Yes, I can see that the adaptation of a forced air system would be quite tricky. Experience does count.

What I do enjoy about my systems are the “Zonal” qualities where I can reduce heat or cold in one zone versus another. That is an advantage of a mini-split system where you can easily have 4 “heads” from one compressor.

That idea of adapting a 200 gallon tank with a heat pump is very interesting . Kudos to you.

Awesome. My own foray into efficiency was setting up a 200 gallon hot water tank kit and heating it with a Geyser heat pump. Then I put a couple of long coils of pex tubing into the tank and ran the hot water line through it. It worked great to get off of oil for water heating and saved a lot money!

But for installing a heat pump (I want a whole home solution using the existing forced air ducting), I’d like to hire HVAC folks who know what they are doing more than me!

I took courses at “Youtube University” to learn how to install my heat pumps.
I wanted to be safe, electrically and HVAC wise.
My programs took over a year and a half, until I had the courage to actually do anything.

Quotes for a system were $10,000 and $13,000. I did it for less than $3,500 including the new tools needed. I bought 2 units, one is 120V , 12,000 BTU for the main floor open concept 650 sq ft. The 240V 18,000 BTU unit has 2 mini-splits to cover 2 of the 3 upper bedrooms.

The AC is perfect. Quiet, efficient and cool.
The heating, my first season, is so far so-so as I approach sub-freezing temps. The main floor unit is underpowered, so the heating is not as effective, and so far the upper unit is OK.
The new heating is different from the old hot water radiators that surround the home. My ceilings are quite warm, my feet, not so much. Lessons still to learn.

I will add resistance heating as the temps drop more.
This will still be cheaper than the my $8,000 hi-efficiency hot water on demand boiler from 15 years ago (94.5 AFLUE), and which has cost about an average $500 per year to fix sporadically.

To upgrade my main floor heat pump would likely require a 200Amp , $3,000 , new panel. I don’t want to go that far yet, unless I will add electrical hot water on demand.
More lessons to take at ‘Youtube U’. :-}

Good points!!!

Utility companies have installed lots of smart meters but I haven’t yet seen a standard offer of service (SOS) that has even simple time-of-day (TOD) rate bands (e.g., 4p-9p, 9p-6a, 6a-4p). A 4p-9p band could be a tenth of a penny more per kwh to start to see how customers respond. How many residential customers still pay one rate all day long? 95%? At the least, utility companies should put bands in their SOS even if the bands all have the same rate just to make customers more aware of the time-cost of energy.

Simple awareness through SOS bands might cause some people to do small things like eat bigger lunches and smaller dinners, or pre-cool / heat their houses, all the way to adding batteries to their homes. We won’t know until SOS TOD bands are commonplace! So much more could be done with incentives, even when an incentive is just awareness of the community grid problem that needs to be solved.

A widened highway solves a peak demand bottleneck but also creates more barren lanes at 2 a.m. Sometimes a good solution encourages behavior to change en masse.

We need to get the local contractors here in Minnesota, US, on board. As I don’t have the skills to do this myself regarding installing heat pumps. Minnesota is a blue state, so we should be able to get this done, as it is essential for combating global warming.

As I understand it, Tesla has started installing much longer cables at their SC station

Upvoted.

Maybe just as well

I would upvote this comment, but apparently that’s disabled? As is sorting by Best (which I guess follows).

And don’t forget heat pumps. And yes, they do work in cold climates:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/norway-heat-pumps-cold-heating

“Electrifying everything” means using a lot more electricity

Well, probably, but don’t forget that it takes a lot of electricity to refine oil into petroleum and diesel. As ICEVs wane, so will that power need

Seems like every day for the past couple of weeks things have been changing. It looked for a bit like you had settled on WordPress, but now apparently we’re back to disqus?

What most observers seem not to realize is that in about 10 years (+/-) we will have so much overcapacity in solar and wind output, and so many tens of millions of cars nestled snug in their garages, as well as Powerwalls, that we won’t know what to do with the power. Most utilities are going to die. Too bad.

Too cheap to meter will be a problem not a benefit, but that doesn’t mean you can beat the heat. A 60 to 1 trough can make heat for less than a dollar per mBtu. We can desalinate water with them; we can use chillers for AC with them. This technology has not yet been given its due or its day in the sun. As Churchill said: We will do the right thing, after we try everything else. Don’t overlook this cheap, reliable, infinite, benign gift in the mouth. Electrify all you won’t, but it won’t be everything.

What they need are all drive through stalls, with solar and batteries to make them clean without charging from the dirty grid and with cables that work on a sliding overhead pull down system like I installed in my drive through shop. I made a 30′ long overhead slider that holds a retractable cable system that allows me to simply reach up and pull to the front or back of the vehicle and down to the cars charging port. Simple and easy to do. Why can’t we have systems all across America like this and then it makes it easy for ANY vehicle regardless if a semi truck, an RV or recreational trailer, a SUV pulling a trailer, or front facing charging port or rear facing charging port.

A large company can do mine much better making the track electric with a motor to move the retractable cable back and forth along it’s length instead of manually like mine is (with several springs to hold the cable close to the ceiling for slack).

Tesla started the stupidity of making cables short and at one end. And it was a terrible decision. It also made it easy for gas lovers to block EV owners and tick them off. Drive through alleviate that problem for the most part.

Imagine how poorly that would work with gas stations if they did that. Almost all gas stations are pull through and you can pull into the side that has your gas opening to the side having the open gas hoses. With gas hoses also being short you wouldn’t be able to gas up many vehicles. It’s simply stupid.

For sure many newer stalls are drive thru but too many times the cables are too short. an overhead track with retractable cable alleviates that problem. But they need to be solar powered with battery stored powered doing the charging–not the dirty grid.

PS my cable isn’t actually wound up–I bought a retractable cable system that fastens to the middle of a 12′ long from ceiling to mid-point and it hangs 6′ above the ground and the cable retracts to pull it down or up out of the way. A commercial system can be electric with charging cable actually reeled up not just a separate quarter inch steel cable system that I implemented for cost savings.

I used one of these from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C6VHS8RZ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Thankfully, yes. It seems to me CT is desperately needing better web designers

The cost to a site owner per MW capacity for a big battery is less than 1/2 the cost of adding 1MW of grid capacity! This assumes the battery will last 15 years.

The latest & greatest MOST OBVIOUS PROOF is Ukraine/Russia conflict… Sadly that is just a repeat because in any war, power infrastructure becomes a #1 target! But let’s forget immediately afterwards and never ever remember that this is a constant in conflicts.

If the US was actually GENUINELY caring about National & Citizen Security, the electric grid would be Priority 1 for securing it with a highly resilient cellular topology where any segment can fail without affecting the whole. No Power & EVERYTHING STOPS ! NO refrigeration for food, medications, hospitals, emergency services etc ad infinitum… never forget, heating & cooling too …. AND no Fossil Fuel processing or refining without power too ! THATS A KICK IN THE …