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Heat pumps twice as efficient as fossil fuel systems in cold weather, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Technology
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I live in Finland. Heat pump is the only source of heat in my house.
Some of the stations in Antarctica use heat pumps. They have been proven to work effectively at -53°C (-64°F) and do so reliably.
Are they more efficient at more reasonable temperatures? Yes. But they still work even when it's very cold outside.
How well a heat pump works in cold temperatures obviously depends what temperatures it was designed to operate at. Don't waste your money on a model that is designed to operate in a different climate. In fact a lot of heat pumps aren't even capable of heating at all - they can only output cold air (which they can do even if it's stinking hot outside by the way).
It can go down to -30C (-22f) sometimes or even below that
Yeah averages are way higher than that. My point just was that saying they don't work in cold climates isn't quite true. Yes, there are locations with way colder climates than this but if Finland isn't considered a "cold climate" then I don't know what is.
Heat pumps are super common here. Many houses just have a electric resistance heating so people switch to heat pumps to save on electricity.
Are you intimately familiar with the inner workings of your heatpump? Nearly all heatpumps in a cold climate have backup heat built in and it would automatically switch to backup when it gets too cold outside. -30C is well into the too cold category for it to function as a heatpump alone
Yeah I have no idea. The alternative would be electric radiators anyways so in most cases that wouldn't make a difference anyways. Temperatures that low are quite rare - maybe just a handful of nights a year. Generally it stays around -10C
Which makes the argument that heat pumps don't work in the cold completely wrong from a user perspective.
What happens when the power goes out
The same thing that happens when you have electric or gas heating. It stops working, because none of those work without electricity nowadays. Hell if you have a coal/wood burner for central heating chances are it doesn't work without electricity either.
how often do you think the power goes out in finland
How often does it got out in Germany At least Finland built a Nuclear reactor to power most of the country unlike Germany which shut all their's down
In my house? Pretty much never. We have solar as well as a grid connection and can connect a generator as well.
In fact, I even have a second stand alone portable solar system that we take camping. It's not powerful enough to heat a house... but it is powerful enough for pretty much everything else. And I can heat my house with a fire if it came to that.
Redundancy is the name of the game if you're worried about reliability.
afaik power never really goes out in western europe unless something happens to the infrastructure (e.g. lightning strike or tree falling on a power line), what instead happens when we run out of generation capacity is that prices skyrocket.
Well it obviously stops working and unless you have some other means of heating your house you're kinda fucked and can only hope it comes back on soon as it generally does.