It was early Monday morning, March 12, 2018, when we received five inches of heavy, wet snow at our farm in Estill County, Kentucky, and we lost electricity, in our all-electric home, sometime before 4:30 AM. No, I’m not relying on memory; I’m actually kind of obsessive about recording things in my At-A-Glance Daily Diary, and I have a whole shelf of them, dating back to 1986, missing only 2001’s, which was lost somehow.
Fortunately, it was 42º F and sunny outside by afternoon, which helped some, but it still got down to 52º F inside the house. My wife, having to work the following day, drove to Lexington to stay at our daughter’s apartment, so she could do something really radical like take a shower in the morning. There was just enough sort-of warm water in the water heater for me to take a quick shower on Tuesday morning. While my wife could leave, I had to stay at home to care for the critters.
To make a long story short, we finally got sparktricity back at 4:54 PM on Thursday, March 15th. It had gotten as cool as 37º F inside the house, though warmer in my bedroom, which I heated with sunshine through the window and my own body heat. The high for that day was 58º F, so that helped some. I wonder how bad things would have gotten if we had lost power for 4½ days in mid-January.
Thus, it was with somewhat of a jaundiced eye that I noticed a series of tweets:
Dan Walters: These power outages have me even more appreciative of having a gas-fired stove, so we can at least have hot food. Something to ponder as officialdom tries to make homes all-electric
panama bartholomy: By now we recognize that burning gas in buildings is one of our leading air polluters, more than cars and power plants combined, part of the reason we have terrible air in CA. We can’t clean up our air and continue to burn gas. We also cannot run a gas system just for cooking (1)
panama bartholomy: If we replaced all of our furnaces with amazing 400% efficient heat pumps (http://bit.ly/3CuNhOU) and water heaters with heat pump water heaters we could cut over 90% of gas use to buildings and have dramatically better air. (2)
The embedded link led to this OpEd in The Washington Post:
By Robert Gebelhoff, Assistant editor and Opinions contributor | January 4, 2023 | 2:43 PM EST
For anyone using fossil fuels to heat their homes, I have good and bad news.
The bad: You’re going to want to replace that system with heat pumps eventually, and it might be expensive. The good: The government can help you, and the change will have huge benefits for you and the world.
Oh, the government can help us? How will the government help us?
These heating and cooling systems, once considered useful only in warmer climates, have in the past few years become far more sophisticated. They are now the best chance we have to phase out fossil fuels as a means of heating and could set the stage for a climate policy revolution. . . . .
Americans are not yet as enthusiastic, but policymakers in many states recognize heat pumps’ potential. A New York commission recently approved a plan to require all new houses built in the state after 2025 to use electric systems rather than those running on natural gas, oil or propane. After 2030, it seeks to require homeowners to replace all fossil-fuel-burning systems with non-carbon-emitting ones once they give out.
New York’s approach is the most aggressive in the country, but it’s by no means alone. Fifteen states and more than 100 cities have plans to encourage heat pump installation. The federal government is in on the strategy, too. The Inflation Reduction Act provides generous rebates and tax incentives for those who install the devices, and the Energy Department has dedicated $250 million to increase their production.
Really? Generous rebates and tax incentives? In March of 2021, we had to replace our heat pump based HVAC — heating, ventilation and air conditioning — system due to the record-setting flooding on the Kentucky River. The rising waters destroyed the old system, but while they got into the crawl space, they did not get into our house itself. Replacing the old system was $6,100, $6,100 we didn’t want to spend. The price was lower for us in that the ductwork from the previous system was still in place and usable. Fortunately, we had the cash to do it, though I wonder just how many of my eastern Kentucky neighbors could say the same.
And if you are living paycheck-to-paycheck, $6,100 is a lot of money, money you have to pay up front to get your new HVAC system installed, months before you ever see those generous rebates and tax incentives. While the numbers fluctuate, surveys in May of 2022 showed that 49% of Americans didn’t have the cash available to handle an unexpected $400 expense.
Can people in such close financial straits get the credit to have a new HVAC system installed when they don’t have the cash?
These efforts are well worth the expense. Consider that buildings consume about 40 percent of all energy in the United States. Residential buildings alone contribute to about 20 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, with half heated by burning fossil fuels.
This is where Robert Gebelhoff, an Assistant editor and Opinions contributor for The Washington Post, tells us just how much he doesn’t understand much of America. “These efforts,” he wrote, “are well worth the expense.” Well, perhaps to someone who has a relatively high position for one of our nation’s most famous and important newspapers, (probably) earns a decent salary — and no, I couldn’t find Mr Gebelhoff’s salary or net worth — and could, I assume, afford that expense. And never forger: Mr Gebelhoff once blithely wrote, “NASA’s latest gamble might not pay out, but it’s worth the $2 billion anyway“. But both my wife and I grew up poor, and if we’re not poor now, having retired back to Our Old Kentucky Home, we can and do see plenty of poorer people living around us.
