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An Idea to Reduce Winter Heating NG Consumption

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SageBrush

REJECT Fascism
May 7, 2015
14,851
21,477
New Mexico
My two person household lives in a 3800 Sq Ft detached home with heating provided by an efficient boiler that circulates hot water through pipes in the slab to radiant heaters. While the boiler is at least 80% efficient (perhaps more,) the slab is not insulated and I am limited in my heating area choices by the 3 zones in the home. I currently heat one zone that includes the boiler room (as a side effect), the adjacent unused bedroom (uninsulated pipes in the wall), the kitchen, dining room and living room.

It occurred to me today that the main area we want to heat is the kitchen. So that said, why not use the stove gas burner ? We can heat up the kitchen as we heat up water and cook breakfast. If there is excess hot water I'll put it in a thermos for later use, use it for dishwashing, or just let it cool off since a little heat buffer for the area will always be welcome.

I gather that a stove burner consumes about 8,000 btu an hour of natural gas, equal to about 1/12th of a therm. One hour is quite enough to heat up the kitchen until the sun takes over, and amounts to a very modest 2.5 therms a month. Unresolved for now is the uber wasteful DHW.

Comments ?
 
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I have an excellent HVAC system (NG for heating) but I also have electric baseboard heating in five rooms. Running full blast in the winter but keeping the house between 72ºF - 74ºF. My solar system offsets all the usage, and we're under NEM 1.0. The excess power that solar generates during the summer is enough to the cover the the under generation in the winter. Power bill this month was $1.06. Natural gas bill was $53.46 (hot water and gas stove). I'm negative $375 for the year on power, but over-generation should kick in around the end of February and I have until the third week of June to make it up, when SCE and I square up for the one-year period.
 
Los Angeles has had a historical 1166 HDD at 65F

Actually, the house is located in the high desert, some distance from L.A. Very hot summers and cool to cold winters. It can snow, which might hang around for a day or so. Neighbor's NG bill was $155 last month. I can't say if that was low or high, as we only use NG for washing and cooking. My annual HDD is 2,295 @ 65ºF as opposed to 914 in L.A. (2016) for comparison.
 
I wouldn't go heating the interior of the house with an open unvented flame.

I am near Green Bay have a 40yo house that up till a little more than a year ago was baseboard electric, which resulted in mortgage payment size electric bills. No room for ducting and the high velocity AC system was junk so we did Fujitsu mini-splits in just a few months electric budget was down 20%, then I went and bought an electric car...........

House is more comfortable year round and the heat pumps function to well below zero, they run hard once it gets more than 15below 0f but they still do blow heat. The almost all glass sun room I run some resistance heat near the far wall in sub-zero weather just due to heater placement which was dictated by all the glass.
 
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Cooking is a great way to add heat to a home. Given the size of your house, I wouldn’t worry about the unvented flame unless you were running it continuously for hours on end. You also get the bonus of humidification from the gas burning.

I think a large Mr. Slim or similar mini-split would be a good investment for all of your normal cold weather days. They’re availble in multi-zone configurations so you can have heating where you want it, when you want it. When the temp drops below the point that the mini-split can’t keep up, fall back to the trusty old gas boiler. If you have solar or another green power source, this would be an excellent home improvement that would substantially lower your carbon footprint.
 
I think a large Mr. Slim or similar mini-split would be a good investment for all of your normal cold weather days. They’re availble in multi-zone configurations so you can have heating where you want it, when you want it. When the temp drops below the point that the mini-split can’t keep up, fall back to the trusty old gas boiler. If you have solar or another green power source, this would be an excellent home improvement that would substantially lower your carbon footprint.
I agree!

Unfortunately I rent this home so my options are limited.

Of what I can do, electric resistance heating appears to be my best choice. This non-intuitive result happens because I only want to heat the space in the kitchen around my wife in the early AM until the sun rises. I estimate that a 200 watt personal heater will be used about 200 hours each winter for a total additional electric consumption of 40 kWh. That is much better than NG heating of one home zone through radiant heating which consumes about 0.75 therm per hour in the AM, even when I figure the opportunity cost of electric use as coal consumption.

Heat/cool the person, not the bloody building !

If my calcs are correct, we are now carbon neutral. Our 3.78 kW PV array covers all home energy use and car miles.
 
A 200 watt forced air heater probably won’t provide noticeable relief. I think the better option would be one of those radiant heat dishes that you can point at yourself. We use one of these in our uninsulated tool shed and it does a nice job of heating the person, not the space. They use about 1,000 watts and have a variable thermostat that will allow them to cycle on and off to provide lower levels of heat.
 
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A 200 watt forced air heater probably won’t provide noticeable relief. I think the better option would be one of those radiant heat dishes that you can point at yourself. We use one of these in our uninsulated tool shed and it does a nice job of heating the person, not the space. They use about 1,000 watts and have a variable thermostat that will allow them to cycle on and off to provide lower levels of heat.
Pretty :) And I imagine quiet, too.

I'll keep it in mind if the ceramic heater is a bust.
 
Just for clarity, I get that an open unvented 8000btu flame is unlikely to cause a CO issue in a large house, but an open flame you could forget about, or inadvertently put something near, just seems like a poor plan, what if for some reason the flame went out or?????????????
Modern heat pumps are impressive, I was looking to make the house more comfortable and save a buck, frankly our CO2 footprint was not a consideration, and wasn't a consideration in the Tesla purchase either.

If renting you could still talk to the homeowner, might be looking for a writeoff or something???