Comment on Anyone else notice this??
CouldntCareBear@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks agoPretty sure heat pumps have higher maintenance costs as well.
Fire is dirt cheap, that’s why a good chunk of the world still uses it as their principal source of cooking and heating. They’re not doing it for the vibes.
Hear pumps are great, they have many advantages but cost is not one. Hopefully that’ll change.
Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
Not saying it’s for free once set up, that would be silly. I just like fair comparisons. 🙂 I don’t concur though that it’s more expensive though.
Heavily depends where you live of course, but in Western Europe and many other “western” nations wood / lumber has become awfully expensive with no indication of it changing, so newer homes are most likely more financially efficient to use a heatpump (especially if you’re able to also afford a few solar panels). We don’t have to fear week-long outages either (even the extremely unlikely case of a national outage like in Spain is fully resolved within 3 days), so even if you don’t have some solar panels and a small battery to power the pump the likelihood of you ever needing a fire to warm up in a new building (which are well insulated) is absurdly tiny. And those pumps really don’t need a lot of power.
Given costs for lumber and regular professional cleaning and maintenance (again, depending on where you live) I’d assume a fireplace with chimney to be at least equally expensive if not more, at least in countries with no easy access to lumber and proper regulations in place (so most of the “developed” countries, assumably). If you have proper quality studies to prove me otherwise please go ahead, it’s all just opinion so far. The only ones I know are comparisons between either heatpumps and classical heating solutions, or comparisons of CO² emitions.