It's fun to think about theoretically more efficient methods of heating.
1) Heat pump - you use electricity to move heat from the outside in. It has efficiency over 100%, because you get all of the electricity's energy, plus some of the outside heat.
2) But generating electricity at the power plant uses heat in the first place, and wastes a lot of it. Let's bring the fuel to the house and make a heat-driven heat pump. This way you get 100% of the fuel's heat, plus heat from outside.
3) But this is still wasteful, because fuel burns hotter than the temperature you want in your house. So you could generate some electricity along the way, and use it to power domestic appliances. This way it will do useful work, and then 100% of it will also end up heating the house, because there's nowhere else for the energy to go.
4) And even that is still wasteful. The house is too hot in summer, and during the day, and too cold in winter, and during the night. A large enough heat reservoir, like thick walls, can smooth out this variation and give you average temperature all the time.
5) And believe it or not, even that is still wasteful. The human body produces enough heat to be warm in most temperatures, given good insulation. So we go from needing thick walls to needing thick clothes, which are much cheaper.
6) And even that is still wasteful! Because you don't need thick clothes either. So we arrive at the perfect solution for staying warm: a pill that makes your body heat up without fuss when it's cold, and lose weight along the way. Combine with clothes to taste.
1) heat pumps make much more sense when you don't burn things to power them. Solar PV, wind, hydro etc powering heat pumps mean you turn energy that is not heat into heat
2) there's no physical reason that you can't run a heat pump in reverse to provide cooling when necessary
3) I need to heat my house along with myself! In the UK there has been a "heat the person, not the home" movement in response to high heating gas prices. Result: a plague of damp and mouldy homes
> 1) heat pumps make much more sense when you don't burn things to power them. Solar PV, wind, hydro etc powering heat pumps mean you turn energy that is not heat into heat
A heat pump that is entirely powered by electricity generated from natural gas is most likely still more efficient than burning that gas to directly heat a house. Obviously though, using renewables is better.
A heat pump that is used on the exhaust of a low efficiency furnace might turn it into a high efficiency furnace. This would have other benefits because you would not have to throw away an old furnace for no reason.
ANY inefficient technology could get an efficiency boost just by using a heat pump.
But for this to happen HPs would have to be much much cheaper.
> A heat pump that is used on the exhaust of a low efficiency furnace might turn it into a high efficiency furnace.
Just to make this clear: I was already comparing to a high efficiency furnace. I.e. a standard air-to-water heat pump (relatively common as a heat pump at least here in germany) would be more efficient at heating a house with electricity purely generated from natural gas than a natural gas furnace would be at its theoretical limit of 100%.
> This would have other benefits because you would not have to throw away an old furnace for no reason.
As long as there are no synthetic fuels for those furnaces (that can be made climate neutral) there is a very good reason to get rid of all of them: any burned fossil fuel is too much burned fossil fuel. We need to get down to zero.
> I.e. a standard air-to-water heat pump (relatively common as a heat pump at least here in germany) would be more efficient at heating a house with electricity purely generated from natural gas than a natural gas furnace would be at its theoretical limit of 100%.
It seems to me that scheme from my toplevel comment (point 2) was already more efficient than either of those. Namely, you burn the gas in the home, and use the temperature gradient to also run a heat pump vs the outside.
> Namely, you burn the gas in the home, and use the temperature gradient to also run a heat pump vs the outside.
I am not exactly sure what that would look like, but I'd imagine it would at least be difficult to match the efficiency of a combined cycle power plant to generate electricity at home for the heat pump. Then again, as you say, you would have the "waste" heat locally to harness as well. Although this waste heat in power plants can be used for district heating as well, so it might also be used in that situation.
Anyway, my main point was that the sentence "heat pumps make much more sense when you don't burn things to power them." makes it sound like burning the same thing to heat your house directly was more efficient when in fact it is not, and potentially by a pretty wide margin.
"It is estimated that there are approximately 4000 attendances at accident and emergency departments in England each year for treatment of carbon monoxide poisoning.
There are approximately 440 hospital admissions per year in England due to carbon monoxide poisoning.
Approximately 51% of these admissions are due to accidental exposure, and 40% are due to intentional self-harm (undetermined in the remaining 9%).
