this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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At what point is city wide infrastructure the answer?
Especially for hot water. Is it worth ripping up the roads and putting in hot water pipes or are we at the point in "electrify everything" that it's actually cheaper to have individual appliances for everything.
I can't help put think with hot water most is used in morning or at night. Seems like a huge storage tank that is filled at night and at peak solar is beneficial for the grid.
Hot water continuously radiates it's heat into the environment around it. City wide hot water infrastructure would be hugely inefficient and impractical as that water would constantly have to circulate to and from homes to be re-heated and re-circulated.
Literally heating massive quantities of water; just to pump it out into essentially a field (of pipes), wait for it to cool, then pump it back and do it again.
Without that recirculation to keep hotwater immediately available at each home/tap; you'd be waiting hours for all the cooled off water to flush out of the pipes and be replaced with hot water, wasting all that water while you wait. (kinda like waiting on a typical hotwater tank, but x100)
Electric hot water on demand combined with green sources of electricity should be the goal.
Lots of countries have city hot water. It's a simple concept. I don't there there is that much heat wasted covering that many people in such a small area.
I just wondered about the economics. I think most of the current ones use waste heat from electricity generation
I live in one of those countries. Heat waste is a big problem, you can sometimes see where the heat pipes are because of melted snow above them. Many houses are poorly insulated as well and lose even more energy.
Central heating, as we call it, is infamous for being rather inflexible and often expensive. I used to pay up to 20% of my salary for heat during colder winters. I now live in an apartment building with its own soil-ethanol geothermal heating and my heating bills are 10% of what it used to be.
Many heating plants still burn oil products to make heat, and those are often expensive. There has been a big push to switch to locally produced biomass to cut costs.