• Dwellings are not insulated to the same level as their northern counterparts. Over 60% of houses in Texas have single pane glass.
• Texas seems to rely substantially on heat pumps for residential heating, with fallback to resistive heating. At 10°f very few heat pumps can supply sufficient heat to keep even a decently insulated house properly heated - my guess is that many are using 2-3x less efficient resistive heaters at night.
• Heating peak demands tend to be correlated with the longest time since the sun was last shining... This bodes poorly for solar supply and also self generators - even those with battery backup.
• Texas typically imports from neighboring states... Most of which are in a similar irregular climate.
• Heating requirements for a building vs exterior temperature is non-linear, as are heat pump efficiencies. This is especially pronounced with poor insulation factor.
To put it into context, Quebec has ~46,000MW of peak electrical production capacity for a population of 8.4M. during cold winter days (-30°f) it uses all of that capacity and becomes a net-importer. In Summer months, it uses 1/3 of this.
Texas had peak electrical production capacity of 37,600MW for it's population of 29M.
What doesn't follow is electricity consumption per BTU produced, ie. if your heating source efficiency is non-linear, such as a heat-pump + resistive fallback heating. You can easily consume 8x the amount of electricity with a delta T of 60 than you do at 15.
In reality, outdoor air temperature alone isn't indicative of the entire building heat loss/requirement - ground temperatures don't respond linearly to air temperatures. Likewise, there are some oddities that come into play with high temperature deltas such as phase-change of materials or outright failure in some cases. Precipitation and wind can also affect thermal efficiencies.
A bitter-sweet example for Texans: The snow can actually provide some insulation. It would be worse if you had no snow and similar air temperatures than getting that 12" of fluffy stuff later this week.
I live in Houston -- very close to downtown, so I'm only about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. This makes it VERY FUCKING WEIRD INDEED that my entire yard is covered in snow, and it is 16F outside. This is NOT Houston weather. It's almost unprecedented -- it's certainly never been anywhere NEARLY this cold in the 26 years I've lived here, and the idea that we really won't be above 32F (0C) for a material amount of time until SATURDAY is really really nuts. In a normal Houston winter, by contrast, we MIGHT see 3-4 nights that freeze. We go years without needing to wrap plants, and I've never bothered to wrap outside pipes before. (Outlying areas to the north and especially northwest of the urban core get as much as 10 degrees F colder, but even so it's not a regular thing.)
So yeah, we're all built here for cooling and not heating. Ambient air temp outside is rarely more than 95, so getting your house to 78 is pretty attainable. But when we get cold snaps, WE certainly notice in our house, which is a relatively new (1997) 3-story townhouse (very vertical; it's about 1800 sq. ft. or 167m^2). It's just not set up to heat evenly or well.
The first problem is just distribution. Our house has a modern 'open' style floorplan, with soaring ceilings in the middle (living) floor. Heat, of course, rises. The upshot is that if you set the thermostat to warm the lower 2 floors to, say, 65F, the 3rd floor main bedroom will be intolerably warm and dry.
As a consequence, a window in our bedroom is open about 2" all winter.
The other gotcha in our house is the floor in the first level, where I have my office (I work from home). It's a stained concrete floor, which is great in the summer because it helps keep the room nice and cool. Unfortunately, it does exactly the same thing in the winter. I'm wearing thick wool socks and long underwear in here now, even though I have a plug-in radiator to supplement the central heating.
Actually, the radiator -- a Delonghi; it works great -- would probably be enough IF the windows were better sealed. My desk is up against a window. My legs feel cold all day in weather like this (well, in cold weather; there hasn't been any weather LIKE THIS before), to the point that last week when it was much warmer (45F during the day) I was wearing sweatpants over jeans.
The house is wonderful and comfortable and attractive. It works GREAT for the vast majority of our weather. It just gets drafty in the winter. And, of course, today I'm concerned that we're going to get rolling outages. Whooo!
At least we have a fireplace. (People laugh about it, but in all honesty having a fire is the easiest way to make the living area comfy without overheating the top floor, just based on where the heat goes. If the house was a little bit bigger, I suspect it would've come with 2 climate control units and proper zoning, which would help a LOT, but as is: just one big zone.)
