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Comment by __sy__ | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, I'm not even sure you need to regulate against natural gas. Product-wise & economically, it's already lost. Electric heat pumps are fantastically more efficient [1] and work both for heating & cooling. Electric water heaters are cheaper/better to operate. Induction stoves are so fast and precise. I don't know about a commercial building, but for a home, you'd probably save $10K+ in piping, installation, and connection fees.

[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/06/heat-pumps-work-miracles/

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> Product-wise & economically, it's already lost.

Not remotely. Induction is swell, but gas is an affordable luxury.

> Electric water heaters are cheaper/better to operate.

In what world? Gas is orders of magnitude more affordable than electricity for water heaters [0]. If your power goes out, then you still have hot water, can cook on the stove, etc.

> I don't know about a commercial building, but for a home, you'd probably save $10K+ in piping, installation, and connection fees.

Depending on where you live, you could potentially recoup that in a year.

Induction stoves are also 2-8x more expensive than gas or electric counterparts. If you're a landlord, it can be a considerable expense to replace appliances.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/eere/femp/energy-cost-calculator-elec...

> If your power goes out, then you still have hot water, can cook on the stove, etc.

It's not as if gas doesn't go out, right?

If you're in a place where your power grid is so unreliable, perhaps you should be looking at getting that fixed.

Yes it is as if the gas never goes out. Because the gas never goes out.

Another way to think of it is, it takes different things to make the different systems go out. The electricity can go out quite easily for a variety of common and not-infrequent reasoms. While it would take a earthquake to take the gas out. If you are having some event that manages to take both out at the same time, then you no longer care about the heat as you are on the roof trying not to drown or running for your life from asteroids.

I prefer having gas as redundancy for when electricity is unavailable. Especially in places it gets really cold, you can live without light, but not without heat and having a gas boiler and stove is a lifesaver.

Heat pumps are a disaster when temperatures drop below 20 degrees F. We end up using auxiliary heat which is extremely inefficient and expensive.

How often does that happen in Berkeley?

Fortunately for this particular case, Berkeley winter temperature hasn't seen a record low below 25 degrees F in the last 30 years. Or more, Wikipedia doesn't go back further than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California#Climate

So heat pumps should be OK for Berkeley.

That's actually correct, though you can also tune them for harsher local weather. I actually visited a heat-pump factory in Guangdong back in March. They make heat-pumps for residential projects in both freezing cold Harbin (Northern China) and hot as hell Guangdong (Southern China). Those are different SKUs that get tuned based on expected regional needs. The temp-vs-efficiency curves get all wacky but it still works. They also had a new product that combines two heat pumps: one for summer, one for winter.

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