StealthP3D
Well-Known Member
Is it true that the Renault Zoe's cabin can only be pre-heated/pre-cooled when connected to grid power?
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Incandescent heat pump stuff (out of main)
- Thread starter Tslynk67
- Start date
Is it true that the Renault Zoe's cabin can only be pre-heated/pre-cooled when connected to grid power?
No. I used to preheat mine all the time when sitting in my driveway, not plugged in.
StealthP3D
Well-Known Member
That's because the heat exchanger is not in the extreme cold, it's using the ground which is a constant mild temperature.
Obviously not suitable for cars (unless you never want to go anywhere)
Singer3000
Member
Domestic heating represents a huge share of the CO2 budget. For a temperate post industrialised country like the Uk it’s 10% of all emissions. It’s also probably the toughest nut to crack after steel and concrete production and aviation.
Every ICE car sold is a CO2 generator for the next 15-20 years. Every house constructed without integrated green heating is a CO2 generator for the next 100 years.
I don’t wanna give Elon a hard time because what have I ever done for the world. But I really wish Tesla would announce that they’re thinking about this problem and devoting an appropriate share of the R&D budget to it.
Ideally a cheap mass scale solution that would not just make use of ground to air temperature differentials but summer to winter temperature differentials. Come on Elon, you have the materials science experts and now have people who know a thing or two about ground conditions.
Come up with a solution and then employ people to aggressively lobby the world’s governments to get this mandated as a requirement for all new builds.
Every ICE car sold is a CO2 generator for the next 15-20 years. Every house constructed without integrated green heating is a CO2 generator for the next 100 years.
I don’t wanna give Elon a hard time because what have I ever done for the world. But I really wish Tesla would announce that they’re thinking about this problem and devoting an appropriate share of the R&D budget to it.
Ideally a cheap mass scale solution that would not just make use of ground to air temperature differentials but summer to winter temperature differentials. Come on Elon, you have the materials science experts and now have people who know a thing or two about ground conditions.
Come up with a solution and then employ people to aggressively lobby the world’s governments to get this mandated as a requirement for all new builds.
Furnaces average life is 16-20 years. You can retrofit air sourced heat pumps to existing HVAC installations, where the climate supports such things. If there is appropriate land available, you can go to horizontal or vertical ground sourced.
However, you then need a lot more backup electrical capacity (or an burner type) for heating during a loss of grid (or thermal mass).
Elon did mention a smarter cooling solution then clammed up on the Rogan podcast. https://electrek.co/2018/09/07/tesla-smart-home-elon-musk-efficient-air-conditioning/
Perhaps a crossover product from SpaceX.
Singer3000
Member
Current air source heat pumps are not the step change in efficiency I’m talking about, with coefficient of performance (COP) in the range of 1.5-4x.
Ground sourced seems to hold the promise of far better COPs but they’re generally pretty uneconomic to retrospectively install, which is why it’s so important to get this technology quickly advanced (especially vertical) and part of the building code.
I am aware of Elon’s vague comments on the Rogan podcast. They are now more than a year old and nothing since.
Ulmo
Active Member
I've said many times that incandescent bulbs were appropriate for where most population lived when incandescent bulbs were invented and made popular. Population used to live near water, thus have cooler climates. They were the original zone-based HVAC system, and they work great for putting out light. The heat rose up into the attic, where much of it escaped the home, but some stayed, and it helped keep rot and mold & mildew out, which we since have learned is toxic. Compare the cost of replacing a rotted house to the owner and the environment compared to replacing a bulb and the heat you already get from that bulb.
Today, we are forced to invent new areas to live in, and LED bulbs make sense in those areas. Furthermore, as we innovate LED bulbs more, we are fixing their light wavelength and other major inferiorities.
