Hi! So I didn't really explain _why_ getting a service upgrade is a headache. In short, your utility often (but not always) needs to replace the wires that go from the transformer (wherever that may be) to your meter box, and then from the meter box to your panel. In addition to being a lot of work, it might not always be possible. I talked about this and some other issues over on Connextras if you'd like to take a look. ruclips.net/video/C4cNnVK412U/видео.html
Getting of UNnatural gas is Very important. It also leaks methane like crazy… Heat pumps are Great! Can be used with geothermal or just FTX, where it takes energy from the ventilated air.
Another snag is grid upgrade costs. Over in WA those are passed along to whoever is requesting that latest service upgrade. It’s easily another 20k for a utility company to place / upgrade a transformer in addition to any normal upgrade costs
100 amps is… 24 kW, right?! Our heat pump uses 6,5 (simple heater) plus 2,5 kW (compressor) for a 180 m2 house in rather cold climate… 1 m snow on the lawn since Xmas… -20C frequenty. With geothermal, the simple heater would almost never start. We had 20A 3-phase, around 14 kW. Upgraded to 25A, 17 kW, as we have two BEVs and a 16 kW PV array.
My father was an HVAC technician for a good 40 years. His number one gripe was always that people never really insulated their homes. So when he rebuilt his current home they stuffed the cinder blocks with insulation, stuffed the walls with blown insulation, and filled the entire crawlspace above the home with a mix of sprayed and blown insulation. That house is always a perfect 74 degrees, even when it's freezing outside or boiling hot in mid august. Insulation goes a looooooooong ways towards being comfy and saving power. =)
@@astang1072 Wife and I just bought our first house, but we're already fantasizing about doing a custom build in a few years and going all out; airtight barrier, mitigating thermal barriers, insulation as far as the eye can see... it'll cost a pretty penny but will be so worth it.
Ever so slightly lowering the video exposure at 26:08 when talking about lights dimming under load is exactly why this is one of my favourite RUclips channels. The commitment is just outstanding.
@@davidbarnes452Lol I've learned when it comes to the internet, anytime I think of something to say, it's already been said by someone else at least a year ago.
The worrying thing for me with iot is that they have an annoying tendency to suddenly gain a subscription model. Can't imagine how much of a nightmare it would be for something this integrated to have that happen.
Also, what happens if the company goes defunct or the standard changes? What happens when the board in the panel fails or becomes obsolete? I might put a smart distribution box downstream from my breaker box but my breakers will be old-fashioned electromechanical breakers.
this WILL REQUIRE a subscription as SOMEONE has to PAY for the "cloud" service and all the ONLINE servers ETC AND the programmers to MAINTAIN the software AND patch bugs and vulnerabilities that ANY software package will have
Well, if the panel can still be controlled manually, the software is open sourced, and it does not require the cloud to function, I would be fine with using it as they cant force you into a subscription and you aren't locked into needing an internet connection to use it.
Yup, that's why when I "smartened up" my thermostat, I went with a Honeywell EIC. It's not as slick as some of the newer stuff, but it is not phoning home and doesn't open a security hole in my WIFI and I don't have to worry about whether a company pulling the plug on a server will kill my ability to control my heat.
A lot of the problems with electrification are problems for regulation rather than for technology...and that's the problem. We don't have the political will in the USA anymore to resist business interests with government regulation, and so not only will electrification be extremely painful here, it will also come with a lot of problematic riders like subscriptions, fees, and service charges.
Span sounds like a great idea. The concern that I have is that almost every single IOT thing ever invented becomes it's own walled garden. So we end up with 60 different companies all running proprietary software to monitor these things and its impossible to switch something out or make easily compatible extras to work with it that aren't from that one specific company. It would need a level of standardisation to ensure any model or brand can work with any other model or brand.
Plus the number of times that an IoT company went bankrupt and then their devices became useless through lack of servers or support is a huge mark against them. Open source (if you can code anyway)
Home Assistant is the solution in my opinion. If you are willing to get "down and dirty" you can integrate almost anything into it, from ZigBee devices to smart cars.
well if that blow your mind, this fact, may actually, course bran damage, your could by kitchen fringes that ran on Gas too, with flames and all that stuff that goes with gas burning?
Thank you for even mentioning apartments. I've lived 24 of my 34 years of life in multi family units and I sometimes feel like writers and video makers on this topic forget other types of housing exist.
Annoy your apartment owner to switch from the current option to electric, they are the ones to annoy for that task, there are also individual panels you can hang of your balcony, you would have to ask the owner for permission to use those as well though.
Credit where it is due, by merely being a multi-unit building, it is inherently more energy efficient even if you're burning stuff. Heating for example. The common areas like stairwells are ekstra air based insulation, and the smaller surface area to volume ratio means slower heat loss overall. Water heating, you lose less heat/energy to innactivity with a range of ages and occupations and lifestyles in the same building. Where in a single family home the times that one family aren't using the water it is cooling down without being used, in such a building someone else is likely to be using it, so you have less re-heating to get it up to temperature due to cooling while unused. And it is also likely to be a larger capacity reservoir of hot water, leadnig to yet another case of smaller surface area to volume ratio, meaning said energy loss due to the cooling of the water is even smaller. Finally, by its very nature it is more likely to already be serviced in a way that adding electric dryers even if indvidual ones (bad, should communal ones) or whatever is not a problem.
@@sylkatesI read it in the opposite sense. It seems to me that the original comment was saying that higher-density living units are better. (As was explained in a further comment, there are many positive energy efficiencies that you get with higher density.)
Playing engineering games like Factorio and modded Minecraft got me really obsessed with the concept of electrifying entire systems, gradually switching everything to solar and wiring everything together and setting up the battery storage and all that is so satisfying. I look forward to doing it for real someday
The only things I learned from modded Minecraft is that flowers are the best technology, forbidden knowledge is cool and blood sacrifices are perfectly okay
In Taiwan, Hitachi sells a minisplit that also works as a water heater, it simply uses a separate condenser to heat the water tank up while it’s cooling your room. Pretty interesting product
We’ve had this in Australia for years and they suck at heating water. The Instant Hot Water gas heaters work great and are very cheap because they don’t store any water in a giant tank when it’s not required.
Yeah it's a shame there's not that many of them in North America. I think LG Therma V is mostly commercial.. Taco System M is another I heard of that recently came out that might be a bit more residential. I think they're still far more expensive than generic heat pump water heaters like Rheem ProTerra and the like, but they do have more perks and likely more efficiency in the summer due to the compressor being outdoors. Edit: SpacePak apparently has some interesting A2W solutions as well.
I am an Estimator that works for a regional electrical contractor in the northwest Oklahoma region. I went ahead and ran a few hypothetical price estimates through my estimating software based on the scenario that you outlined in your video of using a SPAN panel to automatically manage power distribution with just a 100 amp feeder. Here is what I got: Let’s say that you had a 100 amp panel in a 1700 sqft, 50 year old house that was using a gas range, gas water heater, and gas furnace (I see this all the time). If you decided that you wanted a panel upgrade so you could move to all electric the panel upgrade alone, with off the shelf electrical components, would run you about $1400.00. That would replace your 100 amp 30 space panel with a 200 amp 42 space panel. If you add the feeder upgrade, which would most likely be necessary, that would add about $950.00 if the meter base was located within 10 feet of the panel. This might also have to include fees from the utility company to upgrade the feeders on their part. After you have a larger panel you could opt to then install new feeders to your appliances. A new range feeder would run about $1300 if run through an attic and it was within 50 feet of the panel. A new water heater feeder would be about $350.00 if it was within 15 feet of the panel. And a new Furnace feeder would run about $1100.00 if it was within 25 feet of the panel. However, if you decided to install a SPAN panel in place of your 100 amp panel without a feeder upgrade it would run about $6,500.00 assuming that the panel could be purchased and delivered for $3500.00. From what I can find this is a low estimate. With this new panel you would still have to upgrade all of your appliance feeders but you could avoid upgrading your panel feeder. The SPAN panel specifically may not be the solution for automated power distribution control at the moment but I am sure if these kinds of panels come down in price they could be an option. Also, if these prices feel absurdly low to you that’s because they are prices using northwestern Oklahoma material and labor rates. If you were in New York City just multiply these prices by 3-4x.
I'm curious, wouldnt the labor be the same between upgrading the panel size vs replacing with the SPAN panel? If so, why is there the large cost increase with the SPAN unit vs. part cost?
I would be worried about the longevity of the embedded computer system in this panel because looking at modern major appliances with expensive microcontroller boards cost a lot to begin with but if the board goes bad, it's just easier and cheaper to replace the whole appliance than to replace the board. The way this panel is built as well, inconveniently, the SPAN panel foolishly puts the computer board BEHIND the breakers instead of beside it. Also, I would want a system like that to use off the shelf components like a Raspberry Pi or ATX or ITX PC with free and open source software for these duties, effectively reducing cost and ease of repair. Also, so the panel, with its "smart" breakers to operate like the passive breakers in conventional load centre/service entry panels.
@@WJCTechyman I doubt products like raspberry pi would pass any regulation. It's not like your internet router at home. My best guess is that SPAN chooses good quality electronic components and tests their products thoroughly so they don't get a bad rep of low reliability and high maintenance. But yes, concerns raised in comments are all legitimate and we have a long way to go.
@@know1care Rasberry pi's are just boards with chips and they are highly reliable...its the same thing that would be put into any other instrument except with a vast amount of capability.
One thing to know is the Span breaker box starts at $4500 (not including shipping and installation), which is more than the complete cost of an upgrade to 200 amp service.
Lovely, that's four times more, than my gas and elecricity costs for a year, and ten times more than the electricity bills for a year (note: our utility prices are currently heavily subsidized).
@@asdfhun , panels last 20-30 years, typically. I agree it's too expensive for most people (especially since upgrading service is cheaper), but it's worth thinking on the scale of decades not a couple years.
Yeah these things are very pricey, and you do have to do some number crunching to decide which, if any, are going to be beneficial. If you can upgrade to 200 amp service for less than $4500 then great, but it'll be way more than that for a lot of people depending on whether the existing lines running to their house from the street can handle that (and how far from the street their intake is if those lines need replacing), whether the street box itself can handle that, the local cost of equipment and labor for doing the installation, etc. If you look at @asdfhun's response though, they sound like they're doing an "its way too expensive!" knee-jerk reaction take. Yet at the same time, they also state it would pay for itself in 4 years. (Of course that's just the panel - they'd need to change all their devices as well so the total cost will be much more, and may not be justified if the dollar cost is your singular concern. Again, they'd have to crunch the numbers.) But also keep in mind, you don't have to do _everything_ all at once. Start by checking your attic and see if simply blowing a bit more insulation around will be beneficial. If you're running R5 and you can push it up to R20 or higher at moderate expense, that in itself may save you quite a bit of money over the course of a few years. Windows can be expensive if yo have a lot of large ones that can only be "fixed" by replacing them, but doors are often easy: A lot of time you can significantly improve your doors by just adding some cheap weather stripping around the edges. Once all that's done you can start looking at replacing appliances. Again, you only need to worry about doing so one at a time. A heat pump is a great start because, despite the implication from the video, you can often just bolt it on and continue using your existing gas furnace as the "emergency" heat source rather than replacing with resistive. After that is kind of up in the air. The next-most-viable upgrade option is going to depend primarily on your usage patterns and the local cost of gas vs electricity. If gas is more expensive you'd probably want to replace your kitchen range (induction stoves are particularly efficient) as that's probably using the most fuel given you typically cook more often than you do laundry. If electricity is more expensive for you, you could try something like the dryer (or maybe even that furnace which should no longer be running too much after the heat pump is installed). But in that situation you might be better to look at pausing the appliance replacement and considering some solar panels and/or battery system before adding more electrical load, just so you aren't paying the higher grid prices when you do finally get around to switching the remaining appliances. There's a lot of options and pathways. The smart panel is probably one of the last ones you'd need to worry about (ie: once enough things are electric that tripping the main breaker starts becoming a real concern). The main takeaway is that its OK and even better to think about and take action in steps rather than trying to do it all in one fell swoop. (Unless you're in building a brand new home.. if you're in that position then just do it right the first time and save everyone as well as the planet a lot of hassle and expense in the future!)
you've got to think that with greater uptake the prices of those sort of smart panels will reduce over time. They're very new tech, it's to be expected they are a premium price at first
@@emma70707 but do you truly believe a smart system will be operating for 20 years? That the service won't be discontinued by the company? I doubt even the flash memory in the controller is rated for 10 years.
