is electric heating likely to become cheaper than gas heating in future?

[geoff]

In message , ARWadsworth writes

This is the kerl who uses a single cup heating element for his coffee

[MM]

The £100 is the TOTAL amount. The fan heater is used in the room I am in. So when I am in the bathroom, it (obviously!) isn't on in the computer room.

But I'd turn them on anyway for an extra period even if I was using the CH instead of the fan heater. Even if I used CH "all of the time", my "all" would be considerably less than many householders, since (a) I don't like an overheated environment and (b) I'd set the "off" time for, say, 11pm anyway. But on the *coldest* nights (-7 deg or more) I would still want to give extra protection to the pipes at 4am, even if only for 30 minutes.

No one has yet proved to me that I am, since no one has yet explained how I might have obtained *tageted* heating in the same way from £100 of heating oil over 110 days.

There you are completely correct!

Here you are not.

MM

[ARWadsworth]

Well you can shout at a deaf man all day long.

Adam

[terry]

What does seem to escape many is that with a reasonably insulated home; this one is circa 1970 and NOT as well insulated as if I was building it today, is that in an all electric house MOST of the energy coming in, electrically, does some good towards heating the home before escaping through walls ceilings etc. We have a bathroom, for example, which is mostly heated by the six 40 watt incandescent bulbs over the vanity mirror. The amount of electrically generated heat is all a matter of degree (pun intended), the soldering iron very little and the oven, if roasting/baking adds quite a lot.

One really wasteful item is the a clothes dryer which chucks its moist warm air outside. Also outside lights, probably the one location where CFLS or LEDs make sense?.

Getting up this morning with the electric heat turned down over night to about 60F (it was minus 9 Celsius last night but not a lot of wind, it's back up to minus one Celsius right now) I did turn on the thermostat in the hallway for a few minutes, it had been completely off and also turned on the electric oven for about ten minutes just to speed things up.

While this house was/is built as all electric we did later add a very inefficient rock faced fire-place (presently blocked off) and while doing that, some 25 years ago, we added a separate flu to the basement to which have connected an old Jotul wood stove which burns scrap wood and left overs from the trees on this property and some of the wind- fall trees from a few acres we own on back of this town. Basically free firewood, plus the effort of getting it, offset, one hopes from a carbon footprint viewpoint, by the re-growth and deliberate planting of trees we have undertaken during the last 50+ years. In this latitude we do not need air conditioning; it is rarely installed being occasionally available the few days it MIGHT be nice to have it on by some reversible heat pumps systems. However most months (about 9 or

10) here need some heating especially during cool/cold evenings when lights/TV etc. tend to be on anyway.

Filled in one of those UK based 'Carbon footprint' surveys, our results not being too bad despite our cold weather and long heating season; and then realised that it must assume electrcity is generated by burning gas or something? Also it made no allowance for the process of planting trees. When we bought this land there wasn't a single tree or bush. Now about 70 fair sized trees on this half acre or so. Some are 35 feet/more high. But without leaves they don't provide much shelter from winds during the winter!

BTW saw my first Robin other day! The North American variety, about same size as a thrush, with a more orange breast than the British 'Robin Red Breast'. He/she seemed quite surprised by the snow falling on the deck/patio (the day previous it had been completely clear and had even got one of the folding chairs out to sit and drink a cuppa, in the morning sun!

Robin maybe retreated a few hundred/thousand miles to the south back to their migration zone in the USA? However the crows (actually a variety of raven) are making quite fuss in one of the 30 foot plus trees we planted some 40 years ago and in which they have nested at least once previously; ensuring noisy mornings from the nest no more than ten metres or so from daughters bedroom window!

Cheers.

Oh by the way thought we were finished with snow-blowing, but yesterday had to use it again, not much snow but it had drifted a bit and needed to move it before it gets warm slushy and heavy! S'posed to go to plus 6 Celsius next day or so!

[ARWadsworth]

What does seem to escape many is that with a reasonably insulated home; this one is circa 1970 and NOT as well insulated as if I was building it today, is that in an all electric house MOST of the energy coming in, electrically, does some good towards heating the home before escaping through walls ceilings etc.

Yes but see

[The Natural Philosopher]

easy peasy, by spending £2000 on control gear.

[MM]

Interesting. But in what way does that comment explain how I might have obtained *targeted* heating over said period from just a hundred quid's worth of oil (2½ litres per day)?

MM

[Jules Richardson]

It obviously wore the wrong type of shoes.

[chunkyoldcortina]

So why is it not economical to generate one's own domestic electrickery from a small mains gas-fired generator.

[The Natural Philosopher]

If you use a heat pump, electricity is actually cheaper than gas or oil, just about. its certainly in thee area where a blanket statement is not true. The devil is in the details.

secondly, the efficiency you get from a petrol or diesel generator is far less than you get from a properly constructed power station, and you will almost certainly end up paying road fuel tax on the fuel. Even if you don't, its very marginal. And you cant get a domestic nuclear reactor, which is of course currently pipping the post as the cheapest way to push electrons down wires.

you probably only get 20% eff. form a diesel generator, and that varies with the load. A good power station averages the load of lots of people, and achieves up to 60%. AND they can forward buy fuel in bulk.

You can get 80% eff* off a boiler heating water. Maybe more.

Compare that with 60% for the power station and 95% for the grid. No point in direct electrical heating carbon wise unless you use nukes to make it.

Finally, if nuclear power becomes widely adopted, and fossil fuel start to get hard to extract, and or attracts a carbon tax, electricity will in time be cheaper than fossil fuel.

*true thermal efficiency, not concocted figures by boiler manufacturers.

[Andy Champ]

Is a domestic scale CHP system feasible? (use the coolant and hot exhaust from your diesel to heat the hot water / radiators)

Andy

[The Natural Philosopher]

Of course its feasible: whether its cost effective is quite another matter.

Its a bloody poor way to make watts in summer!

at 20% efficiency a 25bhp engine (small 2 liter non turbo diesel at say

3000 RPM) is generating 15Kw of electricity, and 60KW of heat!

I often need 15Kw electricity. I NEVER need 60KW of heat.

[<me9]

Cos it's limited in efficiency by thermodynamic constraints. If you use the waste heat it's a different matter, hence the interest in CHP. Capital costs will be high.