[hef19898]

Those heaters heat one room, not a house or appartment complex. They consume a ton of electricity, are higly inefficient and don't heat your water supply. And while they maybe cheap (are those cheap ones rated for contonous usage or are they some cheap Wish knockoffs?) they are not available in sufficient numbers... Seriously, how comes that people fail to realize how complex things around them are, like infrastructure? These things are not like a consumer grade app or some ride share business...

[seabrookmx]

Not sure where you're getting your facts. I'm sitting in a house with all of these things you claim don't exist, and I'm not an anomaly where I live. My water heater, cooking stove, furnace.. all electric. Most of it installed in the 80's and all original (other than the water heater which has a 10-15 year lifespan).

Electric water heaters and baseboard heaters are common, and extremely efficient. In fact, resistive heaters in the scientific sense (watts in vs. watts out) are the most efficient form of heating.

They're extremely reliable and cheap because of how simple they are.

They may not be _cost effective to run_ in many regions due to high cost of electricity (per watt as compared to gas). But here in BC Canada, resistive elements are extremely common due to relatively cheap power (Hydro in our case). For whole home heating, heat pumps are usually used in new builds because of their advantages, but they're still very tied to the grid and have elements in them for defrosting and the like.

If you scaled up nuclear you'd similarly see prices of electricity drop, and if you have the grid infrastructure (or build it), electric heating (for your home, water, cooking, whatever) becomes pretty attractive.

[hef19898]

Sure it exists. My point was that switching from one to the other is the problem. Europe has issues with gett;ng gas and can't switch to electric. If you use electric and run into electricity issues you cannot switch to gas. Even if both solutions are working just fine.

[seabrookmx]

Your comment I replied to claimed electric heaters were inefficient and not available in numbers. I also don't see any mention of existing infrastructure.

But I'm glad you've been convinced :)

[jfim]

Most of the houses I've seen in Canada are heated using baseboard heaters, they're not exactly uncommon. Efficiency seems fine, and most of Europe doesn't get as cold as Canada during winter.

[Scoundreller]

Where in Canada? Almost everything on the nat gas grid has furnace heating. In the sticks you’ll have wood biomass, propane or kerosene heat.

Anyone using electric baseboards is getting highly subsidized electricity because any other energy source is cheaper.

Only place I saw baseboard heating was in school portables.

[jfim]

Québec. Then again that might be because of the low electricity prices there.

[8note]

BC too. I imagine it goes hand in hand with hydro

[ricardobeat]

I'm standing on floor heating at this very moment (off, of course). It uses district heating / hot water, which could be heated by any kind of energy source, including nuclear.

[Schroedingersat]

The consumer side is actually a lot more trivial than you are making out. It's also about as efficient as gas (0% at the point of consumption as you are producing heat, with about 40% energy loss on the production side).

Electric heating is about the simplest machine you can possibly make (it's just NiCr wire and a thermostat which is already there), and the cost would almost exclusively be the labour of installation. Even heat pumps (including for water) could be built in relatively short order.

The problem is it would entail quadrupling the electricity generating and transmission infrastructure. This is the hard part that takes decades.

[Scoundreller]

> Those heaters heat one room, not a house or appartment complex.

It’s something I’ve always wondered:

At night, it might be more cost effective to heat a bedroom electrically than an entire household with gas. But that’s a forced air heating issue: you can’t block 75% of a furnace’s airflow and expect it to keep working. Europe usually has boilers and radiators so dialing down heating to just a room is possible.

Or better yet, heat the person with a mattress pad instead of the building air at night.

[8note]

You don't want your pipes freezing though

[hef19898]

Lucky that some regions actually understood how isolation of pipes works...

[kalleboo]

> are highly inefficient

Electric resistive heaters are 100% efficient - they convert 100% of the electricity into heat.

[Schroedingersat]

That's 0% efficient. Same as gas heating.

Electricity heating does produce a bunch of heat at other places though, and it all comes from work, whereas the gas could only produce maybe 70% as much work if used some other way.

[Thorrez]

How is this 0% measured? I would think 1 J coming in from the wall making 1 J of heat means 100% efficient.

Yes there are inefficiencies at generation and transportation. But I don't think those are usually counted when talking about the efficiency of a home device. And it certainly won't be enough to bring it down to 0%.

[Schroedingersat]

energy that did work / energy in

As an illustrative example, you could get the same heating effect by putting the electricity through a computer or other appliance, or by putting the gas through a heat engine to produce electricity which is used inside the home and warming the house with the waste heat.

[Thorrez]

Hmm, that type of measurement probably works in some situations, but I don't think it works for heating. For example, I don't think that type of measurement would be as useful for comparing resistive heaters to heat pumps.

I know about heating by computer because for the last several years I've heated my apartment solely by mining Ethereum on my computer. The only dedicated heaters that my apartment has are resistive electric heaters built into the walls, so it's better for me to get a little Ethereum plus heat than just heat.

[Schroedingersat]

I don't like the framing of thermalizing potential energy being 100% efficient because efficiency as a general concept is the fraction of what you did vs. what you could do. It's incoherent mathematically, poor communication, and inconsistent with the way the word efficiency is used in other contexts in everyday speech. Direct thermalization is the least efficient possible action. It also leads to absurd statements like 'heat pumps are 400% efficient'. This is further exacerbated by the communication not expressing the upper bound in any coherent way (which is about 800-900% by this framing depending on temperature differential).

You could frame it as fraction of the heating that is possible at carnot efficiency, I guess. Ie. the amount of heat you put into your room / the amount of heat you with a perfect machine could at typical temperature differentials.

Then an element would be about 10-15% efficient (as measured at the wall vs. an ideal heat pump) and gas would be...awkward to calculate (I'd have to open up a textbook if not just multiplying max COP and max thermal efficiency of a heat engine), but somewhere in the 20-30% efficient range. Electric including a thermal generator would be in the 8-10% range somewhere.

Electric heat pumps would be around 50-70% by this metric, or in the 25-40% range somewhere if using a thermal generator.

Thinking about it, I like this metric because it really highlights how much more wasteful burning gas to heat a home with electricity is if you're not using the waste heat for something. If you're not using renewable electricity, even heat pumps don't break even if they're not high quality and well maintained.

Really drives home the importance of insulation and good curtains in cold areas.

Edit: looking at absorption heat pumps, they seem to be a little better than my guesstimate. I think they outperform fossil fuel powered electric heat pumps.

[Thorrez]

Yes, 100% efficient. But a heat pump is over 100% efficient because it pumps in additional heat from outside instead of just using the electricity's heat.