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Re:The humble water heater could be the savior of our energy... by sidewndr46 on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @09:23AM (#27760832)
Is English a second language for you? I ask not because I am trying to insult, but what you are describing is just called geothermal heat in North America. It can also work in reverse if the air temperature is higher than the ground temperature.

Also, you have your units wrong. Electrical demand is measured in just kilowatts (kw). Actual usage is in kilowatts-hours (kwh) which is just an unusual way of saying joules.

Re:The humble water heater could be the savior of our energy... by scotty79 on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @10:22AM (#27761437)
Units are fine. He just said he gets energy as heat in the amount 4 times higher than amount of electrical energy he uses to get it.

It's fine to talk about it in terms of energy as it would be to talk about it in terms of power.

And I'd argue that kWh is exactly the usual way of saying 3600000 joules.

Also name "geothermal heat" for ground heat pumps might be a local US marketing term. In international English geothermal means rather what Iceland is mostly doing. Pumping water into very hot rocks deep below to extract heat. And it doesn't work in reverse because it would be additional work to pump heat into very hot rocks instead of dumping it into the air or into the cool ground 2 meters below the surface.

Re:The humble water heater could be the savior of our energy... by sidewndr46 on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @12:22PM (#27762859)
I don't know anything about Iceland but I am using the definition from energy.gov

https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/heat-and-cool/heat-pump-s...

Geothermal works with either vertical holes in the ground or a big loop spread out horizontally. Neither one is very deep nor does it involve hot rocks.

Re:The humble water heater could be the savior of our energy... by scotty79 on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @04:20PM (#27765349)
Ah, geothermal heat pumps is perfectly accurate.

Geothermal heat on the other hand is a wider term https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heating of which geothermal heat pumps (ground source heat pumps) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump are just a subset.

Re:The humble water heater could be the savior of our energy... by jcynix on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @05:11PM (#27765777)
Energy is specified in KWh here, i.e. we have a metering system installed which states that our heat pump delivered 128024 KWh of heat and the electricity company's metering system tells me that it used 34844 KWh of electrical energy to do this.

Anyway, for one unit input we got about 3.6 units of output, which has been produced with an almost zero carbon footprint, as we buy only ecologically produced electricity.

And yes, English is a second language.

Re:The humble water heater could be the savior of our energy... by sidewndr46 on Thursday July 08, 2021 @12:54PM (#27774668)
How does a meter compute delivered heat? Computing delivered electricity is easy, but to compute heat delivered you'd need to have adiabatic walls surrounding your house or something like that.