Not when the power's out for days - as often happens in winter storms.

You can run the blower and electronics of a natural gas furnace or boiler off a little camping generator for a week or even better a natural gas whole house unit in perpetuity.

So you don't, you know, freeze to death.

If you take the investment that is the infrastructure for gas lines (all underground) and do similar for most electricity then storms don't take out electricity and people don't die.

Best of all, the total investment and maintenance actually decreases.

How about you get that done first, prove that its at least as reliable, and then start banning things?

Other countries have buried their power lines ages ago, and yes it is as reliable as gas, more so.

But gas lines are already down. If it were as easy as you said then NY would already have no grid problems.

"You can run the blower and electronics of a natural gas furnace or boiler off a little camping generator.."

Likewise for a heat pump, right?

Does this "power out for days after a winter storm" thing actually happen very often? I am from Manitoba and my worst-ever experience was 10-11 hours when it was very, very cold out in 35+ years.

It's been out for 10 days at a time in Seattle.

Not for me it hasn't, you seem to be describing a very specific edge case, which doesn't seem that honest of an example.

I don’t see him overstating anything. He didn’t say everyone experienced it.

>He didn’t say everyone experienced it.

They clearly over-generalized. They didn't say "in some parts of Seattle" they said "in Seattle."

I'm sure there have been edge cases in every state of the country where the power has been 10 days because of unique circumstances.

It wasn't a unique case. It happens about once every 20 years. The time before the 10 day event it was 4 days. I live in the middle of the Seattle metropolitan area, not out in the country. The powerlines were down for miles around. The powerlines thread through the trees, and the trees fall on them during a windstorm.

>It wasn't a unique case. It happens about once every 20 years.

Alright, that's so rare it's hardly a data point.

>I live in the middle of the Seattle metropolitan area, not out in the country.

Wait, so you aren't even talking about the city of Seattle? Never mind...

Non-locals don't know the suburb name, so when talking to non-locals I use Seattle. When talking to locals, I use the suburb name.

> that's so rare it's hardly a data point.

I never expected a 10 day power failure in the middle of a metropolitan city.

Much simpler and accurate to say "a suburb of Seattle." So your original statement was misleading in several ways.

E.g. Seattle City Light has a better reputation for uptime than Puget Sound Energy.

Where in Seattle?

You need way to power to drive the heat pump than you do to run the blower. But I agree, it's stupid to act like a natural gas furnace is a good choice for long-term power outages.

Depending on your definition of long term… I’ve got ~900lbs of propane tanks sitting beside my house, a propane forced air furnace, and a dual fuel generator that can run on propane.

Assuming I run the generator for 12 hours a day at half load (powering my whole house, still firing my equipment up and working remotely…) and the furnace runs for three hours a day throughout that time… I can keep going for a couple of weeks. If I _can_ get gas to fuel the generator with that can be extended pretty substantially—the generator is really what’s using up all my propane.

So in the realm of the kind of power outages where you reasonably expect society to recover and continue… works pretty well for me.

But yeah, in the future I would love to move over to a heat pump and solar generation / local storage. That extends your potential runtime pretty near indefinitely. (We’re talking lifetime of batteries and solar panels at that point instead of “when the propane truck can come by next”.)

> Does this "power out for days after a winter storm" thing actually happen very often?

Near Ottawa—in the past 12 months I’ve had an eight day outage, a four day outage, and a few day long outages.

We don’t need to survive the -40 or -50 of the prairies, but even with good insulation a -10 day in the spring makes the house pretty cold after a couple of days.

No. A heat pump requires a significantly higher amount of electricity to function.

An average gas furnace blower motor draws around 7A at 120V.

A heat pump can require between 20A-40A at *240V* PLUS the air handler which is the same as above. A heat pump air handler is just a furnace without burners. If supplemental heat strips are needed they can be on a 50A breaker at 240V.

What nonsense. If you ha e a backup generator your power isn't out. Gas heat doesn't work with the power out. Why are you resorting to lies to push fossil fuels?

Backup generators are not usually large enough to power an electric furnace. But they'll power the fan for the gas heat just fine.

Source: I used a little gas generator many times to power the gas furnace when the electric grid was down.

