this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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New England and Alaska are about to deploy a lot more heat pumps | The EPA awarded these cold regions with a combined $488M to replace fossil-fueled heating with efficient electric heat pumps. (www.canarymedia.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Will HVAC installers be trained on them, or will they continue to size them for AC load and as a result install systems that are unable to heat below 25F (-5C). The heat pump itself of course can provide heat down to -20F/-25C but it cannot provide enough heat for the climate and so you spend most of the year using the backup heating system (or your house is dangerously cold)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What I recommend doing is finding an installer who is certified by the manufacturer; they tend to be trained to do it right.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

My installer was certified. It was installed right and works well - until the temperature gets to 25F and it just isn't large enough to keep up. This is a sales problem and a larger unit would be more expensive so they didn't offer it to me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I'd provide that feedback. They need to hear it.

[–] spidermanchild 1 points 4 months ago

It sounds like a system design issue, i.e. they always intended there to be a "primary" heating system below 25F and it was sized as such. For every customer like you, there are 3 more that want to keep a fossil backup system in place so that's where the market is. Unfortunately that also means customers need to be very educated themselves to select the "right" opinion. There are also downsides to oversizing heat pumps too, and typically oversizing is very common since manual J is overly conservative and installers are used to oversizing fossil systems. Your best bet is more weatherization to decrease heating load so that your HP can meet that load. Yes capacity drops as temperatures decrease, but good ccASHP can maintain full output closer to 0F. Do you have like a 1 ton mini for a whole home in Maine?