I love that you made this video. Thank you! We have a 100amp feed on a 70 yr old mostly electric home. "Mostly" because our furnace has natural gas backup heat for when it's too cold for the heat pump. AC/heatpump - 30amps/240V Oven/Range - 50amps/240v clothes dryer - 30amps/240v level 2 car charger - 30amps/240v That's 140 amps of power total across my 100amp service feed. Yet, we've never had an issue blowing the main breaker in this home and we don't skimp on our power usage. The clothes dryer and EV Charger share a circuit via a UL certified 30amp smart relay that prioritizes the dryer and allows the car to charge whenever the dryer isn't running. Our 50amp oven has never run at full load. It's often pulling 1-4kw instead of the full 12kw it's capable of drawing. We've never needed to have all 4 "burners" set to high while also running the oven at 500 degrees F. It's not because we can't because we absolutely could without an issue. It's really because we never have a need to....ever...which includes cooking for family during holidays. The highest load I've ever noticed using our whole-house energy monitoring system was 16kw which is still only 66Amps / 66% of the capacity of my home's main feed. It's a non-issue solved by education and knowledge. For us, upgrading to 200amp electrical service is just a very expensive several thousand US dollar convenience tax that we don't need to pay.
Great video. one thing we need to DEMAND from start ups like Span and our governments is standardization and open sourcing of these new smart parts. I don't want my house to stop working cause the company that build my panel goes under and turns off their servers and/or stops supporting their product. being that panels can be in place for like a 100 years and IOT companies can fold in like 2 year this is critical for long term adoption.
ya it's pretty bad i had to subscribe to Maytag to update our washer.. also our relay on our washer was shot on a board. issue was our warranty was useless because no one come out here to repair things so we had to wait 4 months for a new board Sears was the last company out here that came to repair things
climate change is a hoax though... other wise explain why they're not recapping leaking methane wells several million of them are leaking.. Not a single one
I grew up in the 80s in Eastern Washington near the Columbia River, and I thought all-electric homes were just the way it was everywhere. I later learned that our cheapest-in-the-nation power, produced by our dams, was the reason for the widespread adoption of heatpumps in our area.
I am in a similar situation but western Washington. Washington’s hydroelectric dams have given us great experience that other states need to learn from. As you said the all electric house is reasonably common. The transporting of electricity is another one. We didn’t get much choice where the power was generated compared to where it was used. We are really good at moving the electricity from Snoqualmie Falls to Seattle. So when Bonneville power administration did a huge amount of wind, getting that electricity to Spokane and Seattle was nothing new for us. But most other states just put power stations 20 miles from their big cities. So when you tell them they can make a ton of solar electricity but it’s 200 miles away they freak out. Their engineers have literally never worked that problem.
Also from eastern Washington State. Hydroelectric yes, but also Nuclear Power. I built my home long ago before electric HVAC and stoves became reasonable to use. So my house uses gas. And thank god for it. My power bills are half what my neighbors pay with newer electric HVAC/stove homes.
Whatever the cheapest utility is in the area makes the most sense. In southern California, natural gas is cheap, the basic bill can be as low as $13 per month. We have lots of gas appliances here because it makes the most sense. Electricity is the most expensive utility by far here. We have some apartments that are all electric but they are typically utilities included in the rent price. I would not want to live in an all electric home in California, the monthly bill would be as high as a mortgage payment.
@@bpark10001 I'm not comparing my energy costs with someone from Wisconsin. I'm comparing my energy cost with my next-door neighbors. They have new all-electric houses which they put in because electric power is cheap around here. Even so, they pay twice the amount I do because, even if electricity is cheap, natural gas for high energy uses is about 80% cheaper. $200 for electric heating, $40 for gas. I have this financial advantage because I live in an old house that was not built to the modern standards. I understand that it is a little counter intuitive, and it may be the product of my exact geographical location, but electric heating for 1) HVAC, 2) water heaters, 3) stoves and 4) clothes dryers...is not always the cheapest choice. All four of these energy hogs in my old house are gas, becuause that is the way they were built 40 years ago. It was the best choice then, and are even a better choice now.
Unless I'm missing it, a huge limitation of SPAN that to me puts it in the "useless lockin" category are (a) no local API (b) no open integration, like Home Assistant which of course needs that API, and (c) it's a phone/tablet app only. I'm sure the control could be hijacked, but IMO anything like this needs an option for full local control. Using a base infrastructure control system with with lockin/lockout is a hard no go to start. (Just as a casual example, I'd probably add a button mounted in devices like dryers that could be "override priority" that set low priority devices as the highest -- when you really need it right then, and without having to juggle things in an interface. And also building in more complex scheduling and feedback systems...you could build your own system for having devices schedule their own power use based in predictions and human activity.)
It's very DIY right now, but there are several GET and POST endpoint available locally and a local method of generating an auth token. There's a lot of info in the thread on the HA forums titled "Integration with Span?", including interaction with some SPAN employees.
@@nasonguy I'd be shocked if a bad capacitor or a tin whisker doesn't take the electronics out before 10 years is up. I just wouldn't trust something as important as my main electrical service to a "smart" device unless I was sure it would fail dumb when the electronics die instead of failing dead.
@@disjustice I love the idea, but I'd REALLY hope if something went wrong it falls back to being a normal breaker. I like the idea of more control over items but I'd like a failure mode to revert it back to a dumb device vs. taking everything with it.
Even beyond the fact that most IOT things are fundamentally poorly designed systems, the fact that you're supposed to be okay with the utility company just saying "Nah no electricity lmao think of the planet." absolutely does not sit right in my moral view. Like - you are providing a service for which I am paying you, mind your own Fing business.
Cost-wise, the Span panel costs as much as an electrical service upgrade in my area, and that was going from a 60A pushmatic service panel to a 200A traditional breaker box _and_ moving the meter outside.
Hi! I had a Span panel installed with my ground-mount solar system last summer, and yes I am one of those NERDS. I wanted to clarify one thing about the Span panel, at least in its current phase. Earmarking breaker priority is only done with battery energy management and is not implemented to manage grid power. It will only be used when grid power goes down and you are forced to extend the life on your battery backup. I have solar but do not have battery backup, and I cannot even access the priority page on the app. I am hopeful they will figure it out someday but as of today you cannot do what you stated with Span alone. Now, I do have direct access through Home Assistant and can manage this through custom automations, but hardly home user friendly.
About thirty years ago, my father installed a load controller into our panel that sounds similar to the electric management device you described in this video. It had a simple interface box that was mounted inside the house and showed which devices were currently enabled and disabled, along with the number of kilowatts being used by the house. It also shut devices off based on a preference order that could be programmed by the homeowner. The electric utility charged both based on overall kilowatt-hours used and peak kilowatt usage during daytime hours (between about 9 A.M. and 9 P.M.). This device helped us save quite a bit of money during the very hot Phoenix Arizona summers.
You ought to prioritize stove over HVAC. House will maintain temperature for a while. And you wouldn't want to be denied the ability to cook, or have food come out undercooked because the oven shut off halfway and now you don't know exactly how much longer to cook something. Pretty unlikely either the stove or HVAC would get cut off either way, but that's how I'd do it.
I was thinking I would probably give washing machine for example quite high priority as I wouldn't want it to suddenly stop in the middle of a program.
Can confirm. We have a small farm house, all electric, 100 amp service. Everything works great, and when we cook the baseboard heaters in half the house don’t run because the oven and stove kick out more heat than the heaters.
@@MauryMarkowitz What if it's 100 degrees outside and you already run your air at 76 to save energy and you don't want the expense of replacing all this stuff just for the inconvenience of your house being a sauna when you are cooking?
People like to buy keen new junk, rather than save and invest. This kind of thing is the male equivalent of a passion for marble countertops and kitchen remodels.
One extra thought on throttling your resistive heat- if you reduce your heater's output by 20 amps to run 20 amps of stove, your house is still getting 20 amps of heat! In a much more localized way, but if anything that's good, because you're probably in the kitchen with the stove anyway. Dryers and water heaters have this effect, but to a lesser extent as much of the energy goes away through a duct/drain.
assuming your home doesn't have a very poor insulation quality, it may be better to just leave your heater on a lower temp all day and throw a shirt/sweater on when you're not cooking than try to throttle it specifically, just from a practicality standpoint
While not common, there are heat exchanger systems that pass incoming water to a water heater through a heat exchanger connected to the waste water drain pipe, thus recovering a majority of the out going heat in the water going down the drain when taking a shower. Not so good for baths since the hot water is drained after the tub is filled. There are also heat exchange, or energy recovery, systems for clothes dryers that warm the incoming makeup air into the laundry with the dryer exhaust air. My home has an energy recovery ventilation system for the incoming and outgoing air, and a minisplit for heating and cooling. Very cheap to operate. A lot of this comes down to cost and the homeowner being willing to invest in these systems. It is also much more expensive to retrofit than to include in new construction. I believe building codes need major upgrades for new construction to increase overall efficiency, especially commercial buildings. I also believe that buildings should be required to be brought up to new codes as part of any resale. As an electrician who has crawled into a lot of attics and underneath a lot of floors, and worked in a lot of walls, it always amazes me how many buildings still have little to no insulation.
@@ayaderg The heat will still be on and throttling on/off (at full effect) independent on the temperature it's set to(within reason). You would still risk the heater turning on just as you are using your stove.
I just wanna say your videos scratch a very specific part of my brain and I appreciate you so much. I love having you on in the background of basically anything I'm doing because I do genuinely learn some neat stuff by listening. 1 note though: more heatpumps
I think a lot of why this is hard for people is that they only think about most of the these appliances when they're broken down. If your gas furnace breaks in the middle of winter, running a new wire to switch to resistive heat may not be simple and you need to fix the heat ASAP. Just dropping in a new appliance that uses the existing power/fuel hookups is a lot easier when you're in a hurry.
I think most people don't want to spend $10-20k and throw away perfectly good appliances and breaker panels just to make themselves feel better. It would make more sense to throw up some solar panels and actually contribute to the energy mix rather than burn loads of cash becoming more of a siphon on it.
@@mark.audacity Be careful making sweeping statments, its not happened to me, but nor does power(I have had strangely reliable power for most of my life, but its mostly buried in my area), but it is possible, heck, the day im writing this comment there is currently a Gas outage in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. There is a lot of components that can fail in a gas network(Compressor stations), and a lot of Electricity is used to process both Nat Gas and Petrol/Car Gas. I would arguably say its not more reliable and has about the same risks for outage.
Another excellent video! One problem with the smart breaker panel temporarily switching off breakers to keep the house under the 100A limit is that some devices don't like to be *hard disconnected*. For instance, the EV car charger: when re-connected by the smart panel, the charger will be in its default "standby" mode (0 amps) and not resume the previous charging (20 to ~50 amps) and you may end up with a uncharged EV car in the morning if not paying attention to it. This could possibly be remedied by firmware programming. But its probably not programmed like that for kitchen cooking appliances (microwaves, toasters, waffle iron, etc). That is unless the appliance uses old spring timers and heat dials! But almost all of the mid- to higher-end appliances use touch screens with microprocessor control and will be in standby when its power is reconnected.
Yeah -- I don't think a smart panel is necessarily the answer. It's more that we need to get on with developing standard protocols for power management control interchange, that isn't tied to AN app, or even AN company.
