[john_shafthair]

Not when the power's out for days - as often happens in winter storms.

You can run the blower and electronics of a natural gas furnace or boiler off a little camping generator for a week or even better a natural gas whole house unit in perpetuity.

So you don't, you know, freeze to death.

[smileysteve]

If you take the investment that is the infrastructure for gas lines (all underground) and do similar for most electricity then storms don't take out electricity and people don't die.

Best of all, the total investment and maintenance actually decreases.

[nonethewiser]

But gas lines are already down. If it were as easy as you said then NY would already have no grid problems.

[tomohawk]

How about you get that done first, prove that its at least as reliable, and then start banning things?

[greenthrow]

Other countries have buried their power lines ages ago, and yes it is as reliable as gas, more so.

[JamisonM]

"You can run the blower and electronics of a natural gas furnace or boiler off a little camping generator.."

Likewise for a heat pump, right?

Does this "power out for days after a winter storm" thing actually happen very often? I am from Manitoba and my worst-ever experience was 10-11 hours when it was very, very cold out in 35+ years.

[rcme]

You need way to power to drive the heat pump than you do to run the blower. But I agree, it's stupid to act like a natural gas furnace is a good choice for long-term power outages.

[nucleardog]

Depending on your definition of long term… I’ve got ~900lbs of propane tanks sitting beside my house, a propane forced air furnace, and a dual fuel generator that can run on propane.

Assuming I run the generator for 12 hours a day at half load (powering my whole house, still firing my equipment up and working remotely…) and the furnace runs for three hours a day throughout that time… I can keep going for a couple of weeks. If I _can_ get gas to fuel the generator with that can be extended pretty substantially—the generator is really what’s using up all my propane.

So in the realm of the kind of power outages where you reasonably expect society to recover and continue… works pretty well for me.

But yeah, in the future I would love to move over to a heat pump and solar generation / local storage. That extends your potential runtime pretty near indefinitely. (We’re talking lifetime of batteries and solar panels at that point instead of “when the propane truck can come by next”.)

[nucleardog]

> Does this "power out for days after a winter storm" thing actually happen very often?

Near Ottawa—in the past 12 months I’ve had an eight day outage, a four day outage, and a few day long outages.

We don’t need to survive the -40 or -50 of the prairies, but even with good insulation a -10 day in the spring makes the house pretty cold after a couple of days.

[WalterBright]

It's been out for 10 days at a time in Seattle.

[operatingthetan]

Not for me it hasn't, you seem to be describing a very specific edge case, which doesn't seem that honest of an example.

[nonethewiser]

I don’t see him overstating anything. He didn’t say everyone experienced it.

[operatingthetan]

>He didn’t say everyone experienced it.

They clearly over-generalized. I didn't say they "overstated." They didn't say "in some parts of Seattle" they said "in Seattle."

I'm sure there have been edge cases in every state of the country where the power has been 10 days at someone's house because of unique circumstances. That doesn't meaningfully change the risk profile of a heat pump over gas furnaces.

[WalterBright]

It wasn't a unique case. It happens about once every 20 years. The time before the 10 day event it was 4 days. I live in the middle of the Seattle metropolitan area, not out in the country. The powerlines were down for miles around. The powerlines thread through the trees, and the trees fall on them during a windstorm.

[plandis]

Where in Seattle?

[john_shafthair]

No. A heat pump requires a significantly higher amount of electricity to function.

An average gas furnace blower motor draws around 7A at 120V.

A heat pump can require between 20A-40A at *240V* PLUS the air handler which is the same as above. A heat pump air handler is just a furnace without burners. If supplemental heat strips are needed they can be on a 50A breaker at 240V.

[local_crmdgeon]

I've never lost power in NY. Lived all over the state. This isn't California.

[greenthrow]

What nonsense. If you ha e a backup generator your power isn't out. Gas heat doesn't work with the power out. Why are you resorting to lies to push fossil fuels?

[WalterBright]

Backup generators are not usually large enough to power an electric furnace. But they'll power the fan for the gas heat just fine.

Source: I used a little gas generator many times to power the gas furnace when the electric grid was down.