Any Texans looking for some guerrilla insulation/heating techniques:
Put up some painters plastic on the inside frames of Windows (with dual sided tape) as this acts like a very rudimentary dual-pane window. Kits exist for this also (apologies for the Canadian link: https://www.amazon.ca/3M-2141W-6-Indoor-Window-Insulator/dp/... )
Next I would look into a propane space heater (sometimes referred to as a garage/barn heater). These can be operated on a standard 20lb tank and can keep a house warm for a day or two on a single tank. Co2 levels are minimal but you should still make sure you have a decent co2 sensor nearby.
We later moved to a house with newer windows that removed this need, and adult me has a ground source heat pump so I'm toasty even with the 15°F weather here.
I figured it was more an example of "must do something" than "activity that will actually help," but I was proven wrong IMMEDIATELY. They've made a material difference (no pun intended), and I'm said I said no when she asked if I wanted some for my office.
Yeah, that's what people often miss. We're not prepared for this, and don't build for it, because it almost never happens.
And it'll be 70F on Sunday.
Every townhouse I've ever lived in had this problem. The thermostat is on the ground floor or 2nd floor, which results in the bedrooms upstairs being oppressively hot. I will drop the temperature by 5+ degrees before retiring for the night. I hear you about the cold office floor - I have hardwood over a slab and I'm thinking of ordering a heating pad like the one the cat has.
There are many intersecting problems here - the main one is that the standard building code in the South requires a minimum of R-15 insulation in the walls, so that's what the builders put in to remain cost-competitive. You can't get much more than that in a wall cavity framed with 2x4's. Builders and owners need to be incentivized to super-insulate. Not necessarily to a "Net Zero" standard, but increasing the minimum to R-21 (which requires going to 2x6 framing) would help in both heating & cooling seasons.
The other problem is that I have had only a single heat pump for the entire house. It would be much better to have a variable-refrigerant-flow (VRF) system where you have multiple "heads" with their own thermostats that run independently (commonly called a Mini-Split although there are differences). And then you can close the doors to rooms that aren't being used, dropping the thermostat in them to reduce usage.
Larger townhouses -- say, 2500sqft & up -- are often zones more reasonably, at least here, such that heating/cooling can be managed with more granularity. But doing it really requires multiple units, not a single big unit.
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-weather/article/Photos-Re...
This style of house made so that people can feel rich and high status while wasting enormous amounts of energy to heat and cool is an affront to our future generations.
And it’s almost inescapable unless you’re interested in custom building or buying an old house.
Wow dude. You decided why people want specific things and let us know that it’s an affront to future generations. I’m glad it tops the list over deep sea drilling, paved suburban road jungles, ocean acidification, and dubstep (they will look back and mourn the loss of our sanity in this age, but it’s so addictive...).
Maybe people just walk into a tall place and feel more comfortable in it? Maybe builders and markets respond to purchasers and their response to something that lots of people find more comforting?
Perhaps a hyper efficient off-grid renewable-driven earthen hovel isn’t for everyone?
I live in a small, modest, low ceiling home with zoned temperature management and comprehensive energy usage monitoring. That’s great for me and my family, but it’s a preference.
And, you know what? Open plan high ceilings are nice, especially when you don’t have kids and can hear each other more easily.
And even worse are houses badly “opened up” - thereby ruining whatever design was originally in place.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/7b/67/947b6734e9ec93809b2c...
It heats and cools far more efficiently than the traditional homes in Houston (mostly pier and beam construction). There's more to home appeal than thermodynamics, especially in a mild climate.
Conditioning an extra 2 to 12ft above your head is absolutely choosing vanity over energy efficiency.
However, most people don’t even have the choice since they’re making trade offs between various neighborhoods of various income levels, and once you get above a certain income, all the houses are made with open foyers and tall ceilings. The builders wouldn’t be able to sell the more energy efficient homes at as high of a price as the non energy efficient ones, so obviously we’re going to end up with a stock of homes where the all the heat downstairs is constantly going upstairs.
The reason the homes with higher ceilings will sell for a higher price is because people feel a certain way about them. A high ceiling has no practical benefits and is purely for aesthetics at the expense of energy efficiency. My intention isn’t to insult, but I think it is accurate. People do many things to project their status.