Absolutely love your videos. The little details, like the dimming of the video when describing the thunk when the heat strips are activated, make these so fun to watch!
Your channel convinced me to get a dual head mini-split system for my house, and it's been great so far. Kept my poorly insulated house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. I have a very small home, but I've never had an electricity bill more than $180
Aren't efficient ductless mini-splits awesome? Had ours (triple head) just under 2 years and it's been a great upgrade. We are also about halfway through a full renovation (which includes upgraded insulation everywhere), can't wait to get it all finished!
@TheSpaceCoyote82 He actually does explain the cons… The grid is being expanded constantly when it comes to energy production whether that’s solar on homes/businesses or new power plants. SMRs will eventually evolve into the ability for us to have nuclear power that is cheap and highly adaptable.
@TheSpaceCoyote82 The only thing that runs without electricity in my home is water heat (pilot light heats a thermopile to keep gas valve open). And maybe the Internet for about an hour (UPS).
I'm skeptical that a Span panel would cost less to install than a service upgrade from 100A to 200A (at least in most cases), especially in areas where electric distribution is aerial (on overhead wires, rather than underground). It's a cool option, but it seems like it's not (for most users) going to be less costly than upgrading the panel and the feeder wires.
And it's worse in every possible way. Your load panel isn't where you want complexity and imagine you want to charge a car or something, too. At some point you just need more watts. This video really feels more like an ad than anything else.
The environmental cost of smart circuit breaker sounds lower than everyone upgrade to 200A. The maximum total electricity load to the electricity grid will be lower. Even if electricity energy can be stored in battery then be released to the grid for high load, battery charge-discharge is far from 100% efficient. But I agree, the subscription model of most "smart" stuff and their "cloud" / phone-home tendency are putting people off.
@@pkuras The electricity companies need to take care of potentially higher peak energy use. That peak energy use can occur and will occur. It doesn't matter the new peak is in fact 120A or 150A. Higher is higher. Factor in that the cost of electricity generation does not line up linearly with the amount generated because of infrastructure issue etc, I hope you get what I mean.
@@billyswong sure, no argument there - as electricity use increases over time (for all reasons), the grid will need upgrades to accommodate higher usage. This has always been true, and the adoption of EVs is not unique in this regard, though it may result in a faster rate of increase in demand. But for one or a thousand electric customers to upgrade their service from 100A to 200A by itself has zero bearing on actual usage. There is zero causal link between a service upgrade and an increase in electric usage, and your original comment implied as much.
This is something I would like to hear more on. I live in an older house with really old windows, but I'm not keen on replacing them (partially just because I just think they're neat). So other forms of improvements would be interesting to me.
@@Descriptor413 when i moved into my 1905 Queen Anne style home in 2008 I had a window professional give me an estimate for all new wood-clad vinyl. He was honest enough to say that my original double-hung sashes, coupled with tight-fitting aluminum storm windows, would be more energy efficient than replacing everything with new vinyl. I'm sure he was right. My house isn't drafty and utility bills are low, despite the size of the house.
@@Descriptor413 Last week I had 4 windows replaced by Pella. One was a big 6'x3' single pane window. The other three were the cheapest vinyl windows you can find. After all were replaced, you could immediately feel the difference. The house is staying much warmer than it did before. Especially good timing with the arctic vortex this week. On the other hand, it cost $8K. So it gets pricey fast. If I'm being honest, it probably won't pay for itself in dollars for a very long time. But I will be more comfortable and feel less worried about running the heat or AC. Next up full energy audit.
I have to say the stove should always be above the HVAC in priority. I won't feel a short lack of HVAC, but I want the stove to always work when I want to use it. I grew up in an all electric home in rural Canada (switched our heat from oil to ground heat pump when I was a teen) and never tripped the main breaker.
What about the concern of potentially fucking up something by essentially "unplugging" and "plugging in" a potentially high-value item to turn it off/on while it's drawing power?
@@grafzeppelin4069 My laptop's battery and four power divider's switches broke when I flicked my breaker to pull a wire. Good times. Yea, I don't want switches breaking on their own, and I surely won't ever run unprotected wires to any of my electronics again.
Ya cooking is more important than keeping your pipes from freezing and ac who even need that anyway but your stove if it was gas could heat your house enough to keep water from freezing and eat but electric stove will be insane to leave on and open I guess that's why all restaurants have electric stoves what gives that nice grill marks right and I am sorry not attacking ya you have your opinions and can set whatever you want in your home for priority just depends on your situation I guess this is my opinion
@@Koogz406 Since you were so polite in not attacking the OP with your passive aggressive comment, I'll make mine similarly polite... Bluntly, you're being unserious. A heated home heated to 18C cannot drop to below freezing in the time that it would take to cook a meal. It doubly cannot do so while the meal is being cooked by a heat producing device INSIDE THE HOME. This is the whole point of the video. The heat is not shut off indefinitely, it is only shut off for a short time to manage the load. I have no idea what you're even off about on restaurants?
Hi, Italy here. I really enjoy your video! I find it quite amazing that your "smallest" electric service is 100A. Here in Italy the standard household electric service is around 14A, single phase 230V. A normal oven pulls between 10A and 13A, and a washing machine or an hair dryer around 10A. A dishwasher is around 10A. Gas cooktop and gas combi-boiler are the norm. AC it's not present in most of the houses. It's normal for us to manually switch off or wait to use an appliance when something else "power hungry" is running. For example if the dishwasher is running and i've to use the oven, i stop the dishwasher or wait for running it.
That sounds really underpowered to me. Speaking from Norway, the standard for an apartment nowadays is 40A, 3 phase 230V. But if you're unlucky you could even find 25A, single phase. It also depends how heating is conducted. Many houses and apartments have electric radiators, which can draw a lot of current. It is not unusual for breakers to trip if too many radiators are on at the same time. 14A single phase sounds like you have to walk on egg shells all the time.
@@Eduard2004 In our apartment in spain the main circuit is protected by a single line 20 A circuit breaker (MCCB) with c tripping charateristic . We have been using all all electric appliances since the 90s, including conventional electric heating. The only time the MCCB tripped was using the electric heaters, while cooking a multi course meal using the oven and several plates of the stove.
Tl;dr Use heat pumps for everything. That solves your problem too. Yes, same here from the Netherlands, with 8 (or 17 nowadays) kw being the norm. The upgrade to 17kw 3P costs €250. But then again, our heat pump dryers consume up to 1kw in practice, and the heating of the house at max maybe 3-4kw. Keep in mind that we often use the same heat pumps for water heating as for warming the house. And as long as you have a way to dynamically limit the car charging, you will never have any issues, even if you are full electric. A whole video about how to "cope" with a 24kw instead of 48kw sounds so foreign to me. My historical max in a full electric house (no car) is 9kw for about 2 minutes.
I live in France were things are a bit different. When we bought our house it only had 6kW which was fine, since it had a gas boiler and stove. We have replaced all that with a heat pump and induction stove, and we updated the connection online to 9kW, we also have an electric car. A technician is coming soon to upgrade us to 12kW, which should be fine. Listening to Americans talk about 100A/24kW as small seems hilarious to me.
I got a span and span drive (EV charger) installed. Pros: everything you said. It is a really awesome product. Cons: cost. $10,000 for installation not including the panel (another $5,000). IRA has incentives but this is still way too expensive. Also there are smart features when our battery kicks in but there is no way to schedule circuits for time of use for instance. That feature may be coming but is not part of the mix. If you are putting in solar + storage and considering a critical loads panel and you can afford this, Span is an excellent choice. It will get even better with software upgrades. If you are just interested in electrification, there are way cheaper ways to accomplish this including just getting mechanical timers on your water heater, putting notes on your dryer to not use during certain times, etc. You can do all that you need to do for a few hundred dollars.
@@tomtheplummer7322 if corporations paid the tax they should be then none of us, including our old pal Technology Connections would have to pay any 🤷♂️ I'm not going to cry about someone saving a few grand when corporations fuck us on the daily.
I'm from one of those areas where all-electric homes have been the norm for all my life. I knew about gas stoves, furnaces, and water heaters; but I had no idea before watching this video that there are gas-powered clothes dryers.
I live somewhere where gas is the norm for those three, and I hadn't heard of a gas powered tumble dryer. Granted, not a lot of people have them at all.
This video reminds me of those old disney tomorrowland TV show episodes where they excitedly told you how technology available today or soon could easily help us improve our lives or do really cool things. I wish we had more optimism like that (considering all the awful stuff in the world that makes futurism seem depressing). Great video!!
sadly, "think of the convenience of controlling everything from your phone!" turns into "don't protest the government or your [bank account / home] gets freezed"
We live in Peoria, IL and took advantage of that solar program "Illinois Solar For All".. We had 35 panels installed for free on our roof and have not paid for Electric since, even in winter months. We do pay around $40 a month for natural gas. We have a EV charger at around 32 Amps, to charge our car at night to 80%. I'm enjoying your instructive videos, like the dishwasher, (even though we don't own one.) Since your also a Midwesterner, that caught my interest. I was a handyman for 35 years, so I'm still learning after retirement. Thanks, Steve!
With recent electrical power outages (brownouts and blackouts) being in the news, I am very interested in your take on backup power generation/storage. I personally have a whole-house natural gas generator system that allows my home to continue functioning as usual during electrical outages.
Maybe fifteen? Twenty? years ago, it was in many places cheaper to run your house off a IC car engine running on natural gas, hooked up to a generator, than it was to get electricity off the grid. This required using the engine exhaust for heating, of course. It essentially gave you high efficiency natural-gas based heat plus free electricity. Naturally this all relied on cheap gas and an environment where you needed the heat, so as soon as the weather gets warm enough you would need to switch back to the grid.
@@RyanDiederich How is it not relevant? Blackouts happen everywhere and most houses have natural gas service. I live about as far away as you can get from California and the house across the street from me has a whole-house generator that kicks in as soon as the power goes out.
I'm very glad you discussed the code and load calculation considerations - the smartest idea in the world is valueless if it's not legal to install in your jurisdiction! The idea of intelligent breaker panels is fascinating, and I can absolutely see it being a game-changer for electrifying certain older homes; your take is absolutely on point that it's almost never the case you legitimately *must* have all your appliances running simultaneously, so if accepting that saves a homeowner a few thousand dollars (or more) when replacing their gas appliances (motivating them to go fully electric) it's totally worth it. On a related note, I live in a multi-tenant dwelling and would love to install an EV charger in my parking space, but there's currently no easy cost-effective way to do this. Our meters are located in the electrical room also in the parking garage, but the panels are up in our units so there's no simple way to "split off" a circuit at my meter for the charger. Apparently there's a new meter collar device called a ConnectDER that could in theory be used for this purpose, but so far it's not a legal option in my location to install these (simply by virtue of being too new). I'm hoping they become acceptable at some point, because it would really change the calculus around the costs to install proper per-owner EV chargers that are simply and easily billed to their existing account for anybody with a similar building arrangement.
Have you checked out Orange or Plugzio for your EV charging needs? They offer a solution without directly tying to the meter that gives landlord or tenant options for monitoring charging costs.
@@jdlutz1965 There are plenty of companies like this offering various "managed" charging solutions, and the reality is they're all a terrible deal because the monthly "management fees" form a significant fraction of the cost of the electricity in a typical residential dwelling with a "one charger per owner/stall" arrangement; Orange for example looks like it charges $20/month per outlet, which translates to 750km of range in my EV per month "wasted" on unnecessary fees. In most cases, a building looking to deploy charging for a bunch of the owners (when you otherwise can't tie it to their own meters) is better off just deciding on a fixed average rate (adjusted based on measured aggregate usage) that approximately covers typical power cost and just charging that to owners directly themselves (no middleman required). It might be slightly less "fair" but when half the money isn't going to some other company to "manage" the solution you still come out well ahead. Still, this kind of thing requires buy-in from all/most of a building to bother installing which is currently still a hurdle with uptake of EVs low in multi-tenant dwellings. The whole point of a solution that hooks directly up to a tenant's/owner's meter is that it _avoids_ these management fees entirely - you pay nothing other than the incremental per-kWhr cost for your charging. Particularly for those who don't drive a whole lot each month, this can be a huge savings and it's also just a huge reduction in administrative burden and grief not having to deal with managing a whole other system, especially for smaller buildings (ours is only 18 units).
