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Micro heaters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

330 points by dantiberian 12y ago

ck2 12y ago
My cats are my micro-heaters. Zero extra power use in winter :-)
- lucb1e 12y ago
  Tell that to your cat food bill ;)
lukasm 12y ago
I wonder what's the home efficiency.
HelloMcFly 12y ago
I take a more middle-of-the-road philosophy in my house, with primary reliance on space heaters for room-by-room heating. Why do I care if the kitchen is 72°F at 2pm while I'm working at my desk in my office?
g8oz 12y ago
In my experience thermal underwear (long johns) should be considered a must during winter. You don't have to live in a place like Canada or Minnesota to make them a standard part of your wardrobe.
raverbashing 12y ago
Yes Most people want "summer inside the house" which is absurdly wasteful Of course, it sucks when changing clothes or taking a shower, but there are ways of heating locally.
- balfirevic 12y ago
  I don't know how people's desires can be "wasteful". I find that "summer inside the house" during winter is absolutely wonderful from the comfort standpoint and certainly wouldn't trade it for the saving that I would get on electric bill. Of course, I realize that many people don't care for that. More power (and smaller bills) to them.
  - jlebar 12y ago
    > I don't know how people's desires can be "wasteful". In a world where people paid for the true cost of their energy use, this argument might fly. But in most of the world today, this isn't the case, not by a long shot. If you heated to "summer inside the house" and bought high-quality carbon offsets corresponding to your increased energy use, I think most people wouldn't call that "wasteful". "Warm" might be the adjective I'd use. :)
    - wickedlogic 12y ago
      Sorta like when people order whatever they want for lunch, because they bought high quality calorie offsets?
      - Retric 12y ago
        At sufficient exercise levels most people have trouble eating enough. 10,000 calories every day tends to be a lot of food.
        tempestn 12y ago
        Even if you're doing a couple hours of intense exercise every day, you're only going to be adding on the order of 1000 Calories to your daily usage. Resting burn for most adults is around 1500-2000, so that's ~3000. What do you consider "sufficient" exercise?
        PhantomGremlin 12y ago
        Michael Phelps needed 12,000 Calories a day when training. That's seriously "intense"! http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/08/14/michael-phelps-12000-calorie-day-diet-not-for-everyone/ http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/08/14/michael-phelps-12000...
        tempestn 12y ago
        Wow, that is intense. Way beyond what I'd call "sufficient" exercise though!
- im3w1l 12y ago
  Imagine a radiator you turn on for those few minutes. Could probably keep you warm using a lot less energy than it would take to heat the bathroom air and walls.
- Nursie 12y ago
  I want summer inside the house. It may be wasteful, but that's what I want. I don't ever want to step out of the shower in the morning and shiver again, I find this deeply unpleasant. I also don't want to have to wear thick woollen clothes around the house. In pursuit of this I actually moved to Australia for a while, but it turns out I missed the temperate climate and UK culture (also my family, I guess...) So when I own my own home in a few weeks it will be getting insulated to hell and back. Eliminating drafts, insulating attic space, replacing some of the old windows with double or triple glazed ones, checking the state of the wall insulation... etc etc. But when it comes down to it, I'll pay the heating costs and swan around in my t-shirt all year. I like being warm.
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    All I can say is: I understand you. But yeah, improving isolation, having a bathroom heater, using heat pumps instead of electrical heaters are better than just cranking up the heat and paying the bill.
Swizec 12y ago
This is where I really prefer the European model[1] - you heat the whole house with hot water. You make hot water with cheap natural gas. If you're lucky enough, you can even use geothermal. Then you use insulation. This especially is something that feels nobody in the US has heard of. At least in California. As a result, your radiators are turned down to 2 out of 10 all day (heating turns off automatically overnight), and you have to sometimes open a window when it's -13C outside so you don't sweat. Now I don't know how much people spend on heating when they live in a house house, but my apartment's heating bill this winter was about 30 euro a month[2] and I had to keep all my radiators turned off because the one in the bathroom couldn't be regulated. So that alone was enough to heat everything to extremely comfortable levels. tl;dr don't heat with air, insulate your fucking house, and install modern windows [1] Could just be where I'm from, but it seems fairly common in Europe and not at all something I've seen in the US [2] I think my gramps spends about 2k euro in October to pay for natural gas that heats his house until some time in April. So about 300/month for a ~10 bedroom house because he's got a house that's way too big.
- adestefan 12y ago
  This is common in the Northeast and Midwest. Also, if you're in an apartment your place might be so hot because you have a neighbor that has cranked the heat. I used to be able to keep the heat off in a place I lived at because the person that lived below me had their place like a sauna.
- vacri 12y ago
  Crappy insulation is the norm here in Australia as well, which is more of a problem down south where it gets cold in winter. I used to work with a Scot who highlighted the issue, saying that in a Scottish house, the insulation was good enough that you could basically heat a room with a candle. I once asked him if there were any wooden houses in Scotland, he replied "Yes, we keep our lawnmowers in them".
  - Swizec 12y ago
    > I once asked him if there were any wooden houses in Scotland, he replied "Yes, we keep our lawnmowers in them". Austro-hungarian empire outlawed wooden houses in the early 19th century. Hence we still don't have any, and if you live in a wooden house[1], you are considered to not have been able to afford a proper house and thus looked down upon. [1] becoming common with drywall construction methods. Particularly because it's cheap and fast.
voidlogic 12y ago
>In June of 2010 I moved to a place in Montana with only electric heat. Living that far north and depending on one heat source is crazy! Think about the power going out when its -30 out... or if you used gas, running out or having your furnace break down. (Not to mention electric is usually the most expensive way to heat). Most houses where I live have 2 or 3 heat sources. I have wood, LP and electric...
- stormbrew 12y ago
  I live in the northernmost large city in Canada (where we get -40C pretty regularly for a while in the winter) and every apartment I've ever lived in has only one heat source, and usually it's either electric or water pipe. If your power goes out long enough for all the heat to leach out of your apartment or house you probably have some serious problems with either the electric company or your insulation.
  - ars 12y ago
    If you have any kind of heat other than electric you by default have two kinds since you can always fall back on electric.
  - cbhl 12y ago
    Heh, last Christmas the power was out for about two weeks at my parents' house, which uses electricity to push the hot air generated by our gas furnace through the house. It was -25 C. Granted, I might not have had to go to the hospital if we had gone to a warming shelter earlier than the sixth day. (My father is rather stubborn, and it damn near killed me. When I got out of the hospital, I left the house and paid for a hotel room in a part of town where power had been restored.)
- TD-Linux 12y ago
  I lived in Minnesota and had only electric heat. Most other houses have only gas heat, and it usually requires electricity to run. Luckily the electricity is pretty reliable. If you do lose heat, the solution is generally to use blankets outdoor gear until it is fixed. But this has never happened in my 20 or so years of living there.
p_eter_p 12y ago
A similar approach works in hot climates. A friend of mine saved a substantial amount of money by getting an efficient portable AC unit for his bedroom, and shutting off the main air conditioner for the house at night. In a southern summer, the savings add up quick.
- sargun 12y ago
  How does he purge the heat?
  - adamfeldman 12y ago
    Usually those units come with a window attachment to vent the heat outside
  - kimmel 12y ago
    I have a portable air conditioner but it is not as portable as you would think. It is about 2.5 feet tall, sits on nice rolling wheels and has a small exhaust and fitting so you open your window and put the pipe end in place to vent the heat. You do not have to mount it in the window which makes it portable. I can move it from room to room and it only takes about 2 minutes to setup the fitting.
  - colechristensen 12y ago
    Portable air conditioners have small window-installed vents to exhaust hot air.
- cma 12y ago
  Depends where you live--a house with no air conditioning generally won't suffer mold, and neither will one with air conditioning. But spotty air conditioning without something like a dehumidifier will breed mold and warp floors.
  - themodelplumber 12y ago
    A friend of mine has been complaining about his rental's warped kitchen floor and mold (or the fact that mold forms easily). His windows are mostly painted shut. Can you elaborate on this? What kind of a dehumidifier should he look at?
debrice 12y ago
Well, not heating your house enough can also cost you your house as mold and ice can grow in very cold zone of your house. But I do like the ingenuity of the solution. Shit Norwegians Say: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”
- schiffern 12y ago
  This is addressed in the article. >FAQ: It might work in Montana, but in Seattle, our windows would get moldy >There are a variety of ways to mitigate the mold problems that occur in cold, humid climates. I did some experimenting when I lived in the Seattle area and have compared notes with people that are still living there. This is a really large issues even if you don't try this. While there are many things to be done, I think the first two would be: 1) learn how to properly clean mold problems (borax, not bleach) and 2) a dehumidifier nearly eliminates all mold problems and gives off heat.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Vinegar is also excellent at combating mold (before it gets established), and is gentle on pretty much any surface. A 50-50 vinegar-water solution can simply be sprayed onto walls, floors, carpets, and other surfaces. Another is fully airing out a bathroom. I'll set a fan to move air until the walls and other surfaces are dry. Especially useful if you've got an interior bathroom. Otherwise, an openable window is highly useful.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      >I'll set a fan to move air until the walls and other surfaces are dry. // Aren't you just ensuring the whole house is damp then, unless your humidity is low enough in the first place I suppose.