We are not far from a time that LED bulbs will be a fairly good drop-in replacement for incandescent bulbs in any climate. Right now, quality LED bulbs are already a good drop-in replacements in most climates, plus even in cooler climates the long life of LED bulbs allows different fixture shapes that were not possible with incandescent bulb types, and we've already started to see innovation in that area. I've been calling for this future for many decades, and it's finally coming to fruition.
However, all those little heater incandescent bulbs are still great in cool climates on days that aren't too hot, which is every day in many populated climates.
Fluorescent lights were never OK in any climate anywhere in any time at any level of innovation. They were always a mistake to install everywhere for all time. They are sick and cause sickness in every respect. The vibrating light they put off interferes with the motion portion of our eyes, and immediately gives many people migraine headaches (me among them), put out a screeching sound that is absolutely infuriating, and are generally terrible in many other ways (blinking light, toxic chemicals, etc.). Anybody who forced fluorescent lights on anyone should have been taken out and shot. They were evil in every way.
LEDs can also have the problems of fluorescent lights if they do not have smoothing functions (basically, some capacitors and additional diodes, usually). I expect cheap LEDs to be a problem for a long time, maybe forever. However, good quality LEDs will soon be a total replacement for incandescent due to market forces. That doesn't make incandescents bad for the environment they were originally intended, just that they won't have a lot of market dominance any more, and will probably become too expensive to manufacture, until we can build everything from 3D printers or whatever.
Finally, the lands (with warmer climates) that LEDs allow us to move into more efficiently is a great feature of LEDs. That is why good quality LEDs should be here to stay, until something better comes along.
Incandescent bulbs: the original zone-based HVAC system that put out light: anybody who tells you they were evil is just plain wrong. Time passes, and now LEDs have started to take their place, and will completely do so within our lifetimes. Those of us who remember fluorescent lights will know the power of evil mobsters to do stupid evil things to us, and will always hate fluorescent lights rightly so. Our great grandchildren will grow up oblivious to this history of fluorescent lights and the lying evil mobsters they represent.
The cost of delivering that one watt of energy from incandescent bulbs didn't use to be as great as it is today. Now we need LEDs, so we invented them. Problem solved.
It is still too expensive to install heat pumps in retrofit homes in cool areas for most people. I predict the price of heat pumps will rise as more and more people in hot climates and in new homes find them an obviously superior method of heating, and more importantly, cooling. However, in cool climates as retrofits, they will be out of reach for most people. It will be a long time before that market is saturated and the innovation pushes the prices of heat pumps down to the replacement cost of a normal old furnace type. All the while, incandescent bulbs are still putting out their heat for a small fraction of the cost of a heat pump.
If you want to give welfare to the old homes in cool climates to retrofit large heat pumps, large home batteries, and large solar panels necessary to electrify the heat pumps (about $300,000 per home given current regulations, $150,000 per home if the regulations are eliminated) and put in a tax exemption for rerating the tax base for the home price for property taxes, then you could go ahead and shift the tax money currently being paid to illegal aliens and give that money to those cool area people. However, few of those cool area people are demanding that money for heat pump retrofits, so politically, it is a hard sell. Therefore, it is not a valid issue to bring up. Just nada. Never.
LEDs make sense where heat pumps make sense in new construction, in hot lands, and in many retrofits in hot lands that were previously built into earlier. Cool areas are not that and never have been.
There are no cool areas with space to build new homes, but sometimes you see it anyway (unicorns mostly): there, it makes sense to put in home batteries, solar panels, heat pumps, LEDs, and a three car garage with three electric vehicles. Because they're being sold for $2,000,000 anyway.
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Ulmo
Active Member
!!???!?!? You're automatically discounting the pollution caused by importing? The boats themselves cause more pollution than every car on Earth! Not to mention, well, I am mentioning it specifically, the massive pollution caused by the manufacturers in foreign lands!