Another option that is relatively conventional but could be a solution to your dilemma is a meter/breaker combo panel. I'm not sure if you have a gang meter but if each meter is in a unique housing, could employ this method that provides a disconnect and some extra breakers in housing that holds meter.
@@poisonpotato1 Revit is easier in a lot of ways an I am familiar with it, I just chose to use AutoCAD for this project, it's just easier and faster to just draw rather than model
My wife and I purchased a home recently and I REALLY wanted to get a SPAN panel (agree on the nerdiness of it). We had to do a service upgrade because of the age of the panel (yes, a nightmare AND expensive) and it was just way too cost prohibitive at the time. Not to mention they didn't have an installer in our area. My wife and I plan to build a house in the future and a SPAN panel or something similar is definitely going to be in the budget. Something that I was told by our installer that will give some of the monitoring features is the Sense Home Energy Monitor. This wouldn't give the circuit level control, but it apparently lets you see how you are using power.
I think you'll be surprised to know how many homes still have 60 amp services. 😅 My parents have a 60 amp service, electric hot water heater, and electric stove. The way the house is set up, it does not work very well, and they trip breakers semi-regularly in the winter. When the furnace is runs the fan, the electric kettle trips the breaker for example. Their previous home was also 60 amp service, but with gas everything but the dryer (I've literally never knowingly seen a gas dryer). And that was never a problem, despite having two buildings with full kitchens, etc., on that 60 amps! The way power is managed and distributed is definitely very important to how well this works. I used to use my welder at my friend's house, again 60 amp service, never ever tripped a breaker there even turned all the way up, and again the appliances with the exception of the furnace were all electric.
@@WeedMIC Japan is officially 100 (though it can get to 110), while the US is 120V so you do lose a bit there (and also makes a lot of appliances perform much slower).
That SPAN panel you mention is cool, but it's $4500 just for the panel. I upgraded my main panel myself with a bit of help from a friend for about $1000. It's not very difficult to do, especially if your panel is a surface mount.
A much cheaper option than Span is an EV charger with load management (for that load) capability. Usually that is enough to fit all else in a 100 A panel. It works by monitoring the main feeder current and adjusting accordingly.
@@ehhhhhhhhhh If you hired an electrician to do it - yes. Costs will vary. But like I said it's pretty easy to do. I was without power for a few days and borrowed a generator from a friend.
I really appreciate this kind of content as someone who moved from the sweltering south to the frigid north. I’d love to see more how to live in the north content - your humidifier video was extremely useful this winter
I would love a video about different refrigerant types e.g. HFC/propane and their pro's and cons and environmental risks, I think it could be a great addition to your heatpump videos. P.s. Thanks so much for all the great informational content you provide us with, it is so valuable 🙏.
My biggest concern about going all-electric is grid reliability. Here in Michigan recently, winter storms knocked out power to nearly one million people, many for over a week. Thankfully I did not lose power, but it has me thinking twice about switching to a heat pump right now. I can run my furnace on a portable generator, but a heat pump would need something much larger (and more expensive).
Brian Gerst I install heating and AC units in Alabama. I have a 4 ton heat pump in my own house. Last summer I removed a very good, very functional gas furnace because of the price of natural gas. I replaced it with the heat pump. Last winter we had a gas bill that went all the way up to $400. That is WHY I replaced it. This winter I actually had a power bill of $600 . And as I said, I am in Alabama. I couldn't imagine how HIGH the bill for it would have been in Michigan. KEEP YOUR NATURAL GAS. If nothing else, keep a couple of gas heaters as backup. I am an HVAC tech of almost 20 years.
This is a much bigger problem than people realize. Power plants are being shut down because of the fight against fossil fuels, and they're not replacing them with anything. They've simply been reducing the capacity of the grid, borrowing electricity from neighboring states when their demand exceeds their output. This has left us in a precarious position because the overall capacity of the grid is decreasing as demand is going up. There's nothing wrong with using electric cars and appliances, but it's incredibly foolish to increase electricity usage and decrease production at the same time. This is already leading to an increase in rolling blackouts, and it's going to keep getting worse.
Staying on natural gas doesn’t protect you from that. The pipelines that bring the gas to your home require pumps to run. Pumps that utilize electricity. That was one of the problems that happened in Texas, there was no power to run the infrastructure to bring to fuel to power plants to generate the power needed to run the system. In theory keeping a wood or coal stove, or keeping a gas tank would work, though the former two are relatively inefficient at heating homes and produce a lot of particulate matter that’s not good for your health (though still preferable to dying by freezing), gas tank would be better, though that is a potential safety hazard in that if there’s ever a leak and a fire, your house would quite literally explode (which still should be rare enough that it shouldn’t happen). Alternatively, battery storage and home renewables can provide at least some basic power even if the grid collapses, or a mini-diesel generator if you want to be old-school about it. Finally it’s usually a good idea to pressure your state politicians to ensure that the state’s electrical grid isn’t going to fail during critical weather events, like what happened in Texas two years ago. Writing to your representative helps let them know what issues you’re worried about, and relatively few people do it, so it can be a decent way to have an outsized influence.
I live in the Buffalo area so blackouts in the winter are just expected most years. I have animals that need higher temperatures to survive and I currently live in a mostly-electric home because that’s what was available. Not having a gas stove to be able to heat water for them in the winter is one of my biggest worries in this house.
Here in Italy the default is 230V 3,3kW, less than 16A, on one phase. You can upgrade it (or downgrade...) and even if up to a certain range it's all made by software (they send a command to the smart meter, it's the device responsible for breaking if you go beyond your limit) it will have a one-time cost and also your monthly bill will be a little bit higher. If you want more than 6.6 kW (or sometimes 11 kW) you have to switch to multi-phase.
That’s neat, but average American home uses at least 11kwh per day. And that’s not even with electric vehicles or going all electric as most American homes have dual fuel.
@@scallywag1716 yes, you have indeed a higher demand that justifies the higher maximum, because of your quite big houses too compared to European ones. But I can tell you I use something like 6000 kWh per year with a 230V 5 kW service, so a little less than 20 kWh per day. However our demand is spread across the day because our main use is HVAC both in winter and summer. We still use gas for hot water and cooking (100 smc/year) Before 2022 I used gas for heating too while using HVAC just in the summers. Back then we had a 3.3 kW service and we used 4500 kWh per year. But we used something like 700 smc of gas per year 90% of which in winter.
Other italian viewer here! yeah having 100A available is pretty insane to think as an European where the standard is 3.3/6.6 KW max! Electirfication seems like a no brainer with that much of overhead available
@@mirkomilova most homes in the USA are setup for between 6kw-48kw. A big reason we use NG for heat especially where I am is gas compared to electric, gas is significantly cheaper cost wise per year. Electric heat would cost 3x as much(at least compared to my 95%+ efficiency furnace)
Here in Europe they always said they want us to go electric. Then, with the current GAS crisis they raised electricity prices (and electricity taxes) way more than their gas counterparts. Plus we have price caps that only protect people who use gas to heat and cook. If you use more than your allowed quota for electricity you pay much more because the "government price cap" isn't applied to you even if you use almost no gas (or zero gas). (I live in The Netherlands). It's nice of you to bring the technical side of it for people who might benefit.
And that craziness hit France as well despite the fact that 70% of the electricity produced in France is nuclear and another 10% hydroelectric. In other words there is no real price crisis, it's scripted.
I live in europe, a 200A (or even a 100A) service is mindbogeling here. I have a one phase, 230V 35A service. So about 8KW. And that is without a gas supply. I had a heatpump installed about 2 years ago. When I'm not home (so only fridge/freezer, modem is running) my entire house uses about 150-250W. When I'm home with the heat running, its usualy about 1kw depending on the temperature outside. The only time its even close to the max 8kw is when the heatpump is heating the tapwater. wich draws at most 3kw and for desinfection rises to about 6 but thats maybe 15 minutes a week. The heatpump is capable of loadsharing, and when I buy an electric car, the charger will need to be able to do loadsharing to. But 99% of the time it wouldn't even need to. The only time I have over 4kw running through my panel for hours is sunny days, when i'm not home. And thats solarpower going out :)
Yeah insulation can be crazy expensive and replacing old windows too. But I keep seeing folks saying we need to save energy, yet they tell you you don't need to change your insulation. It's just ridiculous. During peak hours, I turn off the heating in my apartment to save money: the temperature drops from 22.5C to 18C in a matter of 2-3 hours (when it's -25C outdoor). It's even worse if it's near -40C outdoor, it drops to 18C in about 2 hours. I don't care as I'm not home when this happens, but the days I am, it gets really uncomfortable quickly. I let you imagine how cold it is near the walls if it gets to 18C at the thermostats. The proper way is to insulate. Then, if the enormous energy saving isn't enough, it's way easier to turn off the heating for a few hours when you're house is properly insulated.
In Europe it is a pretty common to use a device called priority relay, it is a relatively simple device that can disconnect a load if it would exceed a total allowed current limit. It can be used to disable the water heater when another devices are running.
Never heard about such a device in Denmark. We have 3x48A @230V in our apartment. Houses tend to get 3x64A @230V. There is loads of power. But prices have increased.
Just as long as the government can't override the relay and turn off your stuff without your permission, something that I feel is inevitable since politicians are control freaks.
@@trex2099 3x48 or 3x64A @230V, geez! Here in Hungary, the norm for homes is 1x32A, or 3x16A, but plenty of homes have 1x16A @230V. Including our house, and if it's not crazy enough, we only have a 16A breaker on the input of the power meter. On the output of the power meter, there is a single 10A (ten Amperes) breaker, and the entire house runs on that, because there are 60 years old aluminium wires inside the house in some rooms. There is a separate, remote controlled power meter for the water heater, though. But we learnt that we can run either the washing machine, the oven, the microwave, but only one of these at the same time, otherwise the 10A breaker might trip. But after the oven is preheated and cycling on and off, and if we use the microwave at reduced power, two of them can work together, because thankfully the 40 years old 10A breaker is slow, so it can provide 16A for about 10 minutes before the thermal cutout kicks in (maybe even 15-20 minutes in cold winters, because it is outside).
@@kttk4564 I've seen those priority relays in quite a few Finnish homes, most cases I've seen it's just a simple case of preventing Sauna from going on at same time as Kitchen Stove. On the use cases mentioned in this video, you could just do same but vs. the car charger. They're simple things that allow people to have lower service level.
Here in Finland it has been common for over 50 years to have mainly electric heating and appliances, maybe one or two wood-burning stoves to give more heat during the coldest months (we hit -35C just this morning) and heat up your sauna. Gas has been a thing in the past, like early 1900s, in bigger cities.
And for decades we have used simple contactors to turn off loads like space heaters when something like the sauna stove is heating up to avoid tripping the main fuses. Also many car chargers and geothermal heat pumps come with current sensors that you install in your breaker panel and they will dynamically limit their power draw if the total draw of the house is nearing the service limits.
@@dave655467 They get the uranium mainly from Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia. They've got multiple suppliers and long supply deals so there shouldn't be a sudden price hike.
@@dave655467 I don't understand your point? You're saying that nuclear power plants consume more energy than they produce? I'm an electrical engineer so I am fairly sure I know how electricity is produced here and thanks to nuclear we have more production than consumption in the country so unless several nuclear power plants go down at the same time, we're fine.
@@dave655467 Well I know the situation is worse in some parts of Europe, but Finland has enough nuclear for our own needs. Coal is only about 10% of the electricity production in Finland, oil is only the last resort if the grid is about to go down for example if a big power plant gets disconnected from the grid. Anyway electricity will be cheaper this winter than last winter for sure.