      - dredmorbius 12y ago
        No, though generally I'm not in environments where thermal control is a major concern, so the interior tends to be well-ventilated. They key is to understand that a shower is essentially a big humidity generator. So you want to shower with internal doors closed, but external windows open, if they're available. Otherwise you're simply pumping moisture into the residence. Once you've completed your shower, you're no longer introducing more moisture into the environment, so removing / diluting what you've got is the key. An exhaust fan is also useful, though most are relatively low-flow -- this is one element where if I am designing my own structure I'd have a high-capacity, high-flow, and if at all possible, quiet, fixture. A typical 100 CFM fan will require over 5 minutes to achieve a 100% exchange of air within even a modest-sized bathroom, say 6' x 12' x 7.5'. They'll rarely keep up with the generation of humidity during a shower. The real key is that a high-mounted fan removes the moist air that pools above your door jamb. The situation also depends on whether you're in a warm or cold, heating, cooling, or ambient, and humid or dry environment. In cold-weather winter climates, your usual problem is that interiors are too dry, so your bathroom humidity is useful for interior comfort. In a temperate/warm and humid environment, your main concern is venting the bathroom (first) followed by reducing standing moisture. And if it's humid enough that interior humidity is an issue I've likely got a dehumidifier for high-humidity periods. My usual strategy (yes, I've got a bathroom venting strategy) is: For an exterior bath or one with an openable skylight: shower with interior doors closed and the window open. Humidity is generated by tends to escape, keeping total build-up limited. I may or may not shower with the exhaust fan on, but always turn it on afterward, if only to evacuate high-rising moisture. Following shower, spray down shower doors/curtain and walls with vinegar or other (preferably organic) anti-microbial. If the area has higher humidity, a 14" floor fan is good to help evaporate standing water on floors or walls. Mildew tends to form most aggressively in areas in which water pools, and by removing that water and treating it to be inhospitable, you'll virtually eliminate any build-up. For an interior bath, shower with the interior door closed. Exhaust fan is either on or turned on following the shower (much more out of concern for noise than energy -- most fans I've encountered are annoyingly loud as well as relatively ineffective). I'll crack the interior door to allow fresh air in for a minute or so, then swing it wide open. Swirling a towel can help achieve a good vertical air mix (moist, warm air tends to rise), which levels out total humidity and eliminates high-humidity spots. Spray walls and floors with vinegar mix, finish my grooming, then turn on a floor fan to remove additional standing moisture on walls / floor. Airing out bath mats also helps markedly. Note that a bathroom is rarely more than 10% of your total interior area as well (and often less). So even dumping a 100% humid bath's air into your residence will tend to provide less than a ~10% boost in interior humidity. My experience is that air tends not to feel overly humid until it gets above 60-70% humidity, and that humidity tends to normalize fairly quickly over a larger area. The real threat is _standing_ water. End result is that I very, very rarely have bathroom mildew issues, rarely use a chlorine-based mildew treatment (though I've got a spray bottle of bleach too that may get used 1-4x monthly), and spend only a few seconds a day dealing with the matter.
jeffjia 12y ago
Let's just have Nest...
vacri 12y ago
Why not use the reptile heater instead of the incandescent globe? Having a light shining right in my face would end the experiment in minutes.
- mrb 12y ago
  This is a great point! Infrared heat emitters produce less visible light, therefore more heat than a light bulb of comparable wattage.
  - TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
    Umm... Assuming you are not producing any EM radiation at frequencies that go through the skin of your house (radio, X-ray, visible light through the window, etc), any resistive heater will produce the same amount of heat. Because guess what happens when EM radiation is adsorbed? It turns into heat. Any EM radiation.
- jonknee 12y ago
  Apparently he likes the light and thus the double usage (if you're already going to have a light on you might as well use its heat). I agree that the placement would drive me batty. Reptile heaters were mentioned towards the end and he uses them when having guests over.
jondiggsit 12y ago
Just install radiant heat everywhere in your house ya cheap bastard
lutorm 12y ago
This is why changing out incandescents for CFL's in a heated house does almost nothing for saving energy... and if the heat comes from electricity, nothing for saving money, either.
- mangecoeur 12y ago
  Wrong. Does plenty to save energy. Reasons: - for half the year, you don't heat but you still light, so you automatically gain savings for that whole period. (also if you have air conditioning, in summer you heat the house with lights then have to cool the air again) - Lights are on the ceiling. Hot air rises. Therefore heat coming from lights does almost nothing to improve your thermal comfort. - If you are heating using gas rather than electricity, it is far more efficient to heat air with energy from the gas boiler than from the electric lighting
  - superuser2 12y ago
    This is likely mitigated somewhat if you have good natural light sources. The warmer it is, the less you need to run artificial lights (assuming a "normal" sleep schedule.) Not to say that it makes sense, but still.
  - lutorm 12y ago
    If you don't heat, you don't have a heated house. Hence my comment does not apply.
    - lutorm 12y ago
      I wish whoever downvoted this would indicate what part of my comment they disagree with... I said "If A then B", and then the response was "wrong, because if not A then C". Of course it saves energy if you don't heat the house, that's obvious. What's less obvious to many is that it saves much less than you think if you live in a house in Northern Sweden, heated with electric heat (which I happened to grow up in).
  - ams6110 12y ago
    What's the energy cost of making a CFL bulb vs. an incandescent? Also since in practice they don't last a lot longer, and are annoyingly dim for the first few minutes, and are considered an hazardous waste when you need to dispose of them, why does it make sense to replace a $0.50 bulb that has none of those issues with a $5.00 bulb that does?
redcap 12y ago
> The bathroom is the one room in the house that is heated normally. You can get heated toilet seats - they're quite common in Japan. One example: http://www.heatedtoiletseat.com http://www.heatedtoiletseat.com
- mbrameld 12y ago
  Alaskan here. Getting out of the shower in a cold bathroom is no fun. A towel heater can help a lot with that, though.
sdhsdh 12y ago
There's some academic work on this, too: http://www.cbe.berkeley.edu/research/personal-comfort-systems.htm http://www.cbe.berkeley.edu/research/personal-comfort-system...
moron4hire 12y ago
When I was a kid, we were rather poor. My parents scrounged together to buy a computer for the family, and I started to get interested in programming. But my parents were fearful I'd break their computer (not in a "don't be programmin'" way, but definitely in a "please be careful" way). And then a friend donated a computer to me. And I set it up in my bedroom. And I had my first comfortable winter in that house that year. Of course, it made summers unbearable. But for the most part, I was used to heat.
nostromo 12y ago
People should check out WattVision. It's a little device that attaches to your electrical meter so you can monitor your electrical usage. What I've found is that almost all of our home's electrical usage comes from heating (heaters, clothes dryers, and hot water). Everything else is almost a rounding error. For example: I saw almost no change when we switched from incandescents to LED lighting (even in the summer when we're not heating the house) but I saw a large change with efficient shower heads and washing clothes on cold.
- fleitz 12y ago
  Yup, if you're heating your house incandescents just lessen heating load. However, if you're cooling your house incandescents are a triple whammy as AC isn't nearly as efficient as heating.
  - Brakenshire 12y ago
    Incandescents heat the room at the ceiling, which I would imagine significantly reduces their effective efficiency relative to a well placed electric heater. Also, of course, incandescents have the same poor system efficiency as other electric heaters, compared to burning the fuel for heat in your house.
- tungwaiyip 12y ago
  Totally heating dominate energy use. I'm rather disturb to hear people pay much attention to so call "phantom power" from idle electronics and adapters. Adapters plugged in the socket do not consume measurable power. Wifi router uses about a few watts. The worst offender is a set-top box that uses 18W irrespective of power on or off. It is piece of crap anyway so I unplugged it. All the electronics in the house probably use less power in a day compare to running a 1500W heater for 15 minutes.
  - PhantomGremlin 12y ago
    Fortunately I have natural gas for heating and hot water. Much cheaper than electric heat, but the local gas utility is still charging me about $12/MMbtu, which is about 3x the Henry Hub spot price. But electronics is not nearly as benign as you suggest, it depends on your lifestyle. E.g. I have 4 TiVo boxes running 24x7. Each draws about 40W. In my area 1W works out to about $1/yr. So my TiVo boxes cost me $160/yr just in electricity. I also believe that LED lighting saves money. In our family room I used to have a 75W light bulb on for at least 12 hrs/day. That's $37/yr for just a single bulb. I replaced it with an 11W Philips LED. It's now costing me $5.50/yr. That's an over $30/yr savings on a single bulb. The same savings applies anywhere light bulbs are on for a long time.