I disagree. It is not that tough to retrofit cool climate heaters with heat pumps. It requires robot gophers to lay pipe, robot-installed solar panels, and home batteries and heat pumps at the cost point available in about 20 years. It will be very inexpensive compared to today, and it will be cost beneficial without any laws, regulations, or tax subsidies. Today it is a non-issue, because it is not economically popular enough to do. In a few decades, it is a non-issue, because it will be economically obvious to do. There is no in between. It is a non-issue.
Only the nutters are making it into a fake news issue.
Some excellent points there, especially regarding (and obvious really) used of LEDs in warm climates.
I always hated, and still do, fluorescents. At work I always disconnect them above my desk, then maintenance comes around every 6 months and starts changing them thinking they're broken...
Ulmo
Active Member
I disagree. It is not that tough to retrofit cool climate heaters with heat pumps. It requires robot gophers to lay pipe, robot-installed solar panels, and home batteries and heat pumps at the cost point available in about 20 years. It will be very inexpensive compared to today, and it will be cost beneficial without any laws, regulations, or tax subsidies. Today it is a non-issue, because it is not economically popular enough to do. In a few decades, it is a non-issue, because it will be economically obvious to do. There is no in between. It is a non-issue.
Only the nutters are making fake news turn it into a big fake news issue. Turning lemons into lemonade, the sane among us can roll our eyes and hear the real message: maybe someday heat pumps will be cost effective retrofits, and right now they are a good idea in new construction. That's it!
Yup. Right now is about the tipping point where we start to see clean energy vehicle adoption growing for the next 15 years and attrition of the existing ICE vehicles for the next 25 years, and HVAC heat pumps already being installed in almost all new homes, so it's nice to see that being solved. The free market brought us that. Of course, Elon had to call the bluff of the anti-free-market baby boomers to make it happen, but that's life. (Communists claimed to be conservatives with the environment, but kept getting in the way of clean energy; oil companies of course did what oil companies did when the upside wasn't on the solar side; and the rest of sinecure baby boomers built licensing guilds and kept everyone away from being able to do innovation; pretty much as anti-free-market from every angle as you can get.)
You and me both! I consider it a huge missed opportunity. But that same innovation is still available for anyone else to start a company if they have enough ability to raise funds and hire people on the basis of something other than their race, gender, university degree, and political affiliation (i.e., their ability to do the job).
Actually, he's already working on that: they are called batteries. Also, load dumps help. See video at time point 57:01
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https://youtu.be/ZZcTwSpPguU?t=3421It would already be done if Tesla had a full time CEO. But he's also doing SpaceX, so not going to happen.
Elon isn't that aggressive for lobbying on anything but his core product line of the moment. He sacrifices all his lobbying for that core line in each of his companies. Solar and home batteries have gone legislatively backwards during Teslas's introduction of those product lines. Not only do the regulations suffer, but the products do as well: Model S and X have languished and service on everything at Tesla is the definition of the worst possible in any industry.
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jgs
Active Member
It must vary regionally. I don't think they're that common in my area (natural gas is the norm) but much more common than resistive electrical heating, which accounts for approximately nil point nil of the market.
I guess? Though that assumes you've decided to hedge against the grid going out at all, which isn't a given. (I don't; I'm fortunate to have pretty reliable grid power in my area, knock wood. In the twenty years I've been in my house, we've had one outage of more than an hour or so duration, during the Northeast Blackout of 2003.)
We haven't even gotten around to mandating excellent insulation as part of new builds yet. There's lots of low-hanging fruit, no need to reach for rocket science solutions to get a huge improvement in the status quo.
As an aside, "HVAC" stands for "heating, ventilation, and cooling" so no, not the original HVAC. Just H, no VAC. But anyway, your arguments only make sense in areas where heating would otherwise be provided by resistive electrical heating. While I know some markets are like that, it's not true in most areas I've visited (many). Furthermore, most areas I know of that use resistive heating tend to be warm most of the year, with a short cool season. During the (long) warm season, incandescent bulbs are a clear loser. During the (short) cool season, yeah ok, but resistive heating is cheap and easy to install and doesn't heat your house during the summer. So I'm not buying it.