Biggest issue in Ireland and UK is looped supply. Where one incoming is shared between two or more houses. In many cases you are not allowed to add an EV charger or heat pump/air conditioner, because the usage between the two houses will exceed shared incoming supply cable.
@@charlesbridgford254 Both houses could not draw 60A at the same time for long, without damaging the shared wire. EV and heat pumps are more likely to have high current for a long time, than electric showers or cooker.
@@nua1234 EVs usually draw 32A for several hours, but I think heat pumps are overestimated. Mine draws about 8A steady state, 16A when working hard to warm the house up.
I’m only 5 minutes in, Alec, and I’m sure you deal with this: gas often works despite electrical outages. I can run my gas boiler*, range, and hot water heater even when the power fails. *I can run circulator pump and thermostat off a generator.
@@vasiaswolfram3113 When it comes to heating a house, a heat pump is closer to 400% efficient, though that goes down if the temperature difference is really large.
My entire life we've lived in an entirely electric home here in Northern Indiana. It's meant chopping and stacking a lot of wood from our woods to heat during the winter to save money. But we have the woods and the energy, might as well! I love chopping wood! And a nice fireplace is an awesome way to heat the house
@@grafzeppelin4069air pollution. When a number of homes in a dense suburban neighborhood are burning wood, particulates go up and it hits air quality.
I really like things being electrified. I have an induction stove, and an EV. However, we aren’t going anywhere without nuclear energy, so its good that it is making a comeback. Especially where you live, in Illinois, you guys are already doing very well with clean electricity due to your largely nuclear grid.
I'm glad someone mentioned nuclear. Anyone who's serious about energy will admit how inherently limited solar and wind technology is, and anyone who thinks we can rely on either (or both combined) to entirely replace fossil fuel burning is incredibly naive. The only solution is to stop being afraid of "Chernobyl events" and embrace nuclear. This might come as a shock to some, but nuclear reactors that are constructed today are WAY more sophisticated and safe than those made by the corner-cutting Soviets back in the day. There is no longer any reason to fear nuclear.
Your video on heat pumps helped me decide to get a heat pump when taking out my old oil furnace. I also have a mini split for my bedroom thats not ducted into central heating. No issues so far with either of them. With my new solar panels I can see a baseline 2.1 kw/h draw and an evening spike to approx. 5.5 kw/h when I come home
I'd just like to add in to the list of gas appliances in a house that gas based refrigerators and freezers are still a thing. A thing that may be cool enough for its own video if you haven't done one yet. Apologies if this is covered further in.
@@eDoc2020 I know some people use those on their non electrified cabins in the middle of nowhere. But newer seem those used id grid power is available at all.
Came to see if anyone mentioned that. And yeah, they're mostly in RV's, but I do know at least 2 people that have them in their house, but not as their main fridge.
Adsorption refrigeration requires little heat or energy to start the refrigeration cycle, maybe a large candle flame, a 30 pound propane tank lasts for months.. I have seen these appliances in off grid wilderness homes where electricity is solar, water turbine driven, wind driven generators. Lighting is all low voltagae, low current Light emitting diode upgrades from older RV 12 volt direct current bulbs. These led bulbs use a tenth or less of the power the present 120v ac lights use, and many already have been swapped over to led style, so lighting is not the demand on the power...it's the work horse designed appliances like cooking range, electric element heating appliances (home spaces and water). The best heating fuel would be one that burns clean, leaves little or no carbon ... That would be hydrogen as one that can be generated from plain water..yes..plain water contains hydrogen and oxygen.. H2O...how do we separate them is another science. Check it out..
@@Barracuda48082 Absorption refrigerators use much more energy than typical compressor-based refrigerators. And 12v LED bulbs are similar efficiency to 120v ones, not that it matters because the power is low either way. The problem with burning hydrogen is there's a lot of energy lost during electrolysis if you generate it from water.
I'm glad you covered smart circuit breakers. I've heard of them a few years back, but haven't heard any updates since then. I hope we can get some open source ones.
Only way I'd even consider a "smart" load center is if it was capable of being managed entirely on-prem and the protocol was fully documented. I've had way too many idiotic fails with proprietary "cloud" services and won't even consider vectoring my home lighting through "the cloud", let alone much more essential equipment.
the amount of logistics and planning you were able to devise amazes me. if only we had more creative people like you taking decisions; true and passionate engineers.
I just finished my house electrification today with a heat pump water heater. 2 weeks ago I replaced my furnace with an air source heat pump. Did all the work myself and saved a bunch of cost.
What heat exchanger u used ? Is it owned by you, did you install the system yourself, a community project ? Why u needed to replace the pump, more compacity needed ?
I hate my stupid hybrid water heater. Have to disable the heat pump in the winter or else the basement will get into the 30s. And I still don't see a big drop in energy usage even when it's in heat pump mode.
@@person749 I like the ones that have a separate evaporator that goes outside but almost no options for them in the US currently. Where the "all in one" units seem to make the most sense is warm climates where the water heaters are electric anyways, they tend to not have basements, and they have the AC on 80% of the year. In Australia I have seen people have their water heaters outside their house!
@@randomvideosn0where Can confirm. Where I grew up in Australia, the government was paying people to replace their electric water heaters with the dual heat-pump types. Mine was outside on the side of the house. Pretty much no one I knew except for rich people had basements either.
District heating (and maybe cooling) would also solve a great deal of energy need as well. I live in downtown fake London (Ontario) and we are on district heating that is provided by a co-generation plant. I know some places now take waste heat from industries and use it to heat homes. However like you said, lots of homes are not built for upgraded electrical/heating systems right now, so retro fitting with smart systems is a good solution. I think a climate scientist said it well with "there is no one true solution, we must take a portfolio approach to our energy needs and climate policies."
One big issue I see with the idea of smart-panels to manage loads like that is most houses seem to be wired somewhat randomly. If i need to make sure the freezer is running I also need to have the master bedroom, master bath lighting, half of one bedroom, and some random lights all powered. If I need to keep the reptile tanks and aquariums running, I also have to keep the refrigerator, half the kitchen outlets, a hall outlet, and a dining room outlet all powered...which actually is something we have been getting changed (not cheap due to finished basement) because its problematic running on a generator if you are near max and the fridge goes into defrost overloads. I also really don't like the idea of cloud connected critical things. One thing comes to mind is how will it fail if internet goes out? Will it fail everything-on and overload? Will it fail and not turn things on/off keeping state? Will it default everything on? What does it do after a power-failure, especially if there's no internet?
TC seems fairly measured and well through through on most things, but it seems like he's got a fairly large blind-spot for the GLARING ISSUES with this new "IOT" fad. Too blinded by the flashy gizmos to see the cracks in the foundation.
I also don't get this device. Replacing a 100amp panel with a smart panel often will have similar costs to just upgrading the service to 200amp. Alternatively, better than a panel shutting off circuits would be a device that measures current flow then communicates with the appliances to either not run or run at a reduced capacity. Mainly car chargers, water heaters and maybe it could tell a clothes dryer to pause for a bit. A breaker panel is a safety device. Let it just be that.
@@Coconut-219 to be fair I think I also am more risk-aware having an unstable ISP I have learned the hard way how many things puke if they can't phone home. Also with trying to segregate them on VLANs I have learned just how inflexible most IoT is expecting a single flat subnet and no security controls between. Many manufacturers don't even disclose what ports are required to have it work at all.
There are far worst issues. If the company is Venture funded what happens if they go bankrupt? Or they decide a new business model and all of a sudden your breaker box now requires $20/month because the know it is hard to swap out. There are business side things that are legit risks and IOT is a graveyard of them.
since i found your channel i wanted to improve my home. the idea of fully electrifying the home is nice, but i have a lil problem. in my country, we had two country level blackouts in less than five years. depending of the zone, it can take even a whole month to get back electricity. there are still a lot of things to improve everywhere unfortunately.
The *thunk* had me laughing out loud. Great editing. Also, just for "how it is done elsewhere". Here in Belgium a high load connection is 63A@240V (15120 VA) and a typical home gets 40A@240V (9600 VA), but it gets complicated when you go for three-phase. Personally I have 25A@400V+N for example which is three phase 240V with 400V available between the phases, the math gets kind of funky with sqrt(3)*400V*25A but that becomes 17300 VA. Which is in between the typical US numbers of 100A@110V (11000 VA) and 200A@110V (22000 VA) The only headache is that you need to keep the legs balanced and not exceed 25A on any side. Now, the main big change being done here lately is that people will get billed extra based upon their 15 minute rolling peak load. This is to incentivize people to reduce their peak load (and the cynic in me thinks it is also to save on electric grid upgrade costs)
@@radishpineapple74 Which is interesting when you realize that even a small car has 100 horsepower or around 74 kW. So your car engine could easily power your house and the neighbors and heat them both from the waste heat. Which would be stupid environmentally and economically but interesting nonetheless.
@@timgerk3262 For electric on-demand water heaters it is used (as those need a LOT of power). But the normal boilers are typically only 1400 or 2000 watt and just use regular 240. In my house it is only really used for the stovetop/oven combo. It is more of a headache than an advantage really. But its not something easily changed and it was like this when I bought the house. Because as mentioned I really had to pay attention to balancing the phases. (don't put all heavy consumers on one phase for example, figure out the stovetop really only uses 2 phases to get 400V and use the third one for all plugs in the kitchen so if you run a heavy duty appliance on those + the stovetop the whole thing doesn't overload And yes electricians, I know it doesn't really 100% work like that, three phase gets really confusing when figuring out actual load on the phases when you have 400V consumers) It might be advantageous in the future for the electric car charger. But with the capacity charges they now introduce you want to charge slowly anyways so it really isn't that much of an advantage. The main reason it was often used is to save on copper wiring. as with 400V+N I can get 17300 VA over 3x4mm² (15AWG) wires whereas 63A requires 2x10mm² (8AWG) or even 16mm² (6AWG) when crossing larger distances and that is for less overall capacity. (The earth is sourced locally and always in 16mm² here) Internally it is probably that way for the stovetop as well, by using three phase it can use thinner wires as 400V carries more power in less amps.
Sadly - unless we reach a point technologically where I can have my own fusion reactor in my garage - I don't trust the people in positions of power enough to not make... lets just say "questionable" energy policy & infrastructure decisions. *Look at the California EV trashfire - Now imagine that but for YOUR HOUSE.* I like electricity as much as the next guy, but we need more products that "just work" and a correctly-designed electricity infrastructure to handle them. Also its been said a thousand times, but the natural-gas infrastructure in the US is GOD-TIER and makes it essentially dirt-cheap to use gas for heating in most heavy appliances. That doesn't mean electricity is unattainable, that just means it has to be better than "mediocre".
I'm gonna add that if you have a forced air gas heating unit, ADDING an AC unit to it is a 1 day job for a qualified installer. We did this at our Townhouse a few years ago, and it was so nice to be able to keep the windows closed and avoid the noise of our neighbors across the driveway from shouting at each other.
I live in a single family home sitting on a concrete slab with a flat roof (i.e. no attic). Running new circuits is... challenging. I'll stay tuned for Part 2.
It's a little mind-boggling. New construction? Okay, maybe. Even then I'm not completely convinced. Ripping apart your entire house and throwing away working equipment isn't green at all. You'll spend significantly more energy doing that than you'll ever recoup, whether we're talking about out-of-pocket or some more ethereal concept like carbon footprint. If you like chasing house upgrade fads because it's your hobby, I think that's fine, but let's not pretend it's something else.
Woah! The full video felt much shorter than it was. Thanks for the well written content! I'm not a homeowner but I love listening to this type of information.
One of the big concerns I have is electromagnetic interference. Some of it is so bad it even messes with wi-fi. And vice-versa! Ask ham radio operators what they think about arc fault breakers which trip when you transmit. Thankfully some are getting better. BTW span is a cool product. (I am a certified installer).
