- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/72557390
The agreement to release oil stocks comes amid growing concerns in Brussels about entering winter with low strategic reserves, and becoming more susceptible to what several EU officials described as US “blackmail”.
I don’t know, maybe they’ll slow walk it, but the pressure on governments is really high here too, because of the insane price of fuel. They’re enacting widespread subsidies on fuel, which is costing the taxpayer a shitload of money. And about 50-70% the oil companies take for themselves.
Anyway, did I mention that currently BEVs are pretty much the only cars being sold right now? We just got ours yesterday. It’s very nice. Don’t think we’ll ever go back.
Now, it’s just the natural gas heating (house owner already has plans for heat pump) and high-as-fuck prices of everything that we need to deal with.
I vote that trump compensates us for the money he is costing us Europeans being so shit at his job!
Make sure the heat pump is a ground-source one if you get real winters. Otherwise it’s only good for supplementary heating in the dead of winter unless it’s super overpowered for the size of the house. Mine is air since I got it mostly for cooling in the summer, it does the job in spring and autumn so I don’t have to burn any wood, but throwing 300€ a month at it only accounts for about a fifth of the heating effort in the cold part of the winter, need another ~400-500€ worth of firewood or briquettes to make up for the rest of it. Air to Water has a similar weakness as Air to Air and while those usually have resistive heating as a backup, that’ll quickly get you into 1000+ euro electric bill territory in the winter.
Not OP, but how much ground do you need for one?
If you’ve got tons of space and want to save money, you can have a horizontal system, you’d ideally want about 1.5 meters of pipe length for every square meter you’re heating, according to the companies selling heat pumps. The pipe should be a meter deep and I think it should be a meter from any other section of pipe. Think of the good ol’ mobile game Snake.
If you’ve got tons of money or just don’t have the space, you can do a vertical system. It’s even more efficient, but you’d want roughly the same amount of meters, in the form of deep holes in the ground - for a bigger house, it’s OK to use multiple, just keep a bit of distance between them (6 meters is supposedly OK).
When the air goes cold and it’s hard to cool down the outside air to heat up the inside of your home, the ground stays warm so the efficiency drops much less. With the vertical system in particular, there’s no measurable drop, since a lot of your refrigerant is running so deep underground, it’d take an ice age to cool down the dirt down there.
Interesting. Sounds expensive.
It is, but it’s the only way to get viable heating without fossil fuels in a climate with winters. I have a friend with a ground source heat pump and one with an air to water heatpump and the former has a bigger house and significantly smaller electric bill when the real cold hits (January, February). Think it was 100-150 EUR vs 400-500 EUR + also needed to keep burning firewood every day when it got proper cold. Both use floor heating.
All in, you can count on it costing about 15-40k depending on everything. Air to water heat pump is more like 10-15k all in, but when you’re burning 10 kilowatts on resistive heating and your place is still not as warm as you’d like, you’ll know exactly why.
How warm are we talking with the air? If it’s like -10c outside, how warm inside?
A totally predictable consequence of subsidies in a situation where supply is fundamentally limited.
well no then you still need the electricity
which is going to take a couple of decades and that is if China is willing to sell the materials
Yeah, but fundamentally it’s much less volatile and dependent. Wind energy is a local industry, but solar is dependent on China, that’s true.