this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
48 points (98.0% liked)

Canada

7236 readers
958 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories


πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


πŸ’» Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


πŸ’΅ Finance, Shopping, Sales


πŸ—£οΈ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Your thinking on the dirty grid might be false. If you use a heat pump you typically get more heat energy than the energy you input. A heat pump can multiply the energy you put in by a factor of 2-5. Say you burn 1 unit of gas to heat your apartment. You could let your utility burn that liter and give you 50% of its energy in electricity (assuming half is lost). Then you power a hear pump which operates at COP of 2x. You get the same amount of heat as before. Now if the heat pump operates at a higher COP, you end up saving on burned gas. It's only worse if it operates at lower than COP or 2 under these conditions. Depending on the efficiency of the power generator and transmission, those numbers would balance differently. I don't think they'd be worse though. 50% is a really low number.

The reason this doesn't break the preservation of energy principle is that heat pumps move heat instead of converting electricity into heat energy. There's always heat in the air if the temperature is above absolute 0.

[–] ikidd 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

COP goes straight to shit at -15, which happens quite often on the prairies. Which might not be a problem on the annual expense, but if you can't keep your house from freezing up, it doesn't matter how much or little it costs. You'll spend way more $ and carbon fixing it afterwards.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Anyone installing a heat pump in cold climates will often have a backup heat source. If you don't have access to natural gas, heat pumps can save considerable amounts of energy compared to only resistive heat.