this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
374 points (99.5% liked)

Canada

9726 readers
539 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] exasperation@lemm.ee 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yes, but that's why heat pumps in this country are typically paired with auxiliary electric heat.

Yes, and although it's not very efficient to have auxiliary electrical heat, that's a small percent of the overall year.

If you live in a home that hits -20C for 20 days per year, that's really cold! But you'll probably need the heater on for about 180 days per year at that point. Putting up with less efficiency for 20-30 days per year is still a net gain if the other 150 days of heating makes up for it.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I mean, a resistive electric heater is still ("just") 100% efficient.

[–] exasperation@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yeah but if some direct combustion of a fossil fuel is cheaper than electricity, then the actual dollars per unit heat will be cheaper with a fossil fuel source.

[–] 872XXE@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Cheaper, but less efficient. Fossil fuels have a efficiency < 1.

Question is, what’s more important for you: money or environment…

This is not the whole story because not every heating day is equally cold. I have a high end cold climate heat pump in Colorado (which works great btw). I use about 1/3 of my total annual heating energy in January, despite heating for >6 months of the year. I'll use 10% of my annual energy budget for a long weekend if its -10F, and that's all heat pump (I don't even have backup strip heat). It would be 20% if i was using electric resistnace for those 4 days. Electric resistance is really not great, so folks really should get the best heat pumps they can that cover the coldest normal days. It's fine to install strips as a true backup but you're going to have some very high bills and high carbon if you're using it 20-30 days/year. If its hydro/nuclear power you'll still come ahead on carbon but that's not the case everywhere.