cjensen 12y ago
Given that he uses electric heating, it's pretty funny the electric company wanted him to switch to florescent. That buys you nothing in those months where the heater is on. What I'd really like to know is: why not switch to gas?
- maxerickson 12y ago
  He mentions homesteading at the end. I guess he doesn't have a natural gas supply available. Propane and fuel oil aren't the completely obvious win over electric that natural gas is.
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    We haven't found natural gas on the retail level to be any less expensive than propane. Perhaps it depends on where you live.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      I'm talking about utility supplied natural gas vs truck delivered liquid propane in the U.S. I'm pretty sure the natural gas is consistently cheaper (frequently to the tune of 50%, my experience of it is in northern areas where the propane trucks are busy all winter).
deleted 12y ago
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nkozyra 12y ago
I live in Florida. This entire discussion is bizarro world for me. It costs nearly $400 a month to keep my house at 74deg in the summer.
- cheald 12y ago
  Phoenix, ditto, except $500/80. Installing solar screens helped a ton. Our power bills are down around 30% this summer since installing them.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Which is an excellent reminder that the challenge isn't heating or cooling, it's minimizing energy use as dictated by the requirements of your environment.
- _delirium 12y ago
  I live in Copenhagen, and it's also bizarro world for me. :) But mainly because electricity is very expensive here, whereas district heating (hot water produced by municipal plants, which you can draw through your radiator if you'd like) is quite cheap. It would be hard to beat the costs of district heating using a space-heater approach, even given better spatial concentration of the heat.
  - dharma1 12y ago
    Same in Helsinki/Finland - district heating (hot water radiators) for most of the city. Even data centre heat is recycled in this way :)
  - lucb1e 12y ago
    Wait a minute you get hot water from the pipe instead of heating it yourself? That's interesting.
    - allannienhuis 12y ago
      Most large buildings in the parts of China that I've visited (4 different regions of the country) use government supplied central heating (hot water I think). Interestingly this supply is turned on in the fall based on local policy, which is often driven by economics and politics, So it's not uncommon for people to not get the heat turned on until much later in the year than anyone would really like... :)
dredmorbius 12y ago
Spot-heating, especially within a leaky building envelope utilizing expensive heat sources (electric resistance) is one option. But it's hardly the only one, or the best. For northern climates, taking a whole-system approach to home/structure design gets you a tremendously greater payoff in terms of energy savings. Among the most powerful demonstrations of this I've seen are Thorsten Chlupp / Reina LLC's experiences designing and building zero net energy homes in Fairbanks, Alaska. His videos are long (~90 minutes) be exceptionally comprehensive. The TL;DR is: • Total envelope. He pays exceptional attention to any thermal envelope penetrations. All emissions (air, water, sewage) pass through thermal exchanges. • Thermal mass. The foundation, flooring, central masonry stove, and a 5,000 gallon stratified thermal storage tank all store and scavange thermal energy both passively and actively. • Moisture control. Heat barriers introduce thermal issues. Chlupp makes use of multiple glazings, window setbacks, and _exterior_ thermal shutters to minimize moisture buildup on windows. Moisture barriers and ventilation of interstitial spaces is designed to clear moisture. • Heat pumps. Rather than create thermal energy directly (other than the masonry stove), Chlupp moves heat using ground-loop heat pumps. • Solar and net metering. Solar panels (yes, in Alaska) and net metering help him arrive at net zero energy. His first-year goal wasn't met due to plug-in hybrid vehicles, an oversight in his energy modeling. Though conceived as a whole-system ground-up greenfield design, the principles are applicable to a lesser degree as retrofit options. Oh, and for heating your bed: a 1 liter Nalgene bottle, filled with boiling hot water, and slipped into a wool sock, will heat your bed cozily. Two are almost certainly too hot, but you're welcome to try. And they'll last the night. http://www.reina-llc.com/ http://www.reina-llc.com/ Alaska's First Net Zero Energy Homes Performance Update http://fixyt.com/watch?v=Xen_VWyDezY http://fixyt.com/watch?v=Xen_VWyDezY Path to Net Zero Energy Series -- Alaska's first Net Zero Ho... http://fixyt.com/watch?v=AtHkvpRI6fc http://fixyt.com/watch?v=AtHkvpRI6fc http://fixyt.com/search?q=thorsten+chlupp+zero+net+energy http://fixyt.com/search?q=thorsten+chlupp+zero+net+energy
- alricb 12y ago
  Not to mention: In a well-insulated, well-designed house, you won't have any worries about frozen pipes, even with a low thermostat temperature, since all pipes will be inside the insulated enclosure. There's a whole community of people trying to build better buildings out there. The Passivhaus people, the PERSIST (Saskatchewan) and REMOTE (Alaska) approaches (http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/getting-insulation-out-your-walls-and-ceilings http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/getti...), Building Science Corporation, the NRC in Canada (http://archive.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/ibp/irc/cbd/digest-index.html http://archive.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/ibp/irc/cbd/digest-index.h...). Some of these people are ex-hippies or hippie-ish, and there is a bit of bullshit out there, but there's certainly plenty of better ways to build and renovate homes for energy efficiency.
arh68 12y ago
Imagine how much more they could save by keeping the heated mattress pad on and never leave the bed! I mostly jest.. The author seems totally unaware of the efficiency gains that a heat pump can provide. A 300W space heater will be easily outmatched by a heat pump that consumes 300W (unless we're dropping way, way below 0C). The efficiency is likely ~3x [1]. I hope the author isn't making this mistake out of disdain for centralized hvac, since window unit heat pumps are readily available for small spaces. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency
- jqm 12y ago
  I found this out the hard way one winter. Without looking into specifics I decided that a couple of small well placed space heaters (in rooms with traffic) might save electricity over the whole house heat pump. I had 3 small space heaters that ran most of the day and night and I turned the heat pump down to 50. I was wrong. My electric bill was higher than just running the heat pump, and most of the house was cold most of the time.
- Retric 12y ago
  He is dealing with -30 below winters at which point most heat pumps are almost useless. A ground source heat pump can still be useful but they cost quite a bit more to install so they might not be worth it if your to far north.
mangecoeur 12y ago
An interesting approach - though for contrast, a well built passivhaus or low exergy design can achieve similar savings or even net positive. At a cost, true, but at much greater convenience. I feel having to do this is basically admitting that our houses are terribly engineered. And yes, with this kind of system you get problems with damp and mold which can have some pretty serious health impacts.
willholloway 12y ago
Energy is abundant, there is no need to shiver in the cold. Solar forced warm air is inexpensive, simple technology that is very underutilized. Solar photovoltaics get all the attention, but solar warm air/water is less expensive and simple to manufacture. http://sunmatesolarpanels.com/content/view/2/31/ http://sunmatesolarpanels.com/content/view/2/31/
- roel_v 12y ago
  But you can't power a computer on PV. I don't think anyone who knows something about energy efficient heating suggests PV to warm a house electrically, it's too inefficient.
  - jtheory 12y ago
    Not my comment you're responding to, but it's not talking about PV for heating (that'd be kind of ridiculous, honestly). Systems for heating water/air using solar can be quite inexpensive as well; converting light to heat is rather easier than converting it to electricity. E.g., I've seen cheap pool-heating systems that just pump the water through wide flattened black pipes exposed to the sun and send it back into the pool. Voila, solar heating!
    - roel_v 12y ago
      Yeah my second sentence was a non sequitur, but my point was: you can only do a little with solar/water heating. Yes heating a pool is one of those things, but that's a very niche application. This thread is about heating a house, or at least about being comfortable in one, and solar/water is just not a viable technology for that in the vast majority of cases.
      - jtheory 12y ago
        Oh... you said "PV" in both sentences, which is specifically converting light to electricity; that's what threw me. For heating a house with solar (not PV) -- it would depend on insulation level, I'd imagine. I do know people who use it for "most of the time" water heating, with good results.
dmritard96 12y ago
This is a cool approach and actually there is some federal research money available for it. https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/ https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/ (third one down) "DELIVERING EFFICIENT LOCAL THERMAL AMENITIES (DELTA)" We (http://www.flair.zone http://www.flair.zone) were looking into grant funding and saw it. All I could think of was heated/air conditioned underwear lol.
dredmorbius 12y ago