My issue, as others have said, is putting all of your eggs in one basket. Look at how one bad snow storm decimated Texas, and people literally froze to death due to the electric heat going out in their homes. I'm sorry, but I'm a firm believer in having a diverse set of essential appliances to prevent that kind of disaster. Keep in mind, I'm up in North Eastern Pennsylvania, where we get slammed with winter storms and extreme cold regularly. I want a gas stove, and preferably gas or oil heating options as a backup. Even when the lights are out, I can still easily use a lighter as an ignitor or pilot-light. I also just prefer cooking with a gas restaurant style burner, but that's just a bonus. I have nothing against sustainable energy, but when our sh*thole country has proved time and time again it can't manage infrastructure due to deeply seeded corruption, I don't want to rely one one single power/fuel source. Perhaps a wood burning stove and heater would be perfect if I were in a more rural area, but suburban living doesn't leave any options other than gas or oil. Unless there's a way to create efficient at-home electrolysis, and run a burner/heater without blowing up your home, I foresee natural gas being around for a long time. Edit: I don't use natural gas with a blower, but good try.
I'm in South Western PA, so I don't have it as bad as you, but that was my thought. However, gas heating doesn't help you (unless you have individual gas burners in your house) because the blower still won't go. A combo of solar panels and gas would do it, but that's pricey. Plus, it is super cloudy here.
Except that there aren't many systems that don't already have all their eggs in that basket. My furnace burns stuff, sure, but it still depends on electricity to run the blower and power the electronics.
I want to see a Part 3, where you talk about Battery renew-ability, and how to rebalance battery charge capacitance; a way to re-enable your battery accepting charge; this can be done using a basic enough circuit, I think you could handle this amazingly, and it fits your second video theme nicely.
Excellent content, I am certainly convinced that it is not impossible to electrify a home. However I would raise two potential concerns that I have. First, homes with many occupants will have a difficult time manually limiting power usage, as simple as it may be for one person. It's not uncommon in my home to have the drier, oven, hot water heater, and A/C on at the same time, I would be concerned about inadvertently exceeding the limit. And second, I think your dismissal of the risks of IoT-controlled breaker panels is mistaken. There are indeed serious privacy risks, reduced serviceability, and dangers associated with placing essential functions of our homes in the hands of VC-backed tech companies. That said, I would seriously consider everything you discuss in my own home, should I ever have the opportunity (except the smart panel!)
I'm mostly sad that he didn't mention the cost of building and shipping the new appliances. All 4 of the things he mentioned are gas in my home, and 3 of them are less than 5 years old. I sincerely doubt the environment would be better off if I threw them out to get new electric models instead. It's weird because I could swear his electric car video mentioned the heavy toll of producing and shipping automobiles of any sort and advised us to just make sure our NEXT vehicle did better by the Earth rather than urging us to go get a new EV right away. I'm sure he didn't mean for the takeaway message to be "go buy new appliances right now", nor did it come off that way to me. But I am still disappointed that he didn't even mention it.
As an Australian, I assumed off-peak electric water heaters were common. Old systems used a clock in the meter box (breaker board) to disable the heater except during off-peak hours (sometimes with a switch in the house to enable it if you ran low on hot water). Some regions had mains signalling to turn waterheaters on and off.
As always - really interesting video and the concept of a smart breaker box is very cool! Looking forward to part#2!! It's funny - but until you mentioned it at the beginning - I did not realize that gas-dryers were actually a thing (I always assumed the only gas appliances in a house were the furnace/water-heater/stove). Where I grew up in southern Quebec/Canada - everything in our house was electric except for the furnace and water heater ...but these used oil and not natural gas. We used to have this large tank in our basement that Shell would top up at certain times of the year thru an intake pipe in the outside wall (you always knew when this had occurred because there would be a distinct smell of heating oil for an hour or so after the tank was filled). In the early 90s (after I moved out) my parents decided to switch over to an electric furnace and water-heater and the oil tank was drained/removed (I think there was a gov't incentive program at the time encouraging home owners to upgrade older oil-based systems to electric). I don't remember my family ever having problems with the old oil system...but I was happy when my parents decided to upgrade (i.e. you'd occasionally hear about old oil tanks corroding/leaking and all the problems that would cause....so it was definitely some extra peace of mind having the old system upgraded to electric).
My family home just went through a tornado and we and our neighbors were without electricity for a week. Thankfully, we have a natural-gas water heater and we did not lose gas or water service, so we were able to not evacuate, instead sheltering in-place, shower regularly, and clean up our home and community. I am thankful that we are not reliant on a single source of energy and only needed a gasoline-powered generator for short periods each day to keep our refrigerator running and a bottled-propane camp stove to cook meals.
A tornado is a rare event for individuals. Probably first tornado your neighborhood has seen in 200+ years. Including inefficient & dirty fossil fuel for the 1 per 200 year event is silly.
@@electrictroy2010 I don't have that choice all power lines are above ground with lousy poles. We don't deserve the ones of metal or concrete. Well I have a generator and my water heater is propane. Even if you have underground the substation is above ground. And can be knocked out. Hope that never happens. 73
@@electrictroy2010 It was a once in 25 year storm…tornadoes and straight-line winds are rare, but not once in 200…that’s just exaggerating to prove a false point. Power outages are common. From a few hours at a time to a day or two, especially during the winter due to ice storms and the spring due to wind events, natural gas is quite literally a lifesaver here. Electricity is not 100% reliable, but natural gas is. It would be better if we had all underground utilities, but that is cost prohibitive in established neighborhoods, and still wouldn’t make it 100% because most of our outages start at the substations and other mid-level distribution infrastructure.
I have one... I use it mainly in the winter, they work very well and are pretty cheap to run and the hot air blowing out goes through a water filter (to catch debris). This is awesome in the winter as it is also keeping my house warm (ie. Get twice the benefit at same cost). In the spring and summer I use clothes lines which cost nothing.
For the record I think you could probably create an outstanding video on the power grid and it would fit well in the series. I know it's a fine line to walk but it's something that maybe we don't talk about enough. I can respect your decision not to open that can of worms though.
I think that the issue with the power grid is that every states will take care of it differently. Not only that, but politics seems to get in the conversation as soon as you wanna build renewable energy.
"Stop extracting gross sticky explodey goup out of the ground!" And what? Extract rare rocks like lithium, cobalt and nickel to make batteries instead? These aren't renewable either.
@Technology Connections - Alec, this was an excellent video! You did a really great job of covering all the major points and addressing the common concerns regarding home electrification. And I say that as an architect who specializes in this topic and passive house design. Your argument for why 100 amp service can work was well thought out and reasoned. I can't wait for more in this series!
@@matsv201 remeber that our EU grid works at 220V, US at 100 if i remember correctly, we get more energy per A basically. Still here in Italy homes run with just water/home heating with gas and just 16A contract
@@8paolo96 No. Alec said for a 100A they get 24kW of power, meaning the main breaker is 240V. And 100A. Enormous amount of power. Where I live in Europe the "normal" amount is 32A.
Smart panels are neat, what worries me is whether Leviton and Span will continue to support their products in the future. If the adoption rate isn't good enough, Span does not have other product lines to support itself and could die. Leviton at least is a multi product company and can weather slow adoption better than Span but you have to consider the fact that you can still buy a breaker for a Square D panel from 1970 and a Siemens panel from 1974. In other words, Span is going to have slow adoption because slow adoption can kill the company and Leviton will kill a product line based on a business decision as panels are not their primary business.
Great topic! It reminds me of the time I rented an apartment that only had 40 A of total service. The breakers would trip if I had both window AC units on (it was 105 F at the time), and when we brought an electrician out to work on the birds nest of a panel, he just said "Nope." and walked away. It actually worked out, though, because I was able to get a high-efficiency fridge and only use one AC unit. That left me enough overhead that I could charge my EV to full every night on the 120 V service to the garage.
My house was built as entirely electric in the early 1970s, but with a *40A* (on 240V) service. This lead a previous owner to move to oil fired water heating and plumb the house for radiators - the old air plenum heating system cabinet got used for the fridge. I've have 80A service supplied so I can get a car charger installed but it'll be a while before I consider changing the heating; considering the boiler was only replaced a few years ago with a gas one.
@@joseamadorsilva7395 the oil or gas boiler cannot run without power either. Also with fully underground power distribution here, there are very rarely outages caused by weather events
@@cian87 some of the older systems can run manually or have a car battery backup for those times.. I used to work with a guy who owned a lot of rental property.. he said his biggest fear was freezing to death with fuel to use and an electric system that thinks it's safer if he freezes to death without it
a house I rented had 60 A service built in 1920s but I suspect its electrical was 1950s-ish by clues on the panel and I bet a good dozen houses on that block shared the same 50 kVA pole-mounted transformer that happened to be in _my_ back yard LOL
My opinion is that the public money should be used to due replacements in the areas where there is the highest gain. So that'd probably first be homes that just need a reversing valve. But also homes with upgradable service but without appliances or furnaces.
I love this type of topic on your channel(s)- but if you ever want to make a series for homeowners to optimize these things in a more step-by-step matter, please please do.
Great video! Thanks from Sweden. Ps: running a heat pump at -35 Celsius has not been an issue here the last 10 years or so (or so I thought), turns out it's just that the standard packages comes with the "backup heating" included, meaning a whole lot of consumers believe their pump works down to -40 degrees Celsius which they don't.. But then also they really do work fine at -40. 🙃
assume "backup" kicks in around -25 or so in Canada there are "mini split and built in airsource units that will heatpump down to -25 and ground source OR "watersource" units THAT WILL go down -40 OR LOWER
@@jasonriddell same here in mn; being in the middle of the continent we see some really cold air temps, which makes ground source ("water source" generally being against code now unless grandfathered in) way more appealing. Although I'll just keep heating with my wood stove. Good exercise year round, i have a very efficient stove so relatively much less pollution than in years past, carbon neutral because the trees sucked the carbon from the air in the first place... and free!
I'm in Canada and I have use the heat pump exclusively for heating to -5C.. Combo of electric heat and heatpump down to ~-18C and electric heat only below that.
People in the US assume heat pumps are like what went into housing in the South and border states in the 1980s. In other words, underrated for the home. There's a night and day difference between those and what they're installing now but so few people seem to know it.
thanks to your video on heat pumps, I got a ductless mini split installed, and it has changed my fiancé’s life. i’m excited to hear about heat pump water heaters.
Doing laundry often involves hot water and a dryer. I'm not sure placing the dryer above the water heater is the best idea. I'd almost always rather have access to a shower or cleaned clothes. It's a hassle but if I need to my clothes can sit wet for a couple hours (they sometimes do that now anyway.) In large houses with 3 or 4 kids this will certainly be a headache. In some houses a shower, an oven/cooktop, and dryer are almost always running. Obviously every house has different needs, but larger families use more power than smaller families do. I don't think this is a system/plan of action for everyone, but it's an excellent proof of concept regardless.
I don't know about newer dryers, but older ones certainly won't restart a cycle when power is restored. So in an underpowered scenario like what the video addresses, everybody using the dryer would have to be aware that they have to check on the dryer before it's too late in the evening. I think I would lower the priority of HVAC, put it just above the water heater at the bottom. It's the interactive things that require touching and tapping that need to be higher priority.
I was thinking a similar thing. Wet clothes can always be laid out or, in a real pinch, dried with the good ol' hairdryer and wear it damp method. But when I'm cooking, chances are I've been using hot water. Washing hands, dishes, and utilizing the hot water from the tap to make bringing a pot of water to boil faster are pretty much all guaranteed. I'd say dryer is likely the least important besides the car charger, and I might drop the HVAC a peg too just because my house is pretty well insulated and I can stand a 4 degree change in temperature a lot easier than a half-raw meal or a cold shower.
As a Norwegian, it sounds so foreign to hear you talk about the things i grew up with as something novel like this. I want to highlight how much easier everything is when it’s all electric! This is great, you can do this! 🎉 a couple of years ago furnaces became illegal here!
