remains more stable than with fossil fuels, so longer-term I expect operating costs to develop beneficially (even if that only means "remains flat"). TCO of the project, I don't know, but I was optimizing for long-term OpEx for various reasons. By the way: Heating engineers tended to dismiss the project, but the project started before there were any issues with gas supply, so "just use gas" was their go-to solution anyway (for the eco-conscious, they dangled the carrot of "it's H2 ready!", even though it's unlikely that the pipe work will ever support that). Not sure if the attitude of heating engineers changed in the meantime. In the end it was done by air conditioning technicians, and it can be switched between heating mode using radiators and AC with split system frontends, so this house covers cold winters and hot summers with just one external device (which pleases the historical landmark office)

willvarfar 3y ago

This is not my own experience nor the experience of every other homeowner I know in my corner of rural Sweden (and it's a popular discussion topic). I don't know of a single disappointment story, nor is it a thing in the local media. Heat pumps are very cost effective and me and most other homeowners I know have, over the last couple of decades, completely migrated from wood to heat pumps. In fact, there might not be that many homes who'd convert left to convert. The House construction locally has definitely tanked this last year. Much fewer projects.

lagrange77 3y ago
Do you use it as part of a geothermal system, or are you talking about extracting the heat from the air? My thermodynamics class is some time ago, but pumping the heat stored in arctic air to a sufficiently high level for residential heating sounds indeed like an electric heating effectively.
- geon 3y ago
  Yes, when you get down to -20 C or so, the efficiency drops below 1. Depending on the model. I think air heat pumps are more common due to their low price. They are easy to install and work well as a complement to other heat sources. Geothermal is popular too, but the installation cost is significantly higher.
- D13Fd 3y ago
  Modern air source heat pumps are fine. Where I live it's hard to even find someone who services ground source heat pumps. Ground source works slightly better but the install cost is so much higher that it's rarely worth it.
Arnt 3y ago
Digressing a bit... there's something weird about these stories. I come from rural-ish Norway and live in a big city in Germany. Lots of people here in Germany are quite willing to tell me that heat pumps don't work in the area where I come from, where I have many friends with heat pumps. Their confidence amazes me. I don't understand how they can be so confident.

distances 3y ago

They are massively popular in Finland, so clearly they work in the Northern Europe. Gas isn't even a competitor there, the other main option is district heating. Basically all other forms (mainly oil, direct electric heating) are on their way out.

zelos 3y ago

In the UK it's more pronounced. I pay £0.28/kWh for electricity and £0.069/kWh for gas, so as I understand it installing a heat pump will end up increasing my energy bills unless its coefficient of performance is over 4.

teamonkey 3y ago
And in the UK the regulation that bans new gas boilers doesn't come in until 2025. Despite all the new homes being built in the UK, most are still being built with gas central heating.
- benj111 3y ago
  The ban is on single fuel gas boilers. New ones will have to be able to use hydrogen.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    If the UK had made the strategic decision to stick with nuclear we would have much more electric installations (like they have in France) and it would be easier for homes.
  - ajb 3y ago
    They're floating the idea of an outright ban, including 'hydrogen ready'. See Sec 4.1.2 of https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/the-future-homes-and-buildings-standards-2023-consultation/the-future-homes-and-buildings-standards-2023-consultation https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/the-future-homes...
sim7c00 3y ago
in my country new homes come with solar panels and heatpumps usually. if you are unlucky not to earn litteral shit-tons, you can only rent as house prices are through the roof.. with that rental contract comes extra service fees for heatpump and solar panels. those costs are about 10 times higher than savings from not using Gas and having the panels... and they persist for the entirety of the contract. so basically you are off much more expensive. --- for the climate they say >.> ... i can see people getting much less excited to go for green options, simply because its not affordable especially for regular or low income homes... it's just another scheme to get ur money. - it's maybe a bit harsh opinion, but its hard to draw any other conclusions. Send billions upon billions for War, and have households collapse by forcing these kinds of tech on people without any subsidies or help to pay for them. I hope soon to move away from the western countries. i work in IT on a nice salary and i can't even afford to live here anymore :/

xoa 3y ago

>In Northern Europe heatpumps are simply not effective (yet). That's not what I've heard of even air, but to be clear, you are talking air source right? I'm near the Canadian border in northern New England and am getting ready at work to have another vertical ground source (geothermal) heat pump put in, and those are very effective year round. Well loop is around 515' (~155m), which is on the longer side but not a big deal by well drilling standards (which is why lots of well drilling companies have been expanding into heat pumps in the last 5 years and availability has sky rocketed). The price is definitely much higher than air source for now, maybe always will carry some premium, but the major government incentives here help significantly and of course the reliability is high. There are a few minor other bonuses as well I guess, like aesthetically speaking once done there can be nothing to near nothing visible outside. There are a few other strategies (horizontal ground, water source, semi-open) that some are looking at too but around here simple vertical closed looks likely to end up as the majority due to economies of scale, it can be done anywhere vs needing more/special land, and like I said leverages an existing industry. It's neat to see coming along, so perhaps longer term that'll offer an option in Northern Europe too.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]