Asklemmy

43898 readers

1127 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

123

Do you have a Heat Pump in a cold climate? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 10 months ago by spacecowboy@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

60 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Looking to get some anecdotal experiences from someone living in a cold climate using a heat pump as their main source of heat.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, district heating is very common in Scandinavia. We're pioneers in the technology.

Here in Stockholm, we have a wide variety of heat sources, including natural gas, biomass, geothermal, air-source heat pump, and trash incineration. We even had nuclear heat at one point. Some cities also have factory and datacenter waste heat. We also have systems that use winter lake water for cooling in the summer.

[–] stewie3128@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Speaking as USian, this sounds amazing.

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 1 points 10 months ago

It's very nice. The best thing is that most of the heat is generated inside electric co-generation plants. They take normal combustion power plants and send the turbine waste into the district heating network for better efficiency and free heating. Basically achieving over 100% efficiency.

Wikipedia says about half of swedish homes are heated with district heating, with 580 networks nationwide.

I believe some cities and universities in the US have district heating, most notably New York City, but much of it runs on old school steam pipes instead of the insulated water pipes we have in Scandinavia.

I do think this is something that requires more density than most American suburbs have, unfortunately. Single family homes just don't have the density to make district heating economically viable unless they're close by to row-houses/apartments. You only see district heating in cities that have at least some apartment buildings here in Sweden.