OK, Paul Wheaton simply doesn't know what he's talking about: "I think that this does produce some savings, but not as much as you might think. If you set your thermostat to a constant 70, the heater works a little at a time throughout the day. If you drop it to 50 at night or in the middle of the day, the heater stops working, but then when the time comes to warm the house again, the heater has to work at full power for a long time to get the temp back up - thus losing a lot of your savings." WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG Heat losses are driven by two factors: 1. The temperature differential between the hot and cold sides. 2. The thermal conductivity (or exchange) between the hot and cold sides. That's straight out of Newton's Law of Cooling / Fourier's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_heat_transfer#Newton.27s_law_of_cooling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_heat_transfer#Newton... If you're running heat constantly, you're maintaining a constant flow of heat from your interior to the exterior. That is, you're maintaining a high heat exchange rate to the exterior, and you're constantly wasting a large portion of heat. If you're heating only while you need a warm interior, then as the interior temperature falls, the energy flux to the exterior decreases. You're no longer pumping heat into the external environment. Yes, you'll run your furnace/heating system continuously for a while in raising the interior temperature, but that is largely adding heat to the interior space, not to the exterior. The net is expending less energy. Your most efficient strategy is to turn interior heat down to the minimum essential level (ultimately: enough to keep pipes from freezing), or the minimum level the thermostat allows (often ~50F in the US). My own practice is generally to turn any heating system off entirely at night. From a moisture management perspective, you also win as cold air has a lower absolute humidity, that is, the quantity of water it can hold is lower. Heating cold humid air reduces the relative humidity, allowing walls and surfaces to dry out. The overnight heat loss is also a very clear sign that Paul Wheaton is dealing with an exceptionally poorly insulated structure. And a very poor grasp of thermodynamics. The same principle holds for AC as well, though here you want to increase the temperature setting at which the AC comes on, or disable AC entirely while you're out of the home. A better way of thinking of this is to minimize the energy input (heating or cooling) when it's not needed. See: http://www.uswitch.com/energy-saving/guides/heating-on-all-the-time/ http://www.uswitch.com/energy-saving/guides/heating-on-all-t... http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2970/does-turning-down-the-thermostat-at-night-save-energy http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2970/does-turning-d... http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/thermostats http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/thermostats
Donch 12y ago
Number one link on Hacker News is an article stuffed full of Amazon affiliate links for personal heating products. Something isn't right.
XorNot 12y ago
Looking at this as conventional power savings is wrong. It's better to look at this as comfort. I just recently bought one of those 20 watt heat mats, for one specific reason: while using a computer it is impossible to keep my feet warm. Socks, boots, anything? Doesn't work. It was a huge problem while I was studying. Since I got one, for 20 W, my feet are warm. In fact, my perception of room temperature as a whole has been massively improved. This is a lot less power usage then any type of whole room solution.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Last time I lived in a freezing cold house I just pointed my computer's exhaust at my feet.
- rdancer 12y ago
  Have you gone to true extremes? I have found that synthetic fur works extremely well, and is very comfortable, even with stone-cold floors. I'm going to be buying pair of these for the upcoming winter; they're dirt-cheap, machine washable, and will last several seasons: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FG1XINO/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FG1XINO/ref=oh_aui_det... I have been thinking about thermal socks as well ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pairs-Mens-Thermal-Socks-Size/dp/B0019QPX1K/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406819251&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=tehrmal+socks http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pairs-Mens-Thermal-Socks-Size/dp/B00... ), and furry boots for the great outdoors.
staunch 12y ago
Kotatsu tables really are great. Some pictures here if you haven't seen them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu Unfortunately even a cheap table in the U.S. is more expensive than it should be. There's an opportunity for someone to create kotatsu tables and things like them for the American market.
- jrockway 12y ago
  I think the problem is Americans don't want to sit on the floor. Which is strange, because carpet is more comfortable than tatami.
  - anon4 12y ago
    Probably because of their habit of wearing outside shoes inside the house, making the floor too dirty to sit on.
neves 12y ago
You just can't go the bathroom.
deleted 12y ago
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nly 12y ago
I just let my computers get dusty and run CPU intensive tasks.
jebblue 12y ago
I was really caught up in this story and the effort involved until ... "I wonder if these techniques caught on, could this reduce or eliminate US war for oil?" and then "If I wrote this article 20 years ago might we have never gone to war with Iraq?". Iraq was _not_, repeat, NOT, N O T, about oil. Iraq was about stability, about a nut case leader who terrorized and killed his own people, who let his sons terrorize people. It was about all the terrorists caught who had evaded worldwide, WORLDWIDE authorities for decades in many cases, found hiding out in ... Iraq. Hussein disregarded Bush elder, Clinton and Bush junior, covering 3 US Presidencies, both major US political parties. He shot missiles at the very ally planes charged with making him keep his army at bay. He plotted to kill the very US President (Bush elder) who forced him to back out of Kuwait: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/iraq/timeline/062793.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/iraq/tim...
- jtheory 12y ago
  Voted down, then responding in case you don't know why: this is a discussion about micro-heaters. Yes, it's a bit disagreeable to run across even minor, aside comments that disagree with something you believe strongly, but please just deal with that on your own time. Because of course your comment will be unpleasant for people to read who feel just as passionately that you're wrong, and some of them may be compelled to post wall-o-text comments here to rebut your claims. Here, in this discussion about micro-heaters.
  - jebblue 12y ago
    The article was about saving energy using a specific approach _until_ the article's author took the side trip into world politics.
  - jebblue 12y ago
    PS, this, "Voted down, then responding in case you don't know why" is passive aggressive.
    - jtheory 12y ago
ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
Three ladies at my company campaigned heavily for those heated keyboards a few years ago. One shorted out within the first month and the other two stopped functioning within a year.
seamusabshere 12y ago
best. hn. ever.
smallegan 12y ago
I have often wondered why we don't all sleep in heated pods (bubbles). All of the wasted heat to keep houses warm at night drives me nuts.
- yxhuvud 12y ago
  All the heat wasted due to bad insulation drives me nuts. Solve the real problem and inconvenient solutions like the one you suggested disappear.
harmegido 12y ago
I'm sorry, I'm sure this idea/post is valid, but damnit if this isn't exactly what the recent HBO show "Silicon Valley" lampooned in the finale. I cannot stop laughing.
- 3minus1 12y ago
  it's not exactly the same, but close enough to be cuttingly funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvDHKKsCL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvDHKKsCL4
sbierwagen 12y ago
Tom Murphy has done a couple of blog posts on this exact thing: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/heat-those-feet/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/heat-those-feet/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/05/burning-desire-for-efficiency/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/05/burning-desire-f...
bce 12y ago
A similar project is being done by the Senseable Cities Lab at MIT: Local Warming: http://senseable.mit.edu/local-warming/ http://senseable.mit.edu/local-warming/ Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-6i6owLMQk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-6i6owLMQk
dharma1 12y ago
hot water bottles work pretty well. Probably more effective than constantly heating up air. Water is a good storage of heat
jmadsen 12y ago
Very much the "philosophy" of heating here in Japan; heaters for single room, heavy futons on the bed with no heater, kotatsu, foot warmers, etc. Comes from old, leaky wooden houses, but idea is the same. Lot of bad habits here still, but heating the upstairs guest bedroom all winter long isn't one of them
deleted 12y ago
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Lapsa 12y ago
Micro haters cut 87% off my electric heat bill
brusch64 12y ago
This reminds me a little bit of a company I've visited. They cooled the office so much in the summer that some of the people in the office (I'd say 5 out of 20) used electric heaters under their desk to warm their feet.
benjamincburns 12y ago
The idea of a heated keyboard is a little gross to me. Seems like it'd encourage bacteria growth.
- eru 12y ago
  Your keyboard will have the same temperature in summer as the heated one does in winter.
yxhuvud 12y ago
Good grief. If you live in a country that gets cold, learn to insulate your houses better. Seriously, it is that simple. /lives in a country where triple windows are standard for all new buildings intended for people.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  I live in a larger house, being single any house is overkill but I went a bit beyond because of pricing and location. As such I have three bedrooms and two baths where the vents are kept closed. This does mean they seal completely so in winter the rooms can hit the 50s (F) on a below freezing week. You don't need to live in a cold climate to want good insulation, it can save a bundle in hot climates too if your a fan of extreme AC; think 72F that some I know live by. I do the ceiling fan method, 78F and a nice big ceiling fan in every room.
  - newman314 12y ago
    You might want to read this. http://www.familyhandyman.com/smart-homeowner/energy-saving-tips/save-energy-by-closing-heat-registers/view-all http://www.familyhandyman.com/smart-homeowner/energy-saving-...
icantthinkofone 12y ago
You can eliminate the need for an electric blanket by just getting a down-filled blanket. In a normally heated house, I would actually sweat under one. You can buy them in a "half down" style, which would be cooler, but, if the point is to allow you to turn the heat down, down blankets are the perfect thing.
rrss1122 12y ago
Cut out the personal electric heaters and you save even more. I just wear a sweater as my personal heater. Heater only comes on for visitors.

