Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

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Oil tanks are dangerous and unpleasant things to store and maintain, and very dependent on road viability for the once or twice yearly top up. I've known plenty of people in the North East that used oil for heating and they all hated it, and I bet it's easier to get an oil truck to top up your tank in Massachusetts or Maine than it is in Ontario. Oh, and the oil tank is an explosion hazard if you need to do any work on it.

Wood heating is a lot of labor. It's sustainable if you have forest land, but still a ton of labor. Even pre-seasoned and delivered wood takes a lot of work. The general rule of thumb is that you need to envision literally filling your living space with wood in order to have enough to heat your home with wood burning stoves. Wood just doesn't put out the BTUs per pound that oil, coal, or other petroleum products do. Propane seems to be the go-to, but I know very little about storing and running your house off of it.

I think in the future the answer is going to be geothermal, or "ground source heat pumps". They work like reversible AC units that use ground temp water to extract heat from. They're more efficient than regular ACs, allowing you to heat your home with ~1/3 the electricity of regular resistance heating, but the installation costs in suburban areas are extreme due to the deep wells needed. If you live in rural areas though you can use shallower trenches to lay the tubing down below the frost line, making this a much more viable choice.

My parents installed Geothermal a few years ago, which was expensive, like 30k I think, and it's helped, but not a ton as the line is still going under a frozen river in the winter, so the prices I quoted above are after geothermal. I think I saw a comment thread a few months back about how a lot of people got taken by the promises of geothermal and how they don't really do much for people in cold areas. It's great in the summer mind you. My buddy who works for Hydro One said a lot of folks end up paying the same or more after the install of geothermal because of how cold it is, which is really unfortunate. I looked at a big, nicer house in Nova Scotia that had dual geothermal and I was just drooling until I got my hands on the heating bills and was so confused why it was still so expensive.

They don't have wood burning and they are too old to be able to handle it anyway, you'd die from all the wood you'd have to cut and move and deal with. They said oil wasn't viable, and I don't think their house is setup for it anyway. They are worried about snow removal where they live as it's just too much for them now and it's so easy to get stranded for days, even though the city does eventually plow that road.

Where they live it's regularly -30 to -40c in the winter. They were snowbirds until Covid hit.

I’m not an expert, but it doesn’t sound like they installed the lines deep enough. I thought the point was that all groundwater is pretty warm compared to the air you’re trying to heat, at least if you go deep enough.

Something does not compute. $1000 should be getting them ballpark 10'000 kWh of power. That is 14 kW of constant power use. Typical largest residential GSHP over here is 15-18 kW of heating at 4 kW compressor power. (usually COP in range 4-5 is specified at 0C input, 35C output) So unless the GSHP is woefully undersized, the house is terribly insulated and the resistive booster heater is running at full tilt, something is wrong with those numbers.

For saving money on heating the first step should be to waste less heat rather than making the wasted heat cheaper.

I think you're overstating the danger of oil tanks. You mention explosion risks, that's a very rare occurrence and could happen with gas or propane too. The real downsides of oil are the high prices and the carbon footprint.

Wood is at least much cheaper and has charming appeal, gas is cheaper too but not available in many districts. Propane is extremely cost ineffective for heating, it'd be much better to use any other type of heating if possible.

Propane is still more cost effective than electric resistive heating 99% of the time.

Sounds like they’re quite happy with the value provided by $1500-$2000/month from heating electrically.

Alas, if your home is well insulated, a newer wood stove should do the trick, but if moving it from a stack outside and cleaning ash is too much, I get it, stay electric.

Propane is delivered just like oil, but can be stored outside. Usually you get them refilled more often, so if road access is an issue, it’s not a great primary.

Propane freezes. It takes some extreme temperatures to do so, but it does so at temperatures experienced in rural Ontario.

Propane freezes at 86 K; the lowest recorded temperature on Earth was 184 K.

There are a variety of things that can go wrong at low temperatures, like what happened with natural gas in Texas, but the propane itself isn't going to freeze.

As long as your tank is big enough, yes. The issue is propane is stored as a liquid, and when you draw it, it boils (and it must boil) but the evaporation makes the tank colder than ambient.

Boiling point of propane is -42C.

When it’s -30 and you’re drawing a lot of propane… yeah, your evaporation rate may suffer. Interestingly, a stiff wind is helpful here to warm the tank up to -30 (if it isn’t buried in wind-blocking and insulating snow…)

Propane tank heaters are a thing for this reason.

The issue in Texas was that you have regulators and pressure reducing valves, but going from high pressure to low pressure is cooling, leading to frozen valves/regulators because it wasn’t designed for liquid infiltration and the cold temps generated.

Probably less "happy with the value" and more "the capital costs of installing something more efficient are too high".

A wood catalytic converter stove will easily heat your main living areas and all you need is an area to store a few cords of wood, which does not need to be in your living area. It is more work to keep running but would save a ton of money as 1-2k of wood should get you all winter, not just a single month.

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