# Balancing energy options



## dustyroad (Nov 13, 2013)

Once upon a time I was young and knew everything worth knowing. Now, not so much these days.
I have an acreage well over the Northern horizon from most of you but I am looking to consult with the only group of like minded folks I know of. I'm in Western Canada toward the Northern part.
This last winter here was the worst I've ever experienced. Lots of days where I had to burn propane because it was too cold to bring in wood. -40 with a stiff wind. The cost of propane here has at least doubled and I have to reduce my usage or it will be out of range. Propane is for cooking and heating.
Wood is my preferred fuel but there is getting to be more and more times I can't keep up. Also, wood is not so great for those in between times. Nice outside but still need heat inside and the house gets too hot.
I've been thinking about putting in a heat pump to take care of those times when it is warm enough to carry the load and then wood or propane for those colder times. The main purpose of this is to reduce propane usage.
There is too much sales talk about heat pumps. All of it contradictory. I can't afford to do a geothermal install but air to air should do what I need, maybe? Thinking about a dual head around 48,000 BTU. Anybody already figured this out?
Water heater is electric. Power goes out fairly regularly but the deer, moose and bears are wonderful neighbours.


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

I'm no expert on heat pumps, but the first thing I'd do is figure out how much of the year it'll actually produce heat efficiently in your climate. My guess would be, it's not going to be very much. Look at efficiency at various temperatures, heat output vs. power consumption, and figure out the temperature at which it becomes more expensive than propane or electric heat. Then figure out if it's worth the cost to install it for the use you'll get out of it, or if it's ultimately cheaper to use propane or electric.


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## doc- (Jun 26, 2015)

A heat pump is basically an air conditioning unit. Consider a typical central AC-- it has that unit that sits outside the house and it gets pretty warm while it's running. It blows cool air into the house and hot air out....Set it up so it can reverse that with a flip of a switch and it's a heat pump....As I understand it, those offered for homes are only good when temps are pretty mild-- it's a lousy heater if it gets real cold out, and lousy AC if it gets real hot outside.

Other ideas--








Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, not Places


These days, we provide thermal comfort in winter by heating the entire volume of air in a room or building. In earlier times, our forebear's concept of heating was more localized: heating people, not places. They used radiant heat sources that warmed only certain parts of a room, creating...



www.lowtechmagazine.com












How to Keep Warm in a Cool House


Combining the old local heating practices with modern radiant and conductive heating systems could lower energy consumption, improve health, and increase thermal comfort. This is especially true for uninsulated buildings, where air heating is particularly disadvantageous. Local heating sources...



www.lowtechmagazine.com





With irregular weather around here (WI) in Oct and March/April, we don't crank up the wood burning/hydronic heating system until we know it will be needed 24/7. In those unpredictable months, we just heat the family room when needed where we spend most of the day with a 2000W thermostatically controlled electric space heater. It cycles on & off so it actually only runs 15-20 min each hour-- ~1kW (17cents / hr)


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## dustyroad (Nov 13, 2013)

I think I've decided to keep it simple. I need a solution I can work on without bringing in expensive city folks. I should be able to get a more efficiet version of the propane furnace. Maybe even divide the load between 2 units instead of one.
Another crazy idea I came up with is to split my wood finer so it's easier to handle. I am still working to get use to thinking about limitations. My instincts are to keep doing what I've been doing for many years but now I have to get use to scaling back a bit. Bummer!


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

dustyroad said:


> I should be able to get a more efficiet version of the propane furnace.


The most efficient way to burn propane is unvented, like a propane kitchen stove, i.e. without a chimney sucking 1/6 of the heat outside. That works OK in smallish quantities, or in larger quantities if your house isn't super tight. If you think of a propane kitchen stove, if you have, say, 2 burners and the oven going, that's actually a lot of propane burning unvented. It puts a lot of moisture into the air, which some think of as an advantage in the winter. Maybe one of those inexpensive 20K-30K BTU freestanding or wall-mounted propane heaters would do the job. Of course you want a carbon monoxide detector if you're burning anything indoors unvented.


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## furnacefighter15 (8 mo ago)

dustyroad said:


> I think I've decided to keep it simple. I need a solution I can work on without bringing in expensive city folks. I should be able to get a more efficiet version of the propane furnace. Maybe even divide the load between 2 units instead of one.
> Another crazy idea I came up with is to split my wood finer so it's easier to handle. I am still working to get use to thinking about limitations. My instincts are to keep doing what I've been doing for many years but now I have to get use to scaling back a bit. Bummer!


You can also add a heat pump to that furnace.

We call that dual fuel. Runs heat pump mode down to a OA changeover temp that with the right thermostat you can adjust.

Most modern heat pumps do well down to around 20 F degrees OA temp (not a fixed number) above that point they produce more kw heat then it costs, below that it becomes closer to 1:1 ratio.

Oh and I do HVAC for a living.


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