330 points by dantiberian 12y ago

ck2 12y ago

My cats are my micro-heaters. Zero extra power use in winter :-)

lucb1e 12y ago
Tell that to your cat food bill ;)

lukasm 12y ago

I wonder what's the home efficiency.

HelloMcFly 12y ago

I take a more middle-of-the-road philosophy in my house, with primary reliance on space heaters for room-by-room heating. Why do I care if the kitchen is 72°F at 2pm while I'm working at my desk in my office?

g8oz 12y ago

In my experience thermal underwear (long johns) should be considered a must during winter. You don't have to live in a place like Canada or Minnesota to make them a standard part of your wardrobe.

raverbashing 12y ago

Yes Most people want "summer inside the house" which is absurdly wasteful Of course, it sucks when changing clothes or taking a shower, but there are ways of heating locally.

balfirevic 12y ago
I don't know how people's desires can be "wasteful". I find that "summer inside the house" during winter is absolutely wonderful from the comfort standpoint and certainly wouldn't trade it for the saving that I would get on electric bill. Of course, I realize that many people don't care for that. More power (and smaller bills) to them.
- jlebar 12y ago
  > I don't know how people's desires can be "wasteful". In a world where people paid for the true cost of their energy use, this argument might fly. But in most of the world today, this isn't the case, not by a long shot. If you heated to "summer inside the house" and bought high-quality carbon offsets corresponding to your increased energy use, I think most people wouldn't call that "wasteful". "Warm" might be the adjective I'd use. :)
  - wickedlogic 12y ago
    Sorta like when people order whatever they want for lunch, because they bought high quality calorie offsets?
    - Retric 12y ago
      At sufficient exercise levels most people have trouble eating enough. 10,000 calories every day tends to be a lot of food.
      - tempestn 12y ago
        Even if you're doing a couple hours of intense exercise every day, you're only going to be adding on the order of 1000 Calories to your daily usage. Resting burn for most adults is around 1500-2000, so that's ~3000. What do you consider "sufficient" exercise?
        PhantomGremlin 12y ago
        Michael Phelps needed 12,000 Calories a day when training. That's seriously "intense"! http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/08/14/michael-phelps-12000-calorie-day-diet-not-for-everyone/ http://www.foxnews.com/story/2008/08/14/michael-phelps-12000...
        tempestn 12y ago
        Wow, that is intense. Way beyond what I'd call "sufficient" exercise though!
im3w1l 12y ago
Imagine a radiator you turn on for those few minutes. Could probably keep you warm using a lot less energy than it would take to heat the bathroom air and walls.
Nursie 12y ago
I want summer inside the house. It may be wasteful, but that's what I want. I don't ever want to step out of the shower in the morning and shiver again, I find this deeply unpleasant. I also don't want to have to wear thick woollen clothes around the house. In pursuit of this I actually moved to Australia for a while, but it turns out I missed the temperate climate and UK culture (also my family, I guess...) So when I own my own home in a few weeks it will be getting insulated to hell and back. Eliminating drafts, insulating attic space, replacing some of the old windows with double or triple glazed ones, checking the state of the wall insulation... etc etc. But when it comes down to it, I'll pay the heating costs and swan around in my t-shirt all year. I like being warm.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  All I can say is: I understand you. But yeah, improving isolation, having a bathroom heater, using heat pumps instead of electrical heaters are better than just cranking up the heat and paying the bill.

Swizec 12y ago

This is where I really prefer the European model[1] - you heat the whole house with hot water. You make hot water with cheap natural gas. If you're lucky enough, you can even use geothermal. Then you use insulation. This especially is something that feels nobody in the US has heard of. At least in California. As a result, your radiators are turned down to 2 out of 10 all day (heating turns off automatically overnight), and you have to sometimes open a window when it's -13C outside so you don't sweat. Now I don't know how much people spend on heating when they live in a house house, but my apartment's heating bill this winter was about 30 euro a month[2] and I had to keep all my radiators turned off because the one in the bathroom couldn't be regulated. So that alone was enough to heat everything to extremely comfortable levels. tl;dr don't heat with air, insulate your fucking house, and install modern windows [1] Could just be where I'm from, but it seems fairly common in Europe and not at all something I've seen in the US [2] I think my gramps spends about 2k euro in October to pay for natural gas that heats his house until some time in April. So about 300/month for a ~10 bedroom house because he's got a house that's way too big.

adestefan 12y ago
This is common in the Northeast and Midwest. Also, if you're in an apartment your place might be so hot because you have a neighbor that has cranked the heat. I used to be able to keep the heat off in a place I lived at because the person that lived below me had their place like a sauna.
vacri 12y ago
Crappy insulation is the norm here in Australia as well, which is more of a problem down south where it gets cold in winter. I used to work with a Scot who highlighted the issue, saying that in a Scottish house, the insulation was good enough that you could basically heat a room with a candle. I once asked him if there were any wooden houses in Scotland, he replied "Yes, we keep our lawnmowers in them".
- Swizec 12y ago
  > I once asked him if there were any wooden houses in Scotland, he replied "Yes, we keep our lawnmowers in them". Austro-hungarian empire outlawed wooden houses in the early 19th century. Hence we still don't have any, and if you live in a wooden house[1], you are considered to not have been able to afford a proper house and thus looked down upon. [1] becoming common with drywall construction methods. Particularly because it's cheap and fast.

voidlogic 12y ago

>In June of 2010 I moved to a place in Montana with only electric heat. Living that far north and depending on one heat source is crazy! Think about the power going out when its -30 out... or if you used gas, running out or having your furnace break down. (Not to mention electric is usually the most expensive way to heat). Most houses where I live have 2 or 3 heat sources. I have wood, LP and electric...

stormbrew 12y ago
I live in the northernmost large city in Canada (where we get -40C pretty regularly for a while in the winter) and every apartment I've ever lived in has only one heat source, and usually it's either electric or water pipe. If your power goes out long enough for all the heat to leach out of your apartment or house you probably have some serious problems with either the electric company or your insulation.
- ars 12y ago
  If you have any kind of heat other than electric you by default have two kinds since you can always fall back on electric.
- cbhl 12y ago
  Heh, last Christmas the power was out for about two weeks at my parents' house, which uses electricity to push the hot air generated by our gas furnace through the house. It was -25 C. Granted, I might not have had to go to the hospital if we had gone to a warming shelter earlier than the sixth day. (My father is rather stubborn, and it damn near killed me. When I got out of the hospital, I left the house and paid for a hotel room in a part of town where power had been restored.)
TD-Linux 12y ago
I lived in Minnesota and had only electric heat. Most other houses have only gas heat, and it usually requires electricity to run. Luckily the electricity is pretty reliable. If you do lose heat, the solution is generally to use blankets outdoor gear until it is fixed. But this has never happened in my 20 or so years of living there.

p_eter_p 12y ago

A similar approach works in hot climates. A friend of mine saved a substantial amount of money by getting an efficient portable AC unit for his bedroom, and shutting off the main air conditioner for the house at night. In a southern summer, the savings add up quick.

sargun 12y ago
How does he purge the heat?
- adamfeldman 12y ago
  Usually those units come with a window attachment to vent the heat outside
- kimmel 12y ago
  I have a portable air conditioner but it is not as portable as you would think. It is about 2.5 feet tall, sits on nice rolling wheels and has a small exhaust and fitting so you open your window and put the pipe end in place to vent the heat. You do not have to mount it in the window which makes it portable. I can move it from room to room and it only takes about 2 minutes to setup the fitting.
- colechristensen 12y ago
  Portable air conditioners have small window-installed vents to exhaust hot air.
cma 12y ago
Depends where you live--a house with no air conditioning generally won't suffer mold, and neither will one with air conditioning. But spotty air conditioning without something like a dehumidifier will breed mold and warp floors.
- themodelplumber 12y ago
  A friend of mine has been complaining about his rental's warped kitchen floor and mold (or the fact that mold forms easily). His windows are mostly painted shut. Can you elaborate on this? What kind of a dehumidifier should he look at?

