I wish it was only useless:(

Eating 76 kilograms of protein seems slightly excessive, would change my body drastically no doubt. /s

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Our cities are too old to be build with cars in mind.

Vast parts of the cities I lived in were completely bulldozed to accommodate cars.

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And what is the problem with a gas hybrid heat pump? It’s an ideal solution for places that get very cold, use the gas furnace for the weeks when it’s below -5 and use the heat pump for many months around that. It’s one of the most efficient ways to use a heat pump as you don’t have to bully it through the coldest part of winter with very bad COPs, you’re only using it when it’s most efficient. And when your heating period is very long, that will only benefit your seasonal COP. So of course it’s more expensive than a simple furnace, but it will also save loads of energy and redeem itself after 5-10 years.

The best part about this is you already have an AC, aka a heat pump, but you don’t use it for heating?

gas furnance that was somehow under-dimensioned – the idea is that in the real cold days you’d still have the good ole fireplace

Oddly enough I’ve never encountered that in Germany, I only ever see catastrophically oversized furnaces that start cycling in March… Seems to me plumbers never really worry too much about correct dimensioning, they just put the same 20 kW furnace that they know and love to install in every apartment and single family home. For some it will be somewhat adequate, for some it’ll be oversized, who cares, customers never complain when the furnace cycles, but when it’s too cold, you’ve got a problem. Same as they’re never too worried about finding suitable supply water temps. Just set it to 80 and you’re good, it’s the customer who pays horrendous gas bills, not you lmao. That’s also why everyone thinks their Altbau has to have 80°+ supply water when they have never really tried anything lower to see if it maybe suffices. My parents had their oil-furnace on 80C supply for the past 40 years and last winter when everybody was trying to save as much energy as possible they figured out you can set it to 55 as well.

Okay, I suppose you wouldn’t do that when replacing and old furnace but rather go for a hybrid system. In Europe loads of people are reacting to hiked gas prices and have perfectly fine furnaces in place that they don’t want to get rid of.

but assuming they’re saying that it’s saying that $0.63 worth of natural gas gives you the equivalent thermal output of 1kWh

Correct (although $0.063), and interesting to see you seem unfamiliar with this, this is the standard way of listing energy prices in Europe, it’s not just that site. That site was just my first hit when I looked up Canadian energy prices. It’s the low heat value and it’s determined by the energy in a fuel if not allowed to condense (which is the relevant value for a traditional furnace, if you have a more modern condensing furnace you take the high heat value) and it makes it relatively easy to compare different sources of energy.

Canada is huge, and some of that landmass is in the Arctic circle.

What people never realise is that being far up in arctic climates doesn’t only impair an SCOP. Yeah the lowest temps are very cold, but that means temporarily bad COPs. An SCOP is made up of the whole heating period though, which in colder climates is longer, so in turn you have several months more of the time where heat pumps are extremely viable with temporary COPs above 5 or 6 saving loads of energy. The real problem is if your lowest temps are so low that a heat pump will stop working entirely, in which case you get a hybrid system or just leave your old furnace in as backup, which is even better for your SCOP because you omit the month(s) with the worst COP and only use the heat pump when it’s most viable. Let’s say you live in Tuktoyaktuk and heating period is basically all year, then you have your furnace on for 3-4 months but you’re saving massive amounts of energy with your heat pump in the other 8-9 months of the year.

touching on the nuances of the word “efficiency”

I actually tend to avoid using that term for heat pumps anyway, as it’s not really correct in terms of physics. What makes heat pumps so viable is a coefficient of performance, their actual electrical efficiency isn’t all that good at 50-60%, but it’s also kinda irrelevant. It’s sometimes easier to just call it efficiency, but like you say, once you go into the nitty gritty it falls apart.

People think that’s a killer argument against heat pumps when it absolutely isn’t.

