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Cake day: April 6th, 2024

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  • Heat pumps easily exceed 2.5 COP. More like 4 in the UK climate. And gas isn’t 100% efficient either. But yeah it’s a wash or can be more expensive to heat with heat pumps where electricity is really expensive. It helps if we all conveniently ignore externalities like pollution and carbon too.




  • Maybe the study was more robust that this article suggests, but this doesn’t tell me anything. Humans are amazing at regulating our remperature via sweat, so I have zero doubt that normal healthy people will have the same internal and even skin temps wearing different color clothing in different conditions. If the group wearing e.g. dark codlors just sweat X% more to compensate, we can’t draw any conclusions at all. Clothing is complicated, since airflow and moisture retention matter significantly, but we know for a fact that lighter colors reflect more energy than darker colors.


  • 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.