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Comment by dbrgn | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying that hot water based central heating systems with radiators should be replaced by throwing an electric heater in every room? You can't be serious.

There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.

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These $15 space heaters have thermostats, you set a temperature and they heat the room until that temperature is reached. I'm sure you can get a $50 version that speaks smart home protocols of your choice so you can program schedules if that's what you want. Not sure how turning valves on several water radiators per room is more convenient.

These cheap (seriously a $15 heater can’t produce enough heat to cover a room larger than a small bedroom) heaters also can’t be controlled with a central thermostat. Water radiators (or electric heat pumps, etc) can be controlled for the whole home, or by individual locations (without needing to manually turn valves).

In fact, at least in the US, space heaters aren’t allowed to be automatically turned on by any means. They require a person to start it manually each time you want heat. Because they aren’t permanently installed, it is a potential fire hazard. A pet/kid/etc could run past it and knock it over. If that happened near a blanket or pillow, the fabric could catch fire.

I can’t imagine being able to buy something less safe in Switzerland.

I really don't know what else to tell you. This is $20 on Amazon, has tip over protection and a thermostat. Of course there are inexpensive wall mounted options available that you also plug into a wall outlet. These are super popular in Scandinavia.

Portable Electric Space Heater with Thermostat, 1500W/750W Safe and Quiet Ceramic Heater Fan, Heat Up 200 Square Feet for Office Room Desk Indoor Use https://a.co/d/2uD3YJu

I said a central thermostat. This is the context I was referring to. As in a remotely controlled heater where the thermostat is on the wall as opposed to on the device. This is what you’d need to use to keep a home heated while you aren’t there. I happen to have a space heater on right now next to me. It has a very nice remote app on my phone. And it is very clear that the heat function only works from the device itself (due to a legal requirement to support UL 1278). If your cheap heater has a built in thermostat that turns itself on, that’s great… while you’re there watching it. But I can’t say that’s something that I’d ever feel comfortable leaving always plugged in. They are only ever supposed to be used while attended - for a reason. The updated version of the product you linked to (2022 digital version) even has an automatic shutdown timer. You have to manually start it again after that shutdown.

I also have a permanently installed electric heater installed in the wall in a different room. It does have a permanent thermostat that can start/stop automatically. It’s quite a different beast from a $20 space heater with its own circuit back to my breaker box. It works pretty well, but portable, it is not. It was also much more than $20.

But, back to your original point — are you really suggesting replacing the entire German heating infrastructure with $20 ceramic heaters from Amazon? How is that a remotely viable solution? These are devices meant for heating a small office. If you want to heat an apartment or house or city, you need different options. And changing those over takes time and more consideration than buying a bunch of $20 space heaters.

My point was that replacing an existing central gas posered water circulation heater with electric heating is easy, cheap and fast (operating it might be more expensive, or cheaper depending on electricity prices). It's not "Replacing a domestic heating system is significantly more difficult than adding new electricity plants.". I have done so myself on a relative's house in a weekend including installing an electrical water heater (solar panels in roof make this very inexpensive to operate). Of course you wouldn't use cheap chinese portable heaters as a permanent solution, but it would totally work, they are 100% efficient in converting electrical to thermal energy.

Your point that you can't have central temperature controls with electric heating is just absurd, I learned how to build this in first semester of electrical engineering.

Replacing a whole country's infrastructure to go from electric heat to depend on community steam boilers or gas heating instead is infeasible due to the logistics involved as those are major infrastructure projects. The reverse does not seem true. Replacing whole house heating with cheaper per-room heating seems like a downgrade because, well, it is. But there's a war going on and sacrifices have to be made. If you don't think shitty electric space heaters is not luxurious winter living I'd largely agree, but the thing is poor Americans are able to survive through harsher winters than, say, Berlin gets with these terrible heaters.

We (specific subsets of humanity) just completed a massive government led undertaking to distribute a brand new vaccine to huge swaths of population, which involved an insane amount of logistics. And then also RAT kits. On the heels of that, you're telling me that distributing a small box that doesn't need to be stored at -20C or else it goes bad, to every household in a country is simply too hard and we shouldn't even bother, and just let people freeze to death? I mean, yeah it seems a bit late to start. The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022. The second best time though is now.

> Replacing whole house heating with cheaper per-room heating seems like a downgrade because, well, it is. But there's a war going on and sacrifices have to be made.

This would be pointless in Germany, though, since there isn't enough electricity in the European grid to make a short term switch for this many people. (Also the price for electricity is already still much higher than for NG).

For this year, it's already getting too late to act, apart from trying to make as much LNG as possible available to the public.

For the future, electrification of Eueope will need large investments in stable&affordable power production with incentives for homeowners to make the switch as it comes online. Typically such an incentive would be to gradually introduce a tax on NG that will eventually be high enough to squeeze it out of the market.

> The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022.

The best time to start this would have been 20-50 years ago.

> The second best time though is now.

True!

I’ve been waiting a couple weeks for my gas furnace to be repaired (everything’s slow in Canada these days) and ended up buying a couple similar little electric heaters since winter’s pretty much here.

I’ve got no dog in the Euro energy debates, but I can say that anecdotally it’s been fine staying warm with electric heat in the interim. Obviously having a single centrally controlled thermostat is preferable, but it is really a vanishingly negligible task to flip heater a switch on or off.

Do you have a source for them being banned? I could only find an article saying they were being phased out by 2025. https://www.thelocal.ch/20120925/swiss-mps-back-ban-on-elect...

>the efficiency is terrible

I've heard a few people say this, but it's not true - the efficiency of electric heaters is 100%. They're only detrimental when they run off of fossil-fuel based power plants. Instead of making silly laws banning symptoms, our focus should be on removing the pollution at its source.

100% efficiency is terrible compared to the 600% efficiency of a heat pump.

As a quick, temporary emergency measure? Yes.

I don't think there are warehouses full of electric heaters waiting on the off chance half a continent switches from central heating to this.

a) I think many people already have some heaters sitting around somewhere.

b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months.

c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have

d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.

I don't believe your apartment in Switzerland only has one 16A circuit it can draw from, that wouldn't be up to electrical code in most European countries that require one 16A circuit per room. No expert in Switzerland electric code specifically though. The last apartment in Germany I lived in (1 bedroom 1 bathroom) had 4x16A circuits and separate 3x16A for the electric kitchen stove.

What's the efficiency of a 2kW electric heater? It's 100%, which is not terrible. If the electricity production of your country sucks, that should be fixed for other reasons than heating.

Actually, for most of Europe, it should be fixed specifically for the purpose of enabling electrical heating.

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