debrice 12y ago

Well, not heating your house enough can also cost you your house as mold and ice can grow in very cold zone of your house. But I do like the ingenuity of the solution. Shit Norwegians Say: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”

schiffern 12y ago
This is addressed in the article. >FAQ: It might work in Montana, but in Seattle, our windows would get moldy >There are a variety of ways to mitigate the mold problems that occur in cold, humid climates. I did some experimenting when I lived in the Seattle area and have compared notes with people that are still living there. This is a really large issues even if you don't try this. While there are many things to be done, I think the first two would be: 1) learn how to properly clean mold problems (borax, not bleach) and 2) a dehumidifier nearly eliminates all mold problems and gives off heat.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Vinegar is also excellent at combating mold (before it gets established), and is gentle on pretty much any surface. A 50-50 vinegar-water solution can simply be sprayed onto walls, floors, carpets, and other surfaces. Another is fully airing out a bathroom. I'll set a fan to move air until the walls and other surfaces are dry. Especially useful if you've got an interior bathroom. Otherwise, an openable window is highly useful.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    >I'll set a fan to move air until the walls and other surfaces are dry. // Aren't you just ensuring the whole house is damp then, unless your humidity is low enough in the first place I suppose.
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      No, though generally I'm not in environments where thermal control is a major concern, so the interior tends to be well-ventilated. They key is to understand that a shower is essentially a big humidity generator. So you want to shower with internal doors closed, but external windows open, if they're available. Otherwise you're simply pumping moisture into the residence. Once you've completed your shower, you're no longer introducing more moisture into the environment, so removing / diluting what you've got is the key. An exhaust fan is also useful, though most are relatively low-flow -- this is one element where if I am designing my own structure I'd have a high-capacity, high-flow, and if at all possible, quiet, fixture. A typical 100 CFM fan will require over 5 minutes to achieve a 100% exchange of air within even a modest-sized bathroom, say 6' x 12' x 7.5'. They'll rarely keep up with the generation of humidity during a shower. The real key is that a high-mounted fan removes the moist air that pools above your door jamb. The situation also depends on whether you're in a warm or cold, heating, cooling, or ambient, and humid or dry environment. In cold-weather winter climates, your usual problem is that interiors are too dry, so your bathroom humidity is useful for interior comfort. In a temperate/warm and humid environment, your main concern is venting the bathroom (first) followed by reducing standing moisture. And if it's humid enough that interior humidity is an issue I've likely got a dehumidifier for high-humidity periods. My usual strategy (yes, I've got a bathroom venting strategy) is: For an exterior bath or one with an openable skylight: shower with interior doors closed and the window open. Humidity is generated by tends to escape, keeping total build-up limited. I may or may not shower with the exhaust fan on, but always turn it on afterward, if only to evacuate high-rising moisture. Following shower, spray down shower doors/curtain and walls with vinegar or other (preferably organic) anti-microbial. If the area has higher humidity, a 14" floor fan is good to help evaporate standing water on floors or walls. Mildew tends to form most aggressively in areas in which water pools, and by removing that water and treating it to be inhospitable, you'll virtually eliminate any build-up. For an interior bath, shower with the interior door closed. Exhaust fan is either on or turned on following the shower (much more out of concern for noise than energy -- most fans I've encountered are annoyingly loud as well as relatively ineffective). I'll crack the interior door to allow fresh air in for a minute or so, then swing it wide open. Swirling a towel can help achieve a good vertical air mix (moist, warm air tends to rise), which levels out total humidity and eliminates high-humidity spots. Spray walls and floors with vinegar mix, finish my grooming, then turn on a floor fan to remove additional standing moisture on walls / floor. Airing out bath mats also helps markedly. Note that a bathroom is rarely more than 10% of your total interior area as well (and often less). So even dumping a 100% humid bath's air into your residence will tend to provide less than a ~10% boost in interior humidity. My experience is that air tends not to feel overly humid until it gets above 60-70% humidity, and that humidity tends to normalize fairly quickly over a larger area. The real threat is _standing_ water. End result is that I very, very rarely have bathroom mildew issues, rarely use a chlorine-based mildew treatment (though I've got a spray bottle of bleach too that may get used 1-4x monthly), and spend only a few seconds a day dealing with the matter.

jeffjia 12y ago

Let's just have Nest...

vacri 12y ago

Why not use the reptile heater instead of the incandescent globe? Having a light shining right in my face would end the experiment in minutes.

mrb 12y ago
This is a great point! Infrared heat emitters produce less visible light, therefore more heat than a light bulb of comparable wattage.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
  Umm... Assuming you are not producing any EM radiation at frequencies that go through the skin of your house (radio, X-ray, visible light through the window, etc), any resistive heater will produce the same amount of heat. Because guess what happens when EM radiation is adsorbed? It turns into heat. Any EM radiation.
jonknee 12y ago
Apparently he likes the light and thus the double usage (if you're already going to have a light on you might as well use its heat). I agree that the placement would drive me batty. Reptile heaters were mentioned towards the end and he uses them when having guests over.

jondiggsit 12y ago

Just install radiant heat everywhere in your house ya cheap bastard

lutorm 12y ago

This is why changing out incandescents for CFL's in a heated house does almost nothing for saving energy... and if the heat comes from electricity, nothing for saving money, either.

mangecoeur 12y ago
Wrong. Does plenty to save energy. Reasons: - for half the year, you don't heat but you still light, so you automatically gain savings for that whole period. (also if you have air conditioning, in summer you heat the house with lights then have to cool the air again) - Lights are on the ceiling. Hot air rises. Therefore heat coming from lights does almost nothing to improve your thermal comfort. - If you are heating using gas rather than electricity, it is far more efficient to heat air with energy from the gas boiler than from the electric lighting
- superuser2 12y ago
  This is likely mitigated somewhat if you have good natural light sources. The warmer it is, the less you need to run artificial lights (assuming a "normal" sleep schedule.) Not to say that it makes sense, but still.
- lutorm 12y ago
  If you don't heat, you don't have a heated house. Hence my comment does not apply.
  - lutorm 12y ago
    I wish whoever downvoted this would indicate what part of my comment they disagree with... I said "If A then B", and then the response was "wrong, because if not A then C". Of course it saves energy if you don't heat the house, that's obvious. What's less obvious to many is that it saves much less than you think if you live in a house in Northern Sweden, heated with electric heat (which I happened to grow up in).
- ams6110 12y ago
  What's the energy cost of making a CFL bulb vs. an incandescent? Also since in practice they don't last a lot longer, and are annoyingly dim for the first few minutes, and are considered an hazardous waste when you need to dispose of them, why does it make sense to replace a $0.50 bulb that has none of those issues with a $5.00 bulb that does?

redcap 12y ago

> The bathroom is the one room in the house that is heated normally. You can get heated toilet seats - they're quite common in Japan. One example: http://www.heatedtoiletseat.com http://www.heatedtoiletseat.com

mbrameld 12y ago
Alaskan here. Getting out of the shower in a cold bathroom is no fun. A towel heater can help a lot with that, though.

sdhsdh 12y ago

There's some academic work on this, too: http://www.cbe.berkeley.edu/research/personal-comfort-systems.htm http://www.cbe.berkeley.edu/research/personal-comfort-system...

moron4hire 12y ago

When I was a kid, we were rather poor. My parents scrounged together to buy a computer for the family, and I started to get interested in programming. But my parents were fearful I'd break their computer (not in a "don't be programmin'" way, but definitely in a "please be careful" way). And then a friend donated a computer to me. And I set it up in my bedroom. And I had my first comfortable winter in that house that year. Of course, it made summers unbearable. But for the most part, I was used to heat.

nostromo 12y ago

People should check out WattVision. It's a little device that attaches to your electrical meter so you can monitor your electrical usage. What I've found is that almost all of our home's electrical usage comes from heating (heaters, clothes dryers, and hot water). Everything else is almost a rounding error. For example: I saw almost no change when we switched from incandescents to LED lighting (even in the summer when we're not heating the house) but I saw a large change with efficient shower heads and washing clothes on cold.

fleitz 12y ago
Yup, if you're heating your house incandescents just lessen heating load. However, if you're cooling your house incandescents are a triple whammy as AC isn't nearly as efficient as heating.
- Brakenshire 12y ago
  Incandescents heat the room at the ceiling, which I would imagine significantly reduces their effective efficiency relative to a well placed electric heater. Also, of course, incandescents have the same poor system efficiency as other electric heaters, compared to burning the fuel for heat in your house.
tungwaiyip 12y ago
Totally heating dominate energy use. I'm rather disturb to hear people pay much attention to so call "phantom power" from idle electronics and adapters. Adapters plugged in the socket do not consume measurable power. Wifi router uses about a few watts. The worst offender is a set-top box that uses 18W irrespective of power on or off. It is piece of crap anyway so I unplugged it. All the electronics in the house probably use less power in a day compare to running a 1500W heater for 15 minutes.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  Fortunately I have natural gas for heating and hot water. Much cheaper than electric heat, but the local gas utility is still charging me about $12/MMbtu, which is about 3x the Henry Hub spot price. But electronics is not nearly as benign as you suggest, it depends on your lifestyle. E.g. I have 4 TiVo boxes running 24x7. Each draws about 40W. In my area 1W works out to about $1/yr. So my TiVo boxes cost me $160/yr just in electricity. I also believe that LED lighting saves money. In our family room I used to have a 75W light bulb on for at least 12 hrs/day. That's $37/yr for just a single bulb. I replaced it with an 11W Philips LED. It's now costing me $5.50/yr. That's an over $30/yr savings on a single bulb. The same savings applies anywhere light bulbs are on for a long time.

cjensen 12y ago

Given that he uses electric heating, it's pretty funny the electric company wanted him to switch to florescent. That buys you nothing in those months where the heater is on. What I'd really like to know is: why not switch to gas?

maxerickson 12y ago
He mentions homesteading at the end. I guess he doesn't have a natural gas supply available. Propane and fuel oil aren't the completely obvious win over electric that natural gas is.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  We haven't found natural gas on the retail level to be any less expensive than propane. Perhaps it depends on where you live.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    I'm talking about utility supplied natural gas vs truck delivered liquid propane in the U.S. I'm pretty sure the natural gas is consistently cheaper (frequently to the tune of 50%, my experience of it is in northern areas where the propane trucks are busy all winter).

