321
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
321 points (99.1% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5237 readers
469 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I like pedants. Is it correct that they're not necessarily equally efficient in both directions? "Air conditioner" to transfer heat away, vs "heat pump" to transfer heat in? Even though both are heat pumps.
Sort of... It's not so much down to it just not working as good at transferring heat, because the rules of thermodynamics applies... moving heat is moving heat.
But the devil's in the details. If it's below freezing the radiator will frost up and won't work very good. But that problem is solved by temporarily reversing it to heat of the radiator to melt the frost off of it. These systems do this automatically. Freezing temperature is 273 Kelvin, so there is heat outside even when it's below freezing so there's always heat that can be pumped, but there are limits to it.
You don't want to be dependent on a heat pump as the only source of heat for your house. But they build electric heaters into many models to handle those conditions. But obviously on really cold days that it needs to supplement the heating with the electric heater it's not going to be all that efficient, because you're running an electric heater on those days.
But most days it's not going to need to turn on the electric heater, and on your cool spring and fall days it won't even need to defrost. So when you consider it over the course of a year, the heating cost is way lower.
Thanks! I like you space cowboy.
High pressure refrigerants are making the temperature differential higher, so the need for resistive heating is going down.