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Comment by fujigawa | Hacker News Reader

Overall this isn't the W you think it is; New England still leads the nation in heating oil consumption by a large margin.

Nearly 2M households in New England heat their homes with oil (usually boiler, sometimes furnace). For those unfamiliar, a tanker truck comes by your house every couple of months and pumps diesel fuel into a tank down cellar, which literally gets burned like a flamethrower to boil water to heat your home. It's dirty but keeps your home toasty warm when it's -20 outside.

Maine in particular has very little natural gas infrastructure. Electric is impractical as New England winters are cold as balls and the houses are usually old and not that well insulated.

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Electric is extremely practical - I know a lot of New Englanders who have replaced oil burners with heat pumps and made back the investment quite quickly and warmly (it’s easy when a fill up of oil can cost close to a thousand dollars, and you will probably need two in a winter). Insulation helps a lot of course, but the main difficulty is just the upfront cost, time, and structural issues with houses that don’t have central air.

My father replaced oil burning with an air-water heat pump. That is, the heat pump heats water that circulates in the same pipes and radiators that were used previously. Apart from installing the heat pump in the boiler room, no other changes in the house were necessary.

Does that cool through the radiators as well as heat? It seems like it could but I've never heard of heat pumps being used like that.

No, heating only. I'd imagine trying to use them for cooling in the summer would easily lead to condensation and attendant moisture damage.

Heat pumps (they work down to -10F, and can be supplemented with fossil or wood heating, if needed).

https://www.nhpr.org/new-england-news/2024-07-24/new-england...

https://portal.ct.gov/deep/energy/new-england-heat-pump-acce...

Even if powered by gas combined cycles generators, heat pumps use less natural gas than a gas-fired condensing furnace.

In my experience, sometimes the heat pump cannot keep up with the rate of envelope heat loss below certain temperatures (think a mid January polar vortex with sustained temperatures under -10F for days in the Midwest). Also, loss of power will mean loss of heat, where at least with a fossil gas furnace, as long as you have enough power to ignite the burners and run the blower, you’ve got heat (I’ve been able to run this with a vehicle inverter on an EV and a “suicide” extension cord with male plugs on both ends, isolating the furnace circuit; would’ve been perfect if it could’ve generated its own power for the blower while consuming fossil gas for heating).

Looking for a self sustaining cogeneration unit that can produce heat and power if needed, if anyone has recommendations, for when I need to recommend it. Heat pump whenever possible, but backups when needed.

If the heat pump is optimally sized, the time over which the backup resistive heater is used will be nonzero (assuming cost of the heat pump scales with its capacity). This is because spending extra to have it cover that last part is not worth it. This ignores its use for A/C; if in a place where the A/C load dominates the sizing then this argument doesn't apply.

> Electric is impractical as New England winters are cold as balls and the houses are usually old and not that well insulated.

They have the same situation a bit further north in Quebec, same vintage of houses, possibly colder winters. Yet they manage with electricity somehow?

It helps that they have cheap hydro out the ass so you don't really care if you need heat pump auxiliary heat, it kind of inverts the equation:

Cost of electricity in Montreal: 8c/kWh

Boston: 47c/kWh

New York: 58c/kWh

Source: https://www.hydroquebec.com/data/documents-donnees/pdf/compa...

That's New York City, which is more than 3x the cost I pay in Ithaca, NY.

We have a heat pump, btw.

> For those unfamiliar, a tanker truck comes by your house every couple of months and pumps diesel fuel into a tank down cellar

Huh, how un-insulated are those houses really? I grew up in an area with climate slightly colder than New England, and our house was heated with an oil boiler (not literally boiling, it was just warm water circulating in the radiators, not steam). Consumption was about 1000L per year, and the tank was big enough that one fillup per year was enough.

Since replaced with a heat pump, FWIW.

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