It's not really novel to go all electric in the US. It is pretty common in places where other sources are not available. Where other sources are, the issue is cost. Even at 0.10USD/KWh natural gas costs about 1/4 vs. resistance heating. Air source heat pumps are comparable to operate but cost much more up front. Ground source heat pumps cost less vs NG to operate, but installation is very expensive. Of course this varies by region. Also it isn't extra effort from the homeowner perspective. Most of the time it works in the background. The reliability between electric and gas or oil based devices don't differ greatly, so not much to be gained there either. IMO the major problem in the USA is that most people aren't planning to keep a home for life, so spending extra on better appliances and better design and construction (insulation, windows and air sealing) hasn't had proper focus historically. Better homes don't get enough credit when being sold. The improvements are largely hidden and ignored. That is getting better I think, but getting that return on your investment when building is difficult. As that mindset shifts, better products will be installed.
My parents' live in the United States. Their home was built in the 1960s. The address plate on the front of their house says "Powerhome", and it's illuminated by a bulb that has not been changed since the house was built. The plate signifies that the home was built to be an "all electric" home of the future, a novel idea in the 1960s. We could accomplish it then, and it stands to reason that with recent technological advances we can most certainly accomplish it now. Hoping we'll get up to those Norwegian standards.
Yes, I'm from one of those more primitive countries (the Netherlands), and looking at doing what's normal for you. Quite a lot of work, as it's still fairly novel... But I understand you also do underfloor heating with electric heat mats? Mine is water based... Ha det....
I know you said that you are referring to the American market. However, in my country we're going the opposite direction! We used to have an extremely reliable grid (one of the best in the world), but decades of neglect has caused the grid to become so fragile and unreliable that we're all forced to switch to "burning stuff". We've switched to LPG (a very clean version of gas) for cooking and plain old wood stove for heating in the three/four winter months we have. Our water heaters (geysers) are directly solar heated. The rest is still powered by electricity, but with many homes now using battery-backed up inverter systems - even in the city, where I live. PV solar is used for supplemental power and charging during the day. It's a weird mix of renewables and back to burning more stuff for cooking/heating.
Great video! I will add that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Replacing one’s A/C unit with a heat pump but keeping a gas furnace would allow one to use gas as the backup instead of heat strips. Since this backup isn’t used very often, you are still significantly reducing your carbon footprint while not going all in on electrification right away. This can be good in extremely cold climates where it can sometimes drop down to -30C or even colder. Note I said sometimes, when it isn’t that cold the heat pump can take over. A smart thermostat can also choose the energy source that is cheapest at the time, based on current rates and outdoor temperature.
Hahaha, he thinks it's a TV show for housewife people, US only, this is America, in Cuba he is ? Smart breaker you needed, is that replacing the A/C unit ? You did the transition, heat pipes, heat exchanger ? You did that all yourself, great job ! what energy sources you have, low power grid and heat pieps only, never needed any gas ?
You could but its one of those why bother because ng often has minimum service cost/fixed fees. So probably cheaper to just run electric heat on that one or 2 days you need it.
You need to consider the "social regulation" problem. Many municipalities forbid such gas furnace + heat-pump, or tax the crap out of you if they find out you are doing it.
RE:roger1818. Having gas appliances for backup purposes can be an expensive way to do things. Many utility companies have switched to a new system to scam customers. It's called a "customer" or "service" charge, which you must pay monthly regardless of how much power/fuel you use. As customers keep trying to use less and less power/fuel to be more efficient and save money, the utility companies keep raising the "customer" charge higher and higher to make up for it. In a normal house where you are using the average amount of power/fuel, the "customer" charge may be 20% of your bill. But when you are only using it for backup, you may be paying 95% of your bill for "customer" charge. Essentially, you are paying them for "nothing". Until governments wise up and quit allowing utilities to use this scam, energy wasting, billing technique, there is no incentive for consumers to reduce energy consumption.
My parent's house was built in the early 70's and was originally built 100% electric. After my father inherited the house from his parents shortly before I was born, they installed a coal stove because the coal was a lot cheaper than using the electric resistive baseboard heaters. They still use coal to this day.
When the government starts to force everyone into electric everything the price will skyrocket as the upgrades will be paid for by us from both our bills and taxes.
Interesting video. And I'd like to preface what i'm about to say by saying that I have a heat pump (two actually, Fujitsu, with a CoP of 4). I have an electric dryer (gas ones are also available in the UK but not so common any more) and I have about 5kWp of solar PV on my roof. Now that i've said that, I'm happy that I still have a gas boiler (heats the home and the water), because it costs me a third of the cost of using electricity to heat my home, even with the heat pump (they're ASHPs btw). I also have an induction hob, and a gas hob, I bought a combined one because on very sunny days I can cook for free. However, when it's not sunny, it's much, much cheaper to use gas to cook with. A unit of gas costs me about 5p per kWh. A unit of electricity now costs me about 37p per kWh. (That's 6 us cents and 44 us cents respectively). So since our energy prices (specifically electricity) have gone through the roof, all I can say is that I'm glad I did not rip out the existing gas boiler and gas cooker. I am trying. I do have both options. Just one is considerably cheaper to use than the other. Come summer time, we run almost entirely on electricity and for much of the time, for free. But there's no way i'm giving up gas any time soon.
That’s understandable, but that’s also very specific to the UK. In France gas costs about twice that and electricity is about half that, so it’s much closer. I have just installed a heat pump with a COP of 5, and it should be way cheaper than anything possible with gas. We have decided to even remove our gas meter to save approximately 400€ per year, yes it costs that much per year to have the luxury of using gas. No thanks.
I must say, gas stoves are a godsend when there's a power outage. When you have a gas stove and the power goes out, you can pretty much just go on as normal for the evening and wait it out. If you have an electric stove, sorry Charlie, you're going to have to go somewhere else for the night. Of the four typical gas appliances, I have the misfortune of having them all be gas _except_ the stove. Every time my power goes out (which is thankfully rare), I have go somewhere else. Meanwhile, looking back at my previous home (where power outages happened multiple times per year), I _never_ had to leave because my stove was gas. I'm interested to see the solutions for power outages presented in Part 2.
Counterpoint, if almost all houses run 100% on electricity that means higher demand for a more robust electric grid. Losing power for any significant amount of time here in Sweden is extremely uncommon.
If it's a short outage (1-12 hours), just have sandwiches or something else that doesn't need to be cooked. If long outages are a common issue in your area, either pick up a camp stove or stockpile a few MREs per person. Yeah, a camp stove is still (probably?) a gas stove, but it's being used FAR less often than your main stove is, so you're relying on gas far less often. And MREs aren't as memetically bad as they used to be - they also usually come with chemical heating elements, add water to it and it makes your food hot for you. A grill also works - it's just a really big and non-portable camp stove, after all.
The first thing I did after moving in to my new apartment was to disconnect from the gas grid. 😄 Power outages are extremely uncommon here though, so it's basically a non-issue. Induction stoves provide all the same benefits in terms of speed while not posing any of the potential health risks of gas stoves. Cleaning also becomes significantly easier.
@@blunden2 Yep. Unless you're prone to consistent and extended power outages (over a day long, several times a year) for non-disaster reasons (as those would interfere with gas as well) there is zero sensible justification for a gas stove in your house. In all cases beyond those VERY narrow ones, electric/induction ones will do just fine. Keep some food that doesn't need to be cooked (cereal, sandwiches, etc) just in case, and maybe pick up a camping stove or a grill as a backup in case of an extended outage.
@@synvila Also this is a good point yeah. More electricity means a more robust grid is *required.* Plus it's not like gas lines can never be interrupted either.
Hi! So I didn't really explain _why_ getting a service upgrade is a headache. In short, your utility often (but not always) needs to replace the wires that go from the transformer (wherever that may be) to your meter box, and then from the meter box to your panel. In addition to being a lot of work, it might not always be possible. I talked about this and some other issues over on Connextras if you'd like to take a look.
ruclips.net/video/C4cNnVK412U/видео.html
Appreciated!
Getting of UNnatural gas is Very important. It also leaks methane like crazy…
Heat pumps are Great! Can be used with geothermal or just FTX, where it takes energy from the ventilated air.
Another snag is grid upgrade costs. Over in WA those are passed along to whoever is requesting that latest service upgrade. It’s easily another 20k for a utility company to place / upgrade a transformer in addition to any normal upgrade costs
Fire good
Ughooga booga
100 amps is… 24 kW, right?!
Our heat pump uses 6,5 (simple heater) plus 2,5 kW (compressor) for a 180 m2 house in rather cold climate… 1 m snow on the lawn since Xmas… -20C frequenty.
With geothermal, the simple heater would almost never start.
We had 20A 3-phase, around 14 kW. Upgraded to 25A, 17 kW, as we have two BEVs and a 16 kW PV array.
My father was an HVAC technician for a good 40 years. His number one gripe was always that people never really insulated their homes. So when he rebuilt his current home they stuffed the cinder blocks with insulation, stuffed the walls with blown insulation, and filled the entire crawlspace above the home with a mix of sprayed and blown insulation.
That house is always a perfect 74 degrees, even when it's freezing outside or boiling hot in mid august. Insulation goes a looooooooong ways towards being comfy and saving power. =)
True. Blame builders for cutting corners and not putting in good insulation.
that's great if you never have to work on anything.
Just built my new house. A friend of mine quizzed me “What’s the cheapest heat? Insulation!”
@@astang1072 Wife and I just bought our first house, but we're already fantasizing about doing a custom build in a few years and going all out; airtight barrier, mitigating thermal barriers, insulation as far as the eye can see... it'll cost a pretty penny but will be so worth it.
@Zac Hansen insulation is fine. Spray foam insulation on the otherhand.. .you better hope you don't need to open that wall.
Ever so slightly lowering the video exposure at 26:08 when talking about lights dimming under load is exactly why this is one of my favourite RUclips channels. The commitment is just outstanding.
I came here to say this, but knew it my heart it had already been said.
A timestamp of 26:05 made it easier to spot since you did too good a job pinpointing the moment the exposure dropped, heh
and I thought that my laptop got into power saving mode
I was about to comment the same thing. Truly delightful. I half expected to hear a faint 50 Hz hum start too (or 60 Hz in the US I guess)
@@davidbarnes452Lol I've learned when it comes to the internet, anytime I think of something to say, it's already been said by someone else at least a year ago.
The worrying thing for me with iot is that they have an annoying tendency to suddenly gain a subscription model. Can't imagine how much of a nightmare it would be for something this integrated to have that happen.
Also, what happens if the company goes defunct or the standard changes? What happens when the board in the panel fails or becomes obsolete? I might put a smart distribution box downstream from my breaker box but my breakers will be old-fashioned electromechanical breakers.
this WILL REQUIRE a subscription as SOMEONE has to PAY for the "cloud" service and all the ONLINE servers ETC AND the programmers to MAINTAIN the software AND patch bugs and vulnerabilities that ANY software package will have
Well, if the panel can still be controlled manually, the software is open sourced, and it does not require the cloud to function, I would be fine with using it as they cant force you into a subscription and you aren't locked into needing an internet connection to use it.
Yup, that's why when I "smartened up" my thermostat, I went with a Honeywell EIC. It's not as slick as some of the newer stuff, but it is not phoning home and doesn't open a security hole in my WIFI and I don't have to worry about whether a company pulling the plug on a server will kill my ability to control my heat.
A lot of the problems with electrification are problems for regulation rather than for technology...and that's the problem. We don't have the political will in the USA anymore to resist business interests with government regulation, and so not only will electrification be extremely painful here, it will also come with a lot of problematic riders like subscriptions, fees, and service charges.
Span sounds like a great idea. The concern that I have is that almost every single IOT thing ever invented becomes it's own walled garden. So we end up with 60 different companies all running proprietary software to monitor these things and its impossible to switch something out or make easily compatible extras to work with it that aren't from that one specific company. It would need a level of standardisation to ensure any model or brand can work with any other model or brand.
Rule of thumb is never use any IoT device that isn't fully open source.