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nkozyra 12y ago

I live in Florida. This entire discussion is bizarro world for me. It costs nearly $400 a month to keep my house at 74deg in the summer.

cheald 12y ago
Phoenix, ditto, except $500/80. Installing solar screens helped a ton. Our power bills are down around 30% this summer since installing them.
dredmorbius 12y ago
Which is an excellent reminder that the challenge isn't heating or cooling, it's minimizing energy use as dictated by the requirements of your environment.
_delirium 12y ago
I live in Copenhagen, and it's also bizarro world for me. :) But mainly because electricity is very expensive here, whereas district heating (hot water produced by municipal plants, which you can draw through your radiator if you'd like) is quite cheap. It would be hard to beat the costs of district heating using a space-heater approach, even given better spatial concentration of the heat.
- dharma1 12y ago
  Same in Helsinki/Finland - district heating (hot water radiators) for most of the city. Even data centre heat is recycled in this way :)
- lucb1e 12y ago
  Wait a minute you get hot water from the pipe instead of heating it yourself? That's interesting.
  - allannienhuis 12y ago
    Most large buildings in the parts of China that I've visited (4 different regions of the country) use government supplied central heating (hot water I think). Interestingly this supply is turned on in the fall based on local policy, which is often driven by economics and politics, So it's not uncommon for people to not get the heat turned on until much later in the year than anyone would really like... :)

dredmorbius 12y ago

Spot-heating, especially within a leaky building envelope utilizing expensive heat sources (electric resistance) is one option. But it's hardly the only one, or the best. For northern climates, taking a whole-system approach to home/structure design gets you a tremendously greater payoff in terms of energy savings. Among the most powerful demonstrations of this I've seen are Thorsten Chlupp / Reina LLC's experiences designing and building zero net energy homes in Fairbanks, Alaska. His videos are long (~90 minutes) be exceptionally comprehensive. The TL;DR is: • Total envelope. He pays exceptional attention to any thermal envelope penetrations. All emissions (air, water, sewage) pass through thermal exchanges. • Thermal mass. The foundation, flooring, central masonry stove, and a 5,000 gallon stratified thermal storage tank all store and scavange thermal energy both passively and actively. • Moisture control. Heat barriers introduce thermal issues. Chlupp makes use of multiple glazings, window setbacks, and _exterior_ thermal shutters to minimize moisture buildup on windows. Moisture barriers and ventilation of interstitial spaces is designed to clear moisture. • Heat pumps. Rather than create thermal energy directly (other than the masonry stove), Chlupp moves heat using ground-loop heat pumps. • Solar and net metering. Solar panels (yes, in Alaska) and net metering help him arrive at net zero energy. His first-year goal wasn't met due to plug-in hybrid vehicles, an oversight in his energy modeling. Though conceived as a whole-system ground-up greenfield design, the principles are applicable to a lesser degree as retrofit options. Oh, and for heating your bed: a 1 liter Nalgene bottle, filled with boiling hot water, and slipped into a wool sock, will heat your bed cozily. Two are almost certainly too hot, but you're welcome to try. And they'll last the night. http://www.reina-llc.com/ http://www.reina-llc.com/ Alaska's First Net Zero Energy Homes Performance Update http://fixyt.com/watch?v=Xen_VWyDezY http://fixyt.com/watch?v=Xen_VWyDezY Path to Net Zero Energy Series -- Alaska's first Net Zero Ho... http://fixyt.com/watch?v=AtHkvpRI6fc http://fixyt.com/watch?v=AtHkvpRI6fc http://fixyt.com/search?q=thorsten+chlupp+zero+net+energy http://fixyt.com/search?q=thorsten+chlupp+zero+net+energy

alricb 12y ago
Not to mention: In a well-insulated, well-designed house, you won't have any worries about frozen pipes, even with a low thermostat temperature, since all pipes will be inside the insulated enclosure. There's a whole community of people trying to build better buildings out there. The Passivhaus people, the PERSIST (Saskatchewan) and REMOTE (Alaska) approaches (http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/getting-insulation-out-your-walls-and-ceilings http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/getti...), Building Science Corporation, the NRC in Canada (http://archive.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/ibp/irc/cbd/digest-index.html http://archive.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/ibp/irc/cbd/digest-index.h...). Some of these people are ex-hippies or hippie-ish, and there is a bit of bullshit out there, but there's certainly plenty of better ways to build and renovate homes for energy efficiency.

arh68 12y ago

Imagine how much more they could save by keeping the heated mattress pad on and never leave the bed! I mostly jest.. The author seems totally unaware of the efficiency gains that a heat pump can provide. A 300W space heater will be easily outmatched by a heat pump that consumes 300W (unless we're dropping way, way below 0C). The efficiency is likely ~3x [1]. I hope the author isn't making this mistake out of disdain for centralized hvac, since window unit heat pumps are readily available for small spaces. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency

jqm 12y ago
I found this out the hard way one winter. Without looking into specifics I decided that a couple of small well placed space heaters (in rooms with traffic) might save electricity over the whole house heat pump. I had 3 small space heaters that ran most of the day and night and I turned the heat pump down to 50. I was wrong. My electric bill was higher than just running the heat pump, and most of the house was cold most of the time.
Retric 12y ago
He is dealing with -30 below winters at which point most heat pumps are almost useless. A ground source heat pump can still be useful but they cost quite a bit more to install so they might not be worth it if your to far north.

mangecoeur 12y ago

An interesting approach - though for contrast, a well built passivhaus or low exergy design can achieve similar savings or even net positive. At a cost, true, but at much greater convenience. I feel having to do this is basically admitting that our houses are terribly engineered. And yes, with this kind of system you get problems with damp and mold which can have some pretty serious health impacts.

willholloway 12y ago

Energy is abundant, there is no need to shiver in the cold. Solar forced warm air is inexpensive, simple technology that is very underutilized. Solar photovoltaics get all the attention, but solar warm air/water is less expensive and simple to manufacture. http://sunmatesolarpanels.com/content/view/2/31/ http://sunmatesolarpanels.com/content/view/2/31/

roel_v 12y ago
But you can't power a computer on PV. I don't think anyone who knows something about energy efficient heating suggests PV to warm a house electrically, it's too inefficient.
- jtheory 12y ago
  Not my comment you're responding to, but it's not talking about PV for heating (that'd be kind of ridiculous, honestly). Systems for heating water/air using solar can be quite inexpensive as well; converting light to heat is rather easier than converting it to electricity. E.g., I've seen cheap pool-heating systems that just pump the water through wide flattened black pipes exposed to the sun and send it back into the pool. Voila, solar heating!
  - roel_v 12y ago
    Yeah my second sentence was a non sequitur, but my point was: you can only do a little with solar/water heating. Yes heating a pool is one of those things, but that's a very niche application. This thread is about heating a house, or at least about being comfortable in one, and solar/water is just not a viable technology for that in the vast majority of cases.
    - jtheory 12y ago
      Oh... you said "PV" in both sentences, which is specifically converting light to electricity; that's what threw me. For heating a house with solar (not PV) -- it would depend on insulation level, I'd imagine. I do know people who use it for "most of the time" water heating, with good results.

dmritard96 12y ago

This is a cool approach and actually there is some federal research money available for it. https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/ https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/ (third one down) "DELIVERING EFFICIENT LOCAL THERMAL AMENITIES (DELTA)" We (http://www.flair.zone http://www.flair.zone) were looking into grant funding and saw it. All I could think of was heated/air conditioned underwear lol.

