Anyone regret switching to electric heating?

[nyprepper]

I'm looking at electric options for augmenting my oil furnace as we speak. I'm leaning towards high-quality wall-mounted 120v units from Steibel to put one in the master bedroom, one in the home office, and two in open great room / kitchen area.

We got crushed with heating oil fees this past winter and it looks like its going to be up 50% YoY going into this Winter. We went thru 4 cords of wood in a high efficiency woodstove and still managed to consume over 1000 gallons of oil. It's currently around $6.50/g here and I fully expect to see $8-9$/g before next Spring.

 

[dandelot]

Good point. I will look into this.

Update. Rating not so good on this one. But, the idea is good. Thinking out loud, I could probably build something with a microcontroller, some temp probes, DC controlled AC switch. And maybe put it on my IoT network so I can control it remotely. No use doing something unless you can overdo it!

A Raspberry Pi and a couple DS18B20 temp probes will do this very effectively. And a relay to turn on the fan
by the Pi as fan power must be separate from the rpi. Pi support for these is very good and easy to code.

 

[Big Earl]

We have vents on the side walls and above the garage door. Where we do not have vents is a peak of the garage. That where I talked to my contractors about installing the extractor fan.

Shading the garage is something we were thinking about doing since the inverters are on the outside of the west facing wall. And I have noticed on really sunny and hot (100+) days, the inverters seem to be derating. We are thinking about getting a shade sail that would cover a significant portion of this wall.

Go nuts with the shade sails. They make a big difference.

 

[BGbreeder]

Requiring higher amounts of electricity is part of the problem I see with going to a heat pump. In the winter the solar sometime only generates 9-10 kWh a day, which does not meet our needs, let alone charge the powerwalls. And with 50% or so PW reserve levels we have 14 kWh in the 2 powerwalls. So in a power outage we don't have much reserve to run a heat pump.

That is the math that I did and I managed to convince myself that for winter use/outages, I would need double or triple my solar to be able to heat the house with a heat pump. As I don't have the roof space to do that, and ground mount systems are both costly and a contractor/permitting swamp, we haven't gone that route. We are still considering a gas furnace backup with a heat pump as the primary, except for outages, but there is no reasonable ROI for such a system here.

Put differently, I managed to convince myself that for us, it would be cheaper to add more wall and window insulation than go with a heat pump system and enough solar to run it. Not what I was trying to prove, but at the end of the day, for me, it is about at least a reasonable ROI. At some point the ROI interval bleeds over into the next owner, who may very well demolish the house.

All the best,

BG

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

We have 2 Teslas, a 3 and X, and drive about 5K/year total...

... I am not thinking this makes any financial sense. ...

Interesting.

 

[Big Earl]

Any thoughts on tankless? Right now we have a tankless gas system and recirculation pump to ensure we have hot water in seconds instead of minutes in the master bathroom at the far end of the house.

You can keep your recirculation loop and do a heat pump water heater with 80 gallon tank. For best results, put a call switch or a motion sensor in the bathrooms to start the recirculation loop so it doesn't run unnecessarily. I did that at my parents' house and it reduced water heater energy usage by a little more than 10%. Their system is conventional electric, but I'd expect the same to hold true for any fuel source.

 

[Big Earl]

I'm looking at electric options for augmenting my oil furnace as we speak. I'm leaning towards high-quality wall-mounted 120v units from Steibel to put one in the master bedroom, one in the home office, and two in open great room / kitchen area.

We got crushed with heating oil fees this past winter and it looks like its going to be up 50% YoY going into this Winter. We went thru 4 cords of wood in a high efficiency woodstove and still managed to consume over 1000 gallons of oil. It's currently around $6.50/g here and I fully expect to see $8-9$/g before next Spring.

Those Steibel units look to be straight resistance heat, which is 100% efficient. I highly recommend look at mini-split heat pump units, which are 400% efficient. Crazy, I know. For 100,000 BTU of heat, a straight electric unit will consume 29 kWh of electricity. For that same 100,000 BTU, a heat pump mini-split will consume less than 10 kWh of electricity.

 

[tfan2018]

No regrets. Heat pump is way more efficient and no more gas bills.

 

[jboy210]

A Raspberry Pi and a couple DS18B20 temp probes will do this very effectively. And a relay to turn on the fan
by the Pi as fan power must be separate from the rpi. Pi support for these is very good and easy to code.

I could use one of my Pis to do this, but honestly it is overkill and given their prices (up 300%+) a waste money on a hard to get resource (multi-month delay). I have a number of $4 microcontrollers that have enough power to handle this tasks.

 

[zƬesla]

Requiring higher amounts of electricity is part of the problem I see with going to a heat pump. In the winter the solar sometime only generates 9-10 kWh a day, which does not meet our needs, let alone charge the powerwalls. And with 50% or so PW reserve levels we have 14 kWh in the 2 powerwalls. So in a power outage we don't have much reserve to run a heat pump.