In England and Wales, approximately 40 deaths are reported each year due to carbon monoxide poisoning."
Another approach is to heat the interior walls and ceiling instead of heating the air.
Neglecting clothes for a few minutes, your body both radiates heat and absorbs it. When you are in thermal equilibrium you feel warm. If your walls and roof had low grade radiant heaters on them and emitted enough infrared to balance your own outgoing radiation, you’d be warm, even if the air temperature was cold and you had no clothes on.
So if you covered your ceiling with cheap thin iron sheet metal and built small induction coils behind them and heated the ceiling instantly, you could instantly feel warm in a cool room. Exit the room and you turn everything off…letting it lose its tiny amount of heat.
So proper system design could let you have low latency zone heating. Since you usually don’t use all the rooms in your house at the same time, there ought to be more than 50% efficiency in that sort of a system.
2. Our current approach of heating the whole house through forced air is much less satisfying than having a concentrated heat source (like a fireplace) that you can just walk towards and get as much heat as you want out of. Maybe psychological factors might play in…if you “could” be warm with just a little bit of effort maybe you won’t mind being colder than normal. Maybe heat gradients are better for you than uniformly high heat.
I'd prefer floor heating. Your feet will never again feel cold during the colder seasons + warm air travels upwards, thus distributing the heat to the entire room.
The first article I found when searching for “floor heating health” concludes:
> »A warm floor can induce high blood perfusion in the feet and consequently improve an occupant's health by treating many vascular-related disorders.«
The article is from 2008, so there could be newer — or just other — articles out there coming to the opposite conclusion, but it does sound counter-intuitive that it should be bad for the blood flow. I'm willing to change my mind, though.
You can buy infrared heaters that are exacly this. They are easy to install and often look nice, like a picture or mirror. Also they of course heat the furniture and everything, too, so with the low efficiency of electric heating it's not a great option.
Hmm, I'd expect that our bodies mostly exchange heat with their surroundings by conduction, not radiation. So a heater that warms me up by radiation feels a bit suspicious. Are you sure it'll have no negative health effects?
> And even that is still wasteful! Because you don't need thick clothes either. So we arrive at the perfect solution for staying warm: a pill that makes your body heat up without fuss when it's cold, and lose weight along the way
The tech industry once again coming back to amphetamines.
One thing to keep in mind is there are reasons to keep stuff warm, and not just your body. Condensation, etc. is a pain in wet places (Ireland for instance).
Insulation is going to improve efficiency of any system. Generating power at grid scale is usually more efficient than what you can do at home. And you can maybe put your faith that the grid will migrate to renewables in the next few decades while upgrading homes is a lot more labor intensive.
Regarding 6 - this strikes me as not being a million miles off from using radiant heating methods to warm individuals. Would be very unusual to have in a house but you sometimes see them in churches in the UK and Europe where heating the space isn’t feasible.
>So we arrive at the perfect solution for staying warm: a pill that makes your body heat up without fuss when it's cold, and lose weight along the way.
Only part of this your body doesn't automatically do on its own is the "without fuss" bit. And that part can be trained.
1) Heat pump - you use electricity to move heat from the outside in. It has efficiency over 100%, because you get all of the electricity's energy, plus some of the outside heat.
2) But generating electricity at the power plant uses heat in the first place, and wastes a lot of it. Let's bring the fuel to the house and make a heat-driven heat pump. This way you get 100% of the fuel's heat, plus heat from outside.
3) But this is still wasteful, because fuel burns hotter than the temperature you want in your house. So you could generate some electricity along the way, and use it to power domestic appliances. This way it will do useful work, and then 100% of it will also end up heating the house, because there's nowhere else for the energy to go.
4) And even that is still wasteful. The house is too hot in summer, and during the day, and too cold in winter, and during the night. A large enough heat reservoir, like thick walls, can smooth out this variation and give you average temperature all the time.
5) And believe it or not, even that is still wasteful. The human body produces enough heat to be warm in most temperatures, given good insulation. So we go from needing thick walls to needing thick clothes, which are much cheaper.
6) And even that is still wasteful! Because you don't need thick clothes either. So we arrive at the perfect solution for staying warm: a pill that makes your body heat up without fuss when it's cold, and lose weight along the way. Combine with clothes to taste.