Heat pumps, in contrast, simply move heat from the outside air or ground inside — even during frigid winter months.
They do? Technically, yes, that’s how they operate. But taking heat from the outside air, when the outside air is 10º F, isn’t quite the same thing as doing so when it’s 45º F. That’s part of the reason why, as we have pointed out previously, wealthy New Englanders, when going through expensive home remodeling on Thie Old House, chose gas heating systems. We have also previously noted that it “seems that everybody wants a gas range,” even though the climate activists don’t want people to have that choice. Today’s left appear to be pro-choice on exactly one thing.
Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.
Us? We remodeled our kitchen — the whole house was a livable but nevertheless fixer-upper home when we bought it — in 2018, after the power-outage but still planned before it, and we added what my wife wanted, a gas, propane actually, since there’s no natural gas service in our rural area, range, a propane water heater — our electric one was on its last legs anyway, so we needed to replace it — and a propane fireplace. When it got down to -5º F over the Christmas holiday, and our heat-pump based HVAC really couldn’t keep up, that fireplace kept it nice and warm at home. When the floods of 2021 destroyed the old heat-pump HVAC system, the propane fireplace kept us warm.
We had, of course, learned our lesson in our previous home in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. We got fourteen inches of heavy, wet snow on Christmas Day of 2002, and yes, the power failed there as well. We had a heating oil fired steam boiler for our heating system, but it still required a 110-voly, 20-amphere electric circuit to activate the boiler and run the pump. The power was restored at around 6:30 PM . . . on December 26th. We subsequently added a woodstove, which was easy enough, because the previous owner had installed a hearth and chimney for one.
A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe, December 18, 2016.
Would it be superstitious of me to note that we never had a subse-quent power failure of more than a few hours since we installed the alternate heating systems? 🙂
Naturally, I haven’t quoted every word of Mr Gebelhoff’s original, but, further down is this:
This is why heat pumps often save energy costs in the long term, even though they can be expensive to install, especially when replacing existing systems. Cost estimates vary widely depending on the size and age of a house, ranging from as low as $3,000 to upwards of $20,000.
How blithely he wrote that! Yes, heat pumps “often save energy costs in the long run,” but it’s that “expensive to install” part that one of the Washington elite just doesn’t get: you have to have the money to install them in the first place, and that “upwards of $20,000” part isn’t always easy for people. When 49% of Americans, hit hard by inflation in 2022, can’t handle an unexpected $400 expense, how does Mr Gebelhoff expect them to write a check for ten or twenty grand?
One last paragraph from Mr Gebelhoff:
Naturally, efforts to push consumers to embrace heat pumps have generated much anxiety on the right. Republicans in New York have panned their state’s plan as “radical” and claimed it will leave residents “in the dark and in the cold.” But policymakers must not flinch. Yes, retrofitting homes can be expensive. The answer is to offset the costs with subsidies, as many states are already doing.
With this, the Post’s columnist was right there on the cusp, right at the point of realizing that yes, the power can go out, but if he did realize it, he never mentioned it; there isn’t a single word in his column telling us what people who are completely committed to all-electric heat would do in sub-freezing weather — something fairly common in the winter in New York state, when the electricity failed. When Buffalo and Watertown and the other areas in upstate New York get hammered by three or four feet of lake-effect snow, power outages are frequent. If they happened to be dependent upon the type of fuel-oil burner that my family had in Pennsylvania, or the gas furnace my daughter had installed in her home in Lexington when her heat-pump powered HVAC system failed, a simple, gasoline-powered generator that can be bought at Home Despot or Lowe’s can provide the current the 110-volt, 20-amp circuit such systems use to keep their homes warm. A heat pump? The system I have here is on two separate — one for the exterior condenser and one for the crawl space unit — 220-volt, 50-amp circuits. That’s going to require a much larger, much more expensive generator.
Mr Gebelhoff isn’t stupid; you don’t get hired by The Washington Post if you’re an idiot. But, living in the liberal Washington bubble, he is seemingly ignorant about how many Americans live. Not to pick solely on him — his OpEd column is simply a catalyst for mine — but this is a common problem amongst the climate change activists: they simply do not understand the problems that so many Americans work, and can be completely airy-fairy about suggesting policies which will make Americans poorer.
Somehow, one of the French doors, which are on the northwest-facing wall, blew open overnight. The heat pump couldn’t keep up with an open door during January, but the propane stove came on as well — it has a separate, battery-powered thermostat — and that kept the house reasonably warm.