You are still being insulting, or absurdly reductive. Neither is especially welcome. Normal humans value all sorts of competing concerns when evaluating a home where they may spend many many years. Maybe YOU only value thermodynamics and care nothing for aesthetics, but that doesn't mean people who don't share your POV are only trying to project status or whatever other uncharitable thing you envision.
If anyone wants to see what I'm talking about, I think there are some examples here: https://McMansionHell.com Some of them aren't really that bad, but there are some definite atrocities.
Before COVID were were shopping to upgrade, so we're not going to put any more upgrade money into this house, but if we were going to stay I'd absolutely make changes in this.
Re: the downstairs, unfortunately it warms up quickly on a hot day, and the structure of the house is such that the downstairs room's heat doesn't really have an easy path up.
The other factor is that, in a NORMAL, non-plague year, I'm alone in the house during the work day. If had perfect control of the house climate system, I'd let the upstairs drift to 80 or 82 while keeping my office at 76 or 78, and not start trying to cool the rest of the house until after hours when my wife gets home. Same with heating: just heat down here during the day, and warm the rest of the house in the evening.
There are far-infrared ceramic heaters that don't glow. Less smell and more energy converted into radiation instead of warm air.
The radiator in my office -- which is a normal shaped room with maybe an 8 foot ceiling -- does very well.
Something like this: https://www.retrozone.com/Catalog/flexdamper/Pumps.htm I didn't end up doing it and I don't know anybody who has. And it's probably a lot more expensive than opening your window in the winter.
Still have power here
Texas delivered a peak of over 60GW last night, before an unprecedented falloff in generating capacity due to weather and grid conditions.
From ERCOT's own Q&A:
-----------
EEA1
When the reserves drop below 2,300 megawatts, Emergency Energy Alert 1 is activated. That’s when ERCOT communicates to the public and to power generators that the situation is deteriorating.
At this time, ERCOT will import power from other states and from Mexico. This regularly happens during peak summer months and is not new. But right now, because prices are so cheap, and unrelated to the weather, ERCOT was already importing power from Mexico and other power grids.
Rotating outages do not happen during this stage.
EEA2
When the electric reserves drop to 1750 megawatts, other steps are taken to bring on additional capacity, but rotating outages are still not yet activated.
EEA3
When the reserves get to 1,000 megawatts and they are not expected to recover within 30 minutes, ERCOT will then ask electric suppliers like Oncor and Reliant to begin rotating outages to reduce load on the system.
ERCOT said the location of outages would be determined by each provider like Oncor and Reliant.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/weather/texas-power-outages-fre...
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...
It is not clear to me if these interconnections are normally used, or only used in Emergency scenarios. I think they are used both. However I have no idea what sort of capacity these have, and if that is enough in cases like this.
How is it possible for heating devices to be less efficient? Where does the waste energy go?
Normally, waste energy in devices powered by electricity means it's lost to heat, but here it would be lost to...?
Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat. But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to resistive heat to top it up.
This matches my experience, FWIW. When I lived in Ottawa, I occasionally looked at houses and apartment across the river in Quebec and nearly all of them had electric heat.
More data: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-402-x/2007/1741/ceb17...
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr... (see Electricity heading)
https://www.ivey.uwo.ca/energycentre/blog/2019/06/a-closer-l...
Canada is north. In summer, the sun can set round 11PM and in winter at 330PM
That's a lot of hours of electrical light vs natural
The problem is that people who would have otherwise tolerated 50F temperatures without heating by putting on a sweater are pulling their old oil column heater out of the storage.
While it is 10 F outside, the central heating system for my apartment in a 6-story building cannot maintain temperature. It is 66 F and gradually falling. I would guess it would be 2.5kW running 24/7.
That heater probably doesn't run continously.
For a well designed shared system you can get away with less than n x what an individual unit needs.
(That said, I too guess 2.5kW is too small for what GP mentioned.)
Upside to being in Indiana is our furnaces are made for this. I think I can keep my house at 70 down to like -30F outside. It’s a pretty expensive furnace though, wouldn’t make sense in Texas.
Burning gas is insanely thermodynamically active.
Gas furnace burns gas, blows around hot air.
Radiator heats water, and pushes that water around to heat rooms via radiators.