Citation needed. In the instances I'm aware of, it was trivially easy to swap out an old-school air conditioning unit for a heat pump, and the price differential between a cooling-only unit and a heat pump made the choice a no-brainer.
That would be different from virtually every other consumer good, where expanded demand drives competition, and therefore drives prices down.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "cool areas" but unless this is a joke, I suggest you take a look at a map of the northern United States. Oh by the way, why on earth do you think batteries and PV are a prerequisite for installing a heat pump?
StealthP3D
Well-Known Member
Oh, all the technology exists, it's just that it would complicate the way houses and buildings are built in a compartmentalized way for the lowest possible cost. So we have money left over to fly around the globe on vacations. It's all about consuming more energy and not worrying about the true costs to future generations. Currently, all the heat that your refrigerator extracts is pumped into the room. As is all the heat energy that represents the inefficiencies of the refrigeration. Then, during warm weather, the A/C has to spend more energy to send that heat back outside. And that comes with its own inefficiencies. Inefficiencies added on top of other inefficiencies. It is this way because we have cheap fossil energy. It's easier and cheaper to truck/ship/pipe more energy than it is to use it responsibly.
Ideally, buildings would have an integrated temperature management system (much like the Model 3) so heat can be directed where it's needed (or away from where it's not wanted). This could encompass room and water heating/cooling, refrigeration, air conditioning etc. and it would only have one heat pump to run it all. In the winter your refrigeration would still help heat your living space but in the summer you wouldn't be a victim of double jeopardy. If this were coupled with good building design (utilizing passive heating/cooling, computer controlled shades, good insulation, thermal mass, landscaping, etc.) our buildings energy expenditures would be about 1/8 of what it is now. And we would be even more comfortable. These are not bleeding edge technologies and don't need a brilliant engineer like Elon Musk to make them happen. They need people good at lobbying to make them the standard way of doing business. Or a stiff carbon tax to make it marketable. Which also requires lobbyists.
Here's the problem: The billionaires of the world don't want society to pay for all that. Because then there would be less leftover for themselves and it would harm their energy/gambling/resort empires. They want working people to have just enough goods and services to keep working and consuming their products and they don't want to have to pay them enough (either through wages or taxes) so that they can afford such well thought out homes and buildings. And they WANT those homes and buildings to be energy sinks which ensure strong demand for their energy products. In our system, money is power so only the billionaires have the ear of the people we elect. And that's just dysfunctional. Because most billionaires are not as altruistic as Musk. They got to where they are by figuring out how to get more for themselves and how to lobby and avoid taxes. The billionaires we hear about are mostly innovators but the vast majority of billionaires are mostly hidden from public view as they screw us over to enrich themselves further.
Singer3000
Member
Very interesting thanks. But the reality is if I went and bought a plot of land for a new build and didn’t care about slightly higher upfront costs, I still wouldn’t be able to do what you outline. It would be like trying to make an iPod in 1995 from your garage. Technically all possible, if you’re an expert and have time/money.Oh, all the technology exists, it's just that it would complicate the way houses and buildings are built in a compartmentalized way for the lowest possible cost. So we have money left over to fly around the globe on vacations. It's all about consuming more energy and not worrying about the true costs to future generations. Currently, all the heat that your refrigerator extracts is pumped into the room. As is all the heat energy that represents the inefficiencies of the refrigeration. Then, during warm weather, the A/C has to spend more energy to send that heat back outside. And that comes with its own inefficiencies. Inefficiencies added on top of other inefficiencies. It is this way because we have cheap fossil energy. It's easier and cheaper to truck/ship/pipe more energy than it is to use it responsibly.