I've never lost power in NY. Lived all over the state. This isn't California.

I lived in a building with heat pumps in Europe. In colder climate, they're loud. As in, LOUD. It's likely fine when you can install the external module somewhere on the roof (poor birds though), but in many apartment buildings you can only put it on the outer walls, and you can clearly hear the sound inside the flat. Internal modules that cycle air are also noisy, though less.

I'm glad to pay the premium for silent heating.

There are quiet heat pumps available:

https://homeinspectioninsider.com/are-all-heat-pumps-noisy-1...

I'd hardly classify my gas boiler as silent.

Americans already have heat pumps installed "air conditioning units"

Burning stuff is also loud, but resistive heating is mostly quiet other than fan noise and metal containers creaking as they heat up/cool down

Some are, and some of those even live up to their temperature rating, but they are subject to wind chill and can also fail due to ice and snow build-up, so its not as good as it sounds.

What is the backup, resistance heating?

Electric resistance heat is super inefficient. That's why it's often referred to as "emergency heat".

Ironically the best combo is a heat pump + natural gas furnace as a backup. Best of both worlds. But here we are making those illegal so we can pretend to save the planet.

> Ironically the best combo is a heat pump + natural gas furnace as a backup. Best of both worlds. But here we are making those illegal so we can pretend to save the planet.

How does this work in practice though? The natural gas distribution lines don't pay for themselves. If they're only gonna be used in emergencies then they'll be crazy expensive. You have a lot of money by not having to run natural gas through a neighborhood at all.

A more realistic backup in these types of places (which is used widely in the northeast) is heating fuel oil in a tank.

I agree with everything you said except there has been a war on heating oil since before this tiff with natural gas. So even suggesting that is anathema because it would be career suicide for the politicians pushing this. You can certainly use an oil furnace as a second stage, though oil is more often used as a boiler for steam or hydronic.

Storing heating oil is risky, expensive and is a dirty use of a property due to the need for an underground or above ground tank.

Abatement of tank leaks can run into the millions as you have to dig up all soil contaminated by heating oil when the tank is retired, and tank retirement is a cost that holds up many property sales and redevelopment here in the Pacific Northwest.

That's not really true elsewhere. Using in-ground oil tanks is an antiquated practice that isn't used anymore. Any modern heating oil installation has the tanks either in the cellar or in the yard behind the house. Either one would immediately reveal a leak so it could be remedied quickly. Yes Seattle is full of shitty bungalows with in-ground oil tanks that have to be condemned, it is a problem and one of the many reasons Seattle sucks. I did a stint at AWS so know the area. You can get away with a heat pump or baseboard electric in Seattle because the outdoor temperature rarely dips below 30F in winter. Go to a place like Maine where the vast majority of houses use oil. There is no natural gas infrastructure and heating with electric is impractical. 30F is a 'warm' winter day. A heat pump cannot effectively deal with the frigid climate in the NE and electric space heating would be insanely expensive. Many thousands of homes are heating with oil in the northeast everyday and not turning their yards into superfund sites. There are many compromises that work for the milquetoast PNW that won't work elsewhere.

Without said "war on heating oil" suddenly it becomes cheap to install multiple heating systems in your house?

What changes with it not being political suicide? Government subsidies paying to add oil infrastructure to houses and to pay for unused pipelines?

> Electric resistance heat is super inefficient. That's why it's often referred to as "emergency heat".

Yes, which is why it only kicks in when the heat pump isn't enough. Which is not most of the year!

The problem is when it kicks in for everyone in the neighborhood at the same time on an especially cold night and causes a brown out. (Happened to me this winter.)

>> Electric resistance heat is super inefficient

I know what you mean but it is actually nearly 100% efficient. The inefficient part is converting high entropy heat to low entropy electricity.

Heat pumps are significantly >100% efficient, if measured as (heat energy brought inside)/(electrical energy consumed).

Yes, because you are moving heat from one location to another. Same thing with a refrigerator.

If you actually had to pay for the methane leakage from having the interconnect, it would be cost prohibitive, even if they were legal.

My city was only a couple degrees short of -40 this last winter.

Or... Get a ground heat pump?