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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

My house normally uses 70kwh/day. We have an electric heater and with this cold weather we were on track to use 150-200kwh day. At $5/kwh for 5 days of 200kwh due to the cold puts me at $5,000.

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It would make sense for you to turn off your water, drain all the pipes, turn off the heat and go somewhere else for a few days.

and go somewhere else for a few days

Or put a tent up in the living room.

Holy cow! How in the world do you use that much? My old house in Colorado would use ~350kwh/month. Swap out that electric heater for a heat pump asap!

Big house (3700sqft or so), tall ceilings, four people working/schooling from home and an electric car as the primary family car. In 2019 I literally did not turn the heater on a single time, I don't think the investment in a heat pump would be worth it.

Heat pump systems can sometimes be an upgrade to standard air conditioning systems

Does your AC has not heating function (I assume everyone in Texas has AC)?

I'm guessing most Texas AC systems don't have a reversing valve, and a defrost system and all the other goodies you need to run it for heat. It adds to the equipment cost when many years heat isn't needed, and if the temperatures are 10F, you'd still likely need other heat sources.

> a defrost system

What does a defrost system includes? My dad manages a place where defrost system on one of the devices broke. Technician replaced something and hence it was fixed. IIRC it was temperature sensor. All defrost system does is periodically warms up the outside grill basically. It used to get stuck at -15C or so.

That's the gist. It's not much, but if the outside unit is iced over, there's not going to be a lot of heat exchange into the working fluid, so you're not going to get heat into your conditioned environment.

So, a defrost system will include a temperature sensor, and a resistance heater, and often something to signal the inside unit to run the emergency/auxiliary heat until (unless) the outside unit can get up to a temperature where it will work.

We have colder weather where I live, but I see I used 550 kwh per month (at most). Even if my house is half your size, 70 kwh seems like a lot for a daily baseline. I have a similar situation (kids at home studying, me working at home).

Does the the car that drives up your electricity usage that much?

Car adds about 500kwh/mo. During offpeak rates charging this amount cost between $1 and $12 for the month.

A don't think a heat pump would help them in this weather.

Modern ones and designed for purpose go to -20C.

I bet absolutely nobody in texas asked "how efficent is the heatpump at -20c" when buying them. Same reason why all the windmills froze: "would like this wind mill model that produces eletricity at -20, or this cheaper one that freezes at 0c?"

No, but those who make heat pumps know that to sell in the north people care so they try to make one model that works anywhere.

Have you seen how houses are insulated in TX/LA?

New construction is actually pretty good in Texas. But most houses are not new and have little.

Even higher this morning. Up to ~ $6000/MWh or $6/kWh. http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html

Wow! European here. Family of 5 and we are at 8kwh per day. Total yearly electricity bill is < 1000 EUR.

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