Ideally, buildings would have an integrated temperature management system (much like the Model 3) so heat can be directed where it's needed (or away from where it's not wanted). This could encompass room and water heating/cooling, refrigeration, air conditioning etc. and it would only have one heat pump to run it all. In the winter your refrigeration would still help heat your living space but in the summer you wouldn't be a victim of double jeopardy. If this were coupled with good building design (utilizing passive heating/cooling, computer controlled shades, good insulation, thermal mass, landscaping, etc.) our buildings energy expenditures would be about 1/8 of what it is now. And we would be even more comfortable. These are not bleeding edge technologies and don't need a brilliant engineer like Elon Musk to make them happen. They need people good at lobbying to make them the standard way of doing business. Or a stiff carbon tax to make it marketable. Which also requires lobbyists.
Here's the problem: The billionaires of the world don't want society to pay for all that. Because then there would be less leftover for themselves and it would harm their energy/gambling/resort empires. They want working people to have just enough goods and services to keep working and consuming their products and they don't want to have to pay them enough (either through wages or taxes) so that they can afford such well thought out homes and buildings. And they WANT those homes and buildings to be energy sinks which ensure strong demand for their energy products. In our system, money is power so only the billionaires have the ear of the people we elect. And that's just dysfunctional. Because most billionaires are not as altruistic as Musk. They got to where they are by figuring out how to get more for themselves and how to lobby and avoid taxes. The billionaires we hear about are mostly innovators but the vast majority of billionaires are mostly hidden from public view as they screw us over to enrich themselves further.
Needs an off the shelf solution that can be sold to the big house builders, with idiot proof installation. There’s a lot of apartments still flying up China every month...
StealthP3D
Well-Known Member
"Slightly higher" build costs? I would say even if the technology was in mass production with a 50% adoption rate the cost would be more than "slightly higher". Without volume efficiencies, the cost would be even higher. I don't understand it but it seems most homebuyers think a 10-year payback for solar (for example) is too long to be worth considering. I don't see why an efficient and integrated whole-house energy solution would be any different.
With falling prices of solar and battery storage, it might end up being less expensive to just install enough solar/storage capacity to make up for design and build inefficiencies. That said, thermal mass is relatively inexpensive and would be of great benefit in reducing the need to store daytime solar energy into the night.
But my point was that current builders and architects have the knowledge to integrate these things and heat pump/mini-split makers are constantly improving their efficiencies and different types of products but there is no way to integrate all this without considering each house/building separately. Because site location, climate, solar exposure, prevailing winds all play into it and yet only a tiny fraction of all home buyers are willing to assume the extra cost of an architect. People prefer to spend less upfront even if it costs them more over time. Even in an era of unprecedented low-interest rates. I guess the only remaining missing piece is that from appliance makers. Yes, they increase the energy efficiencies of their products constantly but it's going to cost a lot more to integrate their function with the central heating/cooling system (and is also somewhat site and climate-specific).
Singer3000
Member
While it might be expensive to integrate this into a specific detached property with no easy off-the-shelf solution, the majority of new builds globally are in the developing world and are high density identikit apartment blocks. That's where Tesla could aim at first (out of an adjunct building to Shanghai Giga perhaps). I don't imagine it would be too difficult to form a partnership with Chinese appliance makers either, the state could make some initial introductions if necessary. They can then throw an easy tech solution across the likes of China, India and Nigeria.
Too many things needed to be done and only one Elon Musk...
jgs
Active Member
How much home heating is required across the majority of India or Nigeria? If (as I think is the case) the markets you’ve named require mostly cooling, how much scope is there for wizardry to really improve cooling? The Carnot Cycle is pretty well understood already and every new AC unit already has a timer.
I guess there’s a little bit of efficiency to be gained in principle if you couple the AC with a desuperheater for hot water, but hot water is easy to produce with solar collectors in hot areas anyway. (I lived in Bahrain for a while when I was a kid. We produced hot water there with a solar collector in the form of a rooftop storage tank, painted silver, with a shade roof over it. The water still got dangerously hot.)