In that sort of climate you get a hybrid system or just leave your old furnace in as backup. You’ll use the furnace for the couple of days/weeks when it is below -25c/-13f and use the heat pump for the 6 months around that time window and save huge amounts of energy because you only use the heat pump when it’s most efficient. A hybrid system will improve efficiency because it combines the technologies at transition temps while just keeping the old furnace as backup is obviously much cheaper, since you can also get a smaller unit than you normally would because you don’t have to worry about the coldest period.

if your energy cost for that source of power is high, it’s going to lose the financial argument every time.

How high, is the question. How much more is electricity where you live that heat pumps “lose the financial argument every time”? Where I’m from a kWh of electricity is roughly 2.8-3x that of natural gas, so most modern heat pumps will beat that, some by quite a margin.

If globalpetrolprices.com is to be trusted and Canadian natural gas is 0.063 CAD and electricity is 0.165 CAD you’re very much in the same boat with a 2.6 ratio. Most heat pumps should be able to beat a 2.6 SCOP even in Canada.

So, sure, the study only looks at COPs and not at overall cost, but I think it’s not unreasonable to expect home owners to be able to divide electricity price by gas price and compare it to the SCOP of heat pumps on offer.

You’d usually run two or more units in a cascade/multiplex when requiring large amounts of power rather than having one giant unit. Means you can turn off one or more units entirely for low heating demand.

Too cold, too cold…

In Germany this will likely still be a controversial take in 2026. Our political right managed to shift this debate into ideology territory and a good chunk of people believe heat pumps are environmentalists’ fever dreams that don’t really work in cold Germany.

A split system AC is a heat pump in any context. So is a refrigerator. They’re all the same technology that move energy via a refrigerant’s latent heat by compressing it into a warm part and letting it expand into a cold part.

I hear that too. Not just politicians, there’s loads of experts lecturing on heating technologies. It’s just too cold in Germany for heat pumps. Doesn’t stop Scandinavia from getting them, granted, but in Germany it’s just too cold. No point. Sorry.

The number of registered cars has risen considerably, even in the last 10 years or so, and cars are getting increasingly bigger. IIRC registered cars in Berlin for instance has risen from 1.2 to 1.4 m in the last decade or so without the city expanding or gaining any meaningful parking space. Law enforcement is typically fundamentally carbrained, so they are lenient on such violations, thinking you can’t punish the poor people who have to park their car somewhere. With modern technologies it could be battled quite effectively, but it’s simply not politically desired in the Autoland. Instead, privacy and bureaucratic overload are made up as excuses on how it’s impossible to get a hold of it.

I think it goes past mildly on the concern scale. Car centricity in German cities already starkly reduces the quality of life there, and we still haven’t even collectively recognised it as a problem, instead it is still getting worse in 2023.

Opposed to running fossile fuels alongside renewables.

But that’s literally what you’re gonna have to do for 20+ years if you decide to go both ways and also build new nuclear plants. Put all your budget into renewables at once and you instantly cut down on the fossil fuel you’d otherwise burn while waiting for your reactor to go online, all while you’re saving money from the cheap energy yield which you can reinvest into more renewables or storage R&D to eventually overcome the requirement to run something alongside it.

average cyclist can sprint to over 30 mph

I’m on the fitter end of average cyclists and I certainly can’t reach 30 mph without a gradient or massive tailwind. In normal conditions an average cyclist can reach 20 mph under quite a lot of effort, not much more.

In the EU, ebikes are limited to 16 mph and I think that’s plenty to cause lots of accidents with elderlies not being used to such speeds. 20 mph e-support limit is quite fast, but it’s still fine I guess.

I mean, it says cybertruck parts, not the whole thing including assembly. Certainly possible for some manufacturing processes under given conditions to produce parts with ±0.005 tolerances like laser cutting or precision CNC machining of small dimensions. But it’s obviously completely unrealistic given that most parts for a car will be of large-ish dimensions and stamped, injection molded, cast, forged, extruded… none of which lends itself to IT grades better than 10, far away from talking about microns.