That's where the microcontrollers come in handy:

MiniSplitPi — The Mini-Split Raspberry Pi Web Controller

Control Mitsubishi Mini-Split Heat Pump with a Web JSON API using a Raspberry Pi 0w

www.zakon.org

 

[jboy210]

Interesting.

Business covers car expenses, we cover house expenses.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Business covers car expenses, we cover house expenses.

Do you have FUSC on your X?

 

[jboy210]

Do you have FUSC on your X?

I am not familiar with FUSC.

 

[tfan2018]

Requiring higher amounts of electricity is part of the problem I see with going to a heat pump. In the winter the solar sometime only generates 9-10 kWh a day, which does not meet our needs, let alone charge the powerwalls. And with 50% or so PW reserve levels we have 14 kWh in the 2 powerwalls. So in a power outage we don't have much reserve to run a heat pump.

With grid charging, powerwall not getting enough solar in the winter isn't an issue anymore. At some point towards the winter I'll be switching to grid charging to ensure my powerwall has enough charge to last thru should and peak hours.

 

[ucmndd]

With grid charging, powerwall not getting enough solar in the winter isn't an issue anymore. At some point towards the winter I'll be switching to grid charging to ensure my powerwall has enough charge to last thru should and peak hours.

It should be noted that if you claimed the full federal ITC for your powerwalls, they must be charged exclusively by solar for 5 years. I think the risk associated with using the new grid charging feature is quite low and don’t imagine the IRS has the resources to start auditing powerwall owners for compliance - but it will be interesting to see how this unfolds in the next few years.

Back to the original topic - I am extremely reluctant to make anything else in my home dependent on PGE electric rates and would need a boatload more solar and storage to ease my mind if I were to switch my gas appliances to electric.

We are in a rural area with no natural gas service so have a propane furnace, water heater, and stove. In practice we hardly ever use the furnace and heat with an EPA rated stove burning wood from our property 95% of the time. We have a large 320 gallon propane tank, so we generally fill it up once in the summer when rates are lowest and it lasts us a whole year.

I’m not wild about the fossil fuel and air quality implications at scale, but like I said, I will not intermingle my fate with PG&E’s any more than absolutely necessary. I simply don’t trust them. My wood stove emits many many orders of magnitude less pollution than even one of their forest fires.

 

[TerranApart]

Any thoughts on tankless? Right now we have a tankless gas system and recirculation pump to ensure we have hot water in seconds instead of minutes in the master bathroom at the far end of the house.

If you are comparing resistive electric heating vs gas (either tankless or with a tank), I would still expect gas to be mildly more cost-effective.
A heat pump is really the only way I've seen to beat gas on cost-efficiency.

 

[aesculus]

I have been using heat pumps on two different homes since 1980. Prior to my latest set I basically hated them and was convinced the technology was terrible, especially if you lived in any area that got below 45*F and had relative humidity > 25%. Plus they were so loud they drove me up the wall.

But these new variable speed units are a different beast. They are ultra quiet. They start on almost no energy. They run almost constantly just tweaking the output slightly (I set my thermostat to 0.5 differential on a 2500 sq foot area). Unless they are trying to play a 5* catchup, they rarely draw more than about 4-5 kW. So if I was actually on PW backup, I would probably adjust my thermostat to maintain rather than trying to reach some higher temp.

And the same unit cools too, so everything is under one system. One thing though: The outdoor units are huge. I mean 2x bigger than what they replace. Oh. And they are super expensive, so just like a Tesla car and PWs, you will probably never get your investment covered.

 

[Will792]

I'm looking at electric options for augmenting my oil furnace as we speak. I'm leaning towards high-quality wall-mounted 120v units from Steibel to put one in the master bedroom, one in the home office, and two in open great room / kitchen area.

We got crushed with heating oil fees this past winter and it looks like its going to be up 50% YoY going into this Winter. We went thru 4 cords of wood in a high efficiency woodstove and still managed to consume over 1000 gallons of oil. It's currently around $6.50/g here and I fully expect to see $8-9$/g before next Spring.

In my case I use 2 separate heat pumps connected to air handlers and heating oil boiler as a backup. I kept boiler off while expected temperature was above 20F but discovered that boiler would not fire up when I tried to run it the first time during heating season. Forecast was calling for temperature to drop below 10F at night and my heat pumps shut off completely at 13F. Fortunately replacing oil pump fixed the problem but overall it now clear to me that heating oil equipment does not mesh well with heat pumps.

Current generation of heat pumps increased air temperature at registers so it does not feel cool. Also many air handlers have multi speed fans which increases comfort level even more. There are some heat pumps that work with outside temperature as low as -4F to -14F but efficiency is somewhat lower.

Last year I consumed around 70-80 gallons of heating oil, instead of my typical 850.

it is very difficult to forecast future prices of any commodity and diesel/heating oil are not exception. If there is excess solar using heat pump is no brainer, especially if the existing cooling equipment requires replacement.