dredmorbius 12y ago

OK, Paul Wheaton simply doesn't know what he's talking about: "I think that this does produce some savings, but not as much as you might think. If you set your thermostat to a constant 70, the heater works a little at a time throughout the day. If you drop it to 50 at night or in the middle of the day, the heater stops working, but then when the time comes to warm the house again, the heater has to work at full power for a long time to get the temp back up - thus losing a lot of your savings." WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG Heat losses are driven by two factors: 1. The temperature differential between the hot and cold sides. 2. The thermal conductivity (or exchange) between the hot and cold sides. That's straight out of Newton's Law of Cooling / Fourier's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_heat_transfer#Newton.27s_law_of_cooling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_heat_transfer#Newton... If you're running heat constantly, you're maintaining a constant flow of heat from your interior to the exterior. That is, you're maintaining a high heat exchange rate to the exterior, and you're constantly wasting a large portion of heat. If you're heating only while you need a warm interior, then as the interior temperature falls, the energy flux to the exterior decreases. You're no longer pumping heat into the external environment. Yes, you'll run your furnace/heating system continuously for a while in raising the interior temperature, but that is largely adding heat to the interior space, not to the exterior. The net is expending less energy. Your most efficient strategy is to turn interior heat down to the minimum essential level (ultimately: enough to keep pipes from freezing), or the minimum level the thermostat allows (often ~50F in the US). My own practice is generally to turn any heating system off entirely at night. From a moisture management perspective, you also win as cold air has a lower absolute humidity, that is, the quantity of water it can hold is lower. Heating cold humid air reduces the relative humidity, allowing walls and surfaces to dry out. The overnight heat loss is also a very clear sign that Paul Wheaton is dealing with an exceptionally poorly insulated structure. And a very poor grasp of thermodynamics. The same principle holds for AC as well, though here you want to increase the temperature setting at which the AC comes on, or disable AC entirely while you're out of the home. A better way of thinking of this is to minimize the energy input (heating or cooling) when it's not needed. See: http://www.uswitch.com/energy-saving/guides/heating-on-all-the-time/ http://www.uswitch.com/energy-saving/guides/heating-on-all-t... http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2970/does-turning-down-the-thermostat-at-night-save-energy http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2970/does-turning-d... http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/thermostats http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/thermostats

Donch 12y ago

Number one link on Hacker News is an article stuffed full of Amazon affiliate links for personal heating products. Something isn't right.

XorNot 12y ago

Looking at this as conventional power savings is wrong. It's better to look at this as comfort. I just recently bought one of those 20 watt heat mats, for one specific reason: while using a computer it is impossible to keep my feet warm. Socks, boots, anything? Doesn't work. It was a huge problem while I was studying. Since I got one, for 20 W, my feet are warm. In fact, my perception of room temperature as a whole has been massively improved. This is a lot less power usage then any type of whole room solution.

sliverstorm 12y ago
Last time I lived in a freezing cold house I just pointed my computer's exhaust at my feet.
rdancer 12y ago
Have you gone to true extremes? I have found that synthetic fur works extremely well, and is very comfortable, even with stone-cold floors. I'm going to be buying pair of these for the upcoming winter; they're dirt-cheap, machine washable, and will last several seasons: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FG1XINO/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FG1XINO/ref=oh_aui_det... I have been thinking about thermal socks as well ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pairs-Mens-Thermal-Socks-Size/dp/B0019QPX1K/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406819251&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=tehrmal+socks http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pairs-Mens-Thermal-Socks-Size/dp/B00... ), and furry boots for the great outdoors.

staunch 12y ago

Kotatsu tables really are great. Some pictures here if you haven't seen them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu Unfortunately even a cheap table in the U.S. is more expensive than it should be. There's an opportunity for someone to create kotatsu tables and things like them for the American market.

jrockway 12y ago
I think the problem is Americans don't want to sit on the floor. Which is strange, because carpet is more comfortable than tatami.
- anon4 12y ago
  Probably because of their habit of wearing outside shoes inside the house, making the floor too dirty to sit on.

neves 12y ago

You just can't go the bathroom.

deleted 12y ago

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nly 12y ago

I just let my computers get dusty and run CPU intensive tasks.

jebblue 12y ago

I was really caught up in this story and the effort involved until ... "I wonder if these techniques caught on, could this reduce or eliminate US war for oil?" and then "If I wrote this article 20 years ago might we have never gone to war with Iraq?". Iraq was _not_, repeat, NOT, N O T, about oil. Iraq was about stability, about a nut case leader who terrorized and killed his own people, who let his sons terrorize people. It was about all the terrorists caught who had evaded worldwide, WORLDWIDE authorities for decades in many cases, found hiding out in ... Iraq. Hussein disregarded Bush elder, Clinton and Bush junior, covering 3 US Presidencies, both major US political parties. He shot missiles at the very ally planes charged with making him keep his army at bay. He plotted to kill the very US President (Bush elder) who forced him to back out of Kuwait: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/iraq/timeline/062793.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/iraq/tim...

jtheory 12y ago
Voted down, then responding in case you don't know why: this is a discussion about micro-heaters. Yes, it's a bit disagreeable to run across even minor, aside comments that disagree with something you believe strongly, but please just deal with that on your own time. Because of course your comment will be unpleasant for people to read who feel just as passionately that you're wrong, and some of them may be compelled to post wall-o-text comments here to rebut your claims. Here, in this discussion about micro-heaters.
- jebblue 12y ago
  The article was about saving energy using a specific approach _until_ the article's author took the side trip into world politics.
- jebblue 12y ago
  PS, this, "Voted down, then responding in case you don't know why" is passive aggressive.
  - jtheory 12y ago

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

Three ladies at my company campaigned heavily for those heated keyboards a few years ago. One shorted out within the first month and the other two stopped functioning within a year.

seamusabshere 12y ago

best. hn. ever.

smallegan 12y ago

I have often wondered why we don't all sleep in heated pods (bubbles). All of the wasted heat to keep houses warm at night drives me nuts.

yxhuvud 12y ago
All the heat wasted due to bad insulation drives me nuts. Solve the real problem and inconvenient solutions like the one you suggested disappear.

harmegido 12y ago

I'm sorry, I'm sure this idea/post is valid, but damnit if this isn't exactly what the recent HBO show "Silicon Valley" lampooned in the finale. I cannot stop laughing.

3minus1 12y ago
it's not exactly the same, but close enough to be cuttingly funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvDHKKsCL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvDHKKsCL4

sbierwagen 12y ago

Tom Murphy has done a couple of blog posts on this exact thing: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/heat-those-feet/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/heat-those-feet/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/05/burning-desire-for-efficiency/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/05/burning-desire-f...

bce 12y ago

A similar project is being done by the Senseable Cities Lab at MIT: Local Warming: http://senseable.mit.edu/local-warming/ http://senseable.mit.edu/local-warming/ Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-6i6owLMQk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-6i6owLMQk

dharma1 12y ago

hot water bottles work pretty well. Probably more effective than constantly heating up air. Water is a good storage of heat

jmadsen 12y ago

Very much the "philosophy" of heating here in Japan; heaters for single room, heavy futons on the bed with no heater, kotatsu, foot warmers, etc. Comes from old, leaky wooden houses, but idea is the same. Lot of bad habits here still, but heating the upstairs guest bedroom all winter long isn't one of them

deleted 12y ago

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Lapsa 12y ago

Micro haters cut 87% off my electric heat bill

brusch64 12y ago

This reminds me a little bit of a company I've visited. They cooled the office so much in the summer that some of the people in the office (I'd say 5 out of 20) used electric heaters under their desk to warm their feet.

benjamincburns 12y ago

The idea of a heated keyboard is a little gross to me. Seems like it'd encourage bacteria growth.

eru 12y ago
Your keyboard will have the same temperature in summer as the heated one does in winter.

yxhuvud 12y ago

Good grief. If you live in a country that gets cold, learn to insulate your houses better. Seriously, it is that simple. /lives in a country where triple windows are standard for all new buildings intended for people.

Shivetya 12y ago
I live in a larger house, being single any house is overkill but I went a bit beyond because of pricing and location. As such I have three bedrooms and two baths where the vents are kept closed. This does mean they seal completely so in winter the rooms can hit the 50s (F) on a below freezing week. You don't need to live in a cold climate to want good insulation, it can save a bundle in hot climates too if your a fan of extreme AC; think 72F that some I know live by. I do the ceiling fan method, 78F and a nice big ceiling fan in every room.
- newman314 12y ago
  You might want to read this. http://www.familyhandyman.com/smart-homeowner/energy-saving-tips/save-energy-by-closing-heat-registers/view-all http://www.familyhandyman.com/smart-homeowner/energy-saving-...

icantthinkofone 12y ago

You can eliminate the need for an electric blanket by just getting a down-filled blanket. In a normally heated house, I would actually sweat under one. You can buy them in a "half down" style, which would be cooler, but, if the point is to allow you to turn the heat down, down blankets are the perfect thing.

rrss1122 12y ago

Cut out the personal electric heaters and you save even more. I just wear a sweater as my personal heater. Heater only comes on for visitors.