Yet, exceedingly rare to see fires from this
You just answered your own question. The techniques for running gas lines into houses and hooking them up to furnaces are very refined at this point, it can be done safely.
Yet, exceedingly rare to see fires from this
You just answered your own question. The techniques for running gas lines into houses and hooking them up to furnaces are very refined at this point, it can be done safely.
assembly@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I guess my question was more about the “why” for gas lines. I mean it’s a lot of extra effort to put them in place and maintain them when we already have electric coming into the houses.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 day ago
Oh, probably because it's cheaper and more efficient.
If you wanted to use the gas in a gas power plant to produce electricity to run an electric heater, there's a bunch of steps where energy gets lost. The turbine and generator isn't 100% efficient and the transformers and transmission wires lose energy along the way to your house. Whereas burning something directly for heat is nearly 100% efficient, the only waste is whatever heat gets carried away by the exhaust. Which isn't much with a modern high-efficiency furnace. I've got one of those and every once in a while I knock icicles off of the exhaust vent outside when I pass it. They use countercurrent exchange to keep all the heat inside the house.
assembly@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ahhhh. That makes sense. I guess I had always assumed that it would be more efficient to have one centralized “burning of the gas” event to create and distribute electricity than numerous individual burning events to create heat but it makes sense that due to the efficiency of just converting gas to heat directly it would be more efficient.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 day ago
There are some cities that do things a third way; they have a centralized facility that burns the gas (or other fuels) to generate electricity, and then also pipe the heat out to the city in the form of heated water or steam running through insulated underground pipes. Buildings tap into those pipes and run it through radiators. That has the potential to be even more efficient because you're using what would otherwise be "waste" heat, but it depends on a relatively compact city to avoid losing too much heat while sending it through the pipes. I understand this is not uncommon in Eastern European and Russian cities. I'm not familiar with the details, though, so if you want to know more about this I'd recommend Googling around a bit.
GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca 20 hours ago
This is no longer correct. We have heat pumps that can be more than 100% efficient, even air-sourced heat pumps in -30° weather. There are still many places where this will still be more expensive than a gas furnace.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 20 hours ago
I don't know how you're measuring efficiency, but a heat pump with greater than 100% efficiency lets you build a perpetual motion machine. That's not possible.