Plus the number of times that an IoT company went bankrupt and then their devices became useless through lack of servers or support is a huge mark against them. Open source (if you can code anyway)
Like, say... ZigBee?
Matter will fix this in the long run.
Home Assistant is the solution in my opinion. If you are willing to get "down and dirty" you can integrate almost anything into it, from ZigBee devices to smart cars.
Okay the realization that there are gas burning dryers really hit me out of left field.
I could literally have never guessed that would be number 4
I literally just used mine
I've used one. They are very fast. But super uncommon. Large towns or small cities may only have one or two models available.
well if that blow your mind, this fact, may actually, course bran damage, your could by kitchen fringes that ran on Gas too, with flames and all that stuff that goes with gas burning?
@@zoomzabba452 uncommon really?
Yeah it made me wonder what else they can have running on gas.
Thank you for even mentioning apartments. I've lived 24 of my 34 years of life in multi family units and I sometimes feel like writers and video makers on this topic forget other types of housing exist.
"other better types of housing" there fixed it for you.
Annoy your apartment owner to switch from the current option to electric, they are the ones to annoy for that task, there are also individual panels you can hang of your balcony, you would have to ask the owner for permission to use those as well though.
Credit where it is due, by merely being a multi-unit building, it is inherently more energy efficient even if you're burning stuff. Heating for example. The common areas like stairwells are ekstra air based insulation, and the smaller surface area to volume ratio means slower heat loss overall. Water heating, you lose less heat/energy to innactivity with a range of ages and occupations and lifestyles in the same building. Where in a single family home the times that one family aren't using the water it is cooling down without being used, in such a building someone else is likely to be using it, so you have less re-heating to get it up to temperature due to cooling while unused. And it is also likely to be a larger capacity reservoir of hot water, leadnig to yet another case of smaller surface area to volume ratio, meaning said energy loss due to the cooling of the water is even smaller. Finally, by its very nature it is more likely to already be serviced in a way that adding electric dryers even if indvidual ones (bad, should communal ones) or whatever is not a problem.
Well on the plus side if you live in apartments you're already way more efficient in terms of heat use.
@@sylkatesI read it in the opposite sense. It seems to me that the original comment was saying that higher-density living units are better. (As was explained in a further comment, there are many positive energy efficiencies that you get with higher density.)
Playing engineering games like Factorio and modded Minecraft got me really obsessed with the concept of electrifying entire systems, gradually switching everything to solar and wiring everything together and setting up the battery storage and all that is so satisfying. I look forward to doing it for real someday
Have you played Satisfactory?
FtB Ultimate is a brilliant way to learn about the benefits of electrification and a simplified way of teaching how it’s done!
The only things I learned from modded Minecraft is that flowers are the best technology, forbidden knowledge is cool and blood sacrifices are perfectly okay
Modded Minecraft is goated. Made me develop an interest in math and physics from a young age.
What mods do you use for Minecraft? I get yelled at by my friends for liking redstone too much, so I feel it would be fitting
I'm glad you brought up power outages. So many people talk about making everything electric but never address the outages that can and will happen.
If you have solar panels and power wall, you don't care about the grid going down.
In Taiwan, Hitachi sells a minisplit that also works as a water heater, it simply uses a separate condenser to heat the water tank up while it’s cooling your room. Pretty interesting product
That sounds like an incredible efficiency upgrade. Taking heat from your home to heat your water and cool your home at the same time.
I believe Rheem in the US has something like that too. Very interesting product indeed
We’ve had this in Australia for years and they suck at heating water. The Instant Hot Water gas heaters work great and are very cheap because they don’t store any water in a giant tank when it’s not required.
Yeah it's a shame there's not that many of them in North America. I think LG Therma V is mostly commercial.. Taco System M is another I heard of that recently came out that might be a bit more residential. I think they're still far more expensive than generic heat pump water heaters like Rheem ProTerra and the like, but they do have more perks and likely more efficiency in the summer due to the compressor being outdoors.
Edit: SpacePak apparently has some interesting A2W solutions as well.
Taiwan is so great! Great people, great heritage, and the ultimate in tech.
I am an Estimator that works for a regional electrical contractor in the northwest Oklahoma region. I went ahead and ran a few hypothetical price estimates through my estimating software based on the scenario that you outlined in your video of using a SPAN panel to automatically manage power distribution with just a 100 amp feeder. Here is what I got:
Let’s say that you had a 100 amp panel in a 1700 sqft, 50 year old house that was using a gas range, gas water heater, and gas furnace (I see this all the time). If you decided that you wanted a panel upgrade so you could move to all electric the panel upgrade alone, with off the shelf electrical components, would run you about $1400.00. That would replace your 100 amp 30 space panel with a 200 amp 42 space panel. If you add the feeder upgrade, which would most likely be necessary, that would add about $950.00 if the meter base was located within 10 feet of the panel. This might also have to include fees from the utility company to upgrade the feeders on their part.
After you have a larger panel you could opt to then install new feeders to your appliances. A new range feeder would run about $1300 if run through an attic and it was within 50 feet of the panel. A new water heater feeder would be about $350.00 if it was within 15 feet of the panel. And a new Furnace feeder would run about $1100.00 if it was within 25 feet of the panel.
However, if you decided to install a SPAN panel in place of your 100 amp panel without a feeder upgrade it would run about $6,500.00 assuming that the panel could be purchased and delivered for $3500.00. From what I can find this is a low estimate. With this new panel you would still have to upgrade all of your appliance feeders but you could avoid upgrading your panel feeder.
The SPAN panel specifically may not be the solution for automated power distribution control at the moment but I am sure if these kinds of panels come down in price they could be an option.
Also, if these prices feel absurdly low to you that’s because they are prices using northwestern Oklahoma material and labor rates. If you were in New York City just multiply these prices by 3-4x.
I'm curious, wouldnt the labor be the same between upgrading the panel size vs replacing with the SPAN panel? If so, why is there the large cost increase with the SPAN unit vs. part cost?
hello fellow okie! 👋
I would be worried about the longevity of the embedded computer system in this panel because looking at modern major appliances with expensive microcontroller boards cost a lot to begin with but if the board goes bad, it's just easier and cheaper to replace the whole appliance than to replace the board. The way this panel is built as well, inconveniently, the SPAN panel foolishly puts the computer board BEHIND the breakers instead of beside it. Also, I would want a system like that to use off the shelf components like a Raspberry Pi or ATX or ITX PC with free and open source software for these duties, effectively reducing cost and ease of repair. Also, so the panel, with its "smart" breakers to operate like the passive breakers in conventional load centre/service entry panels.
@@WJCTechyman I doubt products like raspberry pi would pass any regulation. It's not like your internet router at home. My best guess is that SPAN chooses good quality electronic components and tests their products thoroughly so they don't get a bad rep of low reliability and high maintenance. But yes, concerns raised in comments are all legitimate and we have a long way to go.
@@know1care Rasberry pi's are just boards with chips and they are highly reliable...its the same thing that would be put into any other instrument except with a vast amount of capability.
One thing to know is the Span breaker box starts at $4500 (not including shipping and installation), which is more than the complete cost of an upgrade to 200 amp service.
Lovely, that's four times more, than my gas and elecricity costs for a year, and ten times more than the electricity bills for a year (note: our utility prices are currently heavily subsidized).
@@asdfhun , panels last 20-30 years, typically. I agree it's too expensive for most people (especially since upgrading service is cheaper), but it's worth thinking on the scale of decades not a couple years.
Yeah these things are very pricey, and you do have to do some number crunching to decide which, if any, are going to be beneficial. If you can upgrade to 200 amp service for less than $4500 then great, but it'll be way more than that for a lot of people depending on whether the existing lines running to their house from the street can handle that (and how far from the street their intake is if those lines need replacing), whether the street box itself can handle that, the local cost of equipment and labor for doing the installation, etc.
If you look at @asdfhun's response though, they sound like they're doing an "its way too expensive!" knee-jerk reaction take. Yet at the same time, they also state it would pay for itself in 4 years. (Of course that's just the panel - they'd need to change all their devices as well so the total cost will be much more, and may not be justified if the dollar cost is your singular concern. Again, they'd have to crunch the numbers.)
But also keep in mind, you don't have to do _everything_ all at once. Start by checking your attic and see if simply blowing a bit more insulation around will be beneficial. If you're running R5 and you can push it up to R20 or higher at moderate expense, that in itself may save you quite a bit of money over the course of a few years. Windows can be expensive if yo have a lot of large ones that can only be "fixed" by replacing them, but doors are often easy: A lot of time you can significantly improve your doors by just adding some cheap weather stripping around the edges.
Once all that's done you can start looking at replacing appliances. Again, you only need to worry about doing so one at a time. A heat pump is a great start because, despite the implication from the video, you can often just bolt it on and continue using your existing gas furnace as the "emergency" heat source rather than replacing with resistive. After that is kind of up in the air.
The next-most-viable upgrade option is going to depend primarily on your usage patterns and the local cost of gas vs electricity. If gas is more expensive you'd probably want to replace your kitchen range (induction stoves are particularly efficient) as that's probably using the most fuel given you typically cook more often than you do laundry.
If electricity is more expensive for you, you could try something like the dryer (or maybe even that furnace which should no longer be running too much after the heat pump is installed). But in that situation you might be better to look at pausing the appliance replacement and considering some solar panels and/or battery system before adding more electrical load, just so you aren't paying the higher grid prices when you do finally get around to switching the remaining appliances.
There's a lot of options and pathways. The smart panel is probably one of the last ones you'd need to worry about (ie: once enough things are electric that tripping the main breaker starts becoming a real concern). The main takeaway is that its OK and even better to think about and take action in steps rather than trying to do it all in one fell swoop. (Unless you're in building a brand new home.. if you're in that position then just do it right the first time and save everyone as well as the planet a lot of hassle and expense in the future!)
you've got to think that with greater uptake the prices of those sort of smart panels will reduce over time. They're very new tech, it's to be expected they are a premium price at first
@@emma70707 but do you truly believe a smart system will be operating for 20 years? That the service won't be discontinued by the company? I doubt even the flash memory in the controller is rated for 10 years.
I love that you made this video. Thank you!
We have a 100amp feed on a 70 yr old mostly electric home. "Mostly" because our furnace has natural gas backup heat for when it's too cold for the heat pump.
AC/heatpump - 30amps/240V
Oven/Range - 50amps/240v
clothes dryer - 30amps/240v
level 2 car charger - 30amps/240v
That's 140 amps of power total across my 100amp service feed. Yet, we've never had an issue blowing the main breaker in this home and we don't skimp on our power usage.
The clothes dryer and EV Charger share a circuit via a UL certified 30amp smart relay that prioritizes the dryer and allows the car to charge whenever the dryer isn't running. Our 50amp oven has never run at full load. It's often pulling 1-4kw instead of the full 12kw it's capable of drawing. We've never needed to have all 4 "burners" set to high while also running the oven at 500 degrees F. It's not because we can't because we absolutely could without an issue. It's really because we never have a need to....ever...which includes cooking for family during holidays.
The highest load I've ever noticed using our whole-house energy monitoring system was 16kw which is still only 66Amps / 66% of the capacity of my home's main feed. It's a non-issue solved by education and knowledge. For us, upgrading to 200amp electrical service is just a very expensive several thousand US dollar convenience tax that we don't need to pay.
Great video. one thing we need to DEMAND from start ups like Span and our governments is standardization and open sourcing of these new smart parts. I don't want my house to stop working cause the company that build my panel goes under and turns off their servers and/or stops supporting their product. being that panels can be in place for like a 100 years and IOT companies can fold in like 2 year this is critical for long term adoption.
ya it's pretty bad i had to subscribe to Maytag to update our washer.. also our relay on our washer was shot on a board. issue was our warranty was useless because no one come out here to repair things so we had to wait 4 months for a new board
Sears was the last company out here that came to repair things
[whispers] NATIONALISATION
Same thing with all cