4 ms·

It's not apples-to-apples though due to the difference in heating efficiency. If you use N kWh to heat your house with a gas boiler, you'll use N/P to heat it w

by mjd89 9mo ago

It's not apples-to-apples though due to the difference in heating efficiency. If you use N kWh to heat your house with a gas boiler, you'll use N/P to heat it with a heat pump. P is something like 3 or 4, depending on various factors (and who you ask).

blitzar 9mo ago
I don't see many heat pumps in the wild - I do see plenty of resistive heaters and electric "power showers" still.
- lm28469 9mo ago
  As long as they're powered by "clean" electricity it doesn't really matter though.
  - ben_w 9mo ago
    Depends on the context; if you are presently using x kWh of electricity for non-heating plus 2x kWh of gas for heating, your options for electrical heating are either to 3x your electricity demand by "upgrading" to resistive, or 1.5x (or whatever) your demand by upgrading to a heatpump. There's other stuff you can also do, but costs are all over the place, e.g. my 110 ish sqm house in Berlin is so well insulated (and has heat pump) that even while it's snowing outside it's hot enough indoors to be naked, for an electricity bill that's lower than that of my 37 square meter apartment in the UK, despite German electricity prices being much higher.
rsynnott 9mo ago
Potentially bigger. There are a lot of old non-condenser boilers out there, with a typical efficiency of about 70%. And even condensers are often not much better than 75-80%; to hit the faceplate 90%+ efficiencies the system needs to be balanced such that the return temperature is in quite a narrow range.
georgefrowny 9mo ago
Plus housing insulation. So many British houses are still almost entirely uninsulated. That's not an exaggeration, the roof of my house had zero insulation, solid brick walls, no under floor insulation and single glazing. The only gesture to efficiency was some secondary glazing over the windows. It absolutely ripped though gas just to keep a couple of rooms warm enough to live in, and it was still two jumpers and thermal trousers indoors. God only knows how the pensioner who lived there before managed.

by mjd89 9mo ago

blitzar 9mo ago

I don't see many heat pumps in the wild - I do see plenty of resistive heaters and electric "power showers" still.

lm28469 9mo ago
As long as they're powered by "clean" electricity it doesn't really matter though.
- ben_w 9mo ago
  Depends on the context; if you are presently using x kWh of electricity for non-heating plus 2x kWh of gas for heating, your options for electrical heating are either to 3x your electricity demand by "upgrading" to resistive, or 1.5x (or whatever) your demand by upgrading to a heatpump. There's other stuff you can also do, but costs are all over the place, e.g. my 110 ish sqm house in Berlin is so well insulated (and has heat pump) that even while it's snowing outside it's hot enough indoors to be naked, for an electricity bill that's lower than that of my 37 square meter apartment in the UK, despite German electricity prices being much higher.

rsynnott 9mo ago

Potentially bigger. There are a lot of old non-condenser boilers out there, with a typical efficiency of about 70%. And even condensers are often not much better than 75-80%; to hit the faceplate 90%+ efficiencies the system needs to be balanced such that the return temperature is in quite a narrow range.

georgefrowny 9mo ago

Plus housing insulation. So many British houses are still almost entirely uninsulated. That's not an exaggeration, the roof of my house had zero insulation, solid brick walls, no under floor insulation and single glazing. The only gesture to efficiency was some secondary glazing over the windows. It absolutely ripped though gas just to keep a couple of rooms warm enough to live in, and it was still two jumpers and thermal trousers indoors. God only knows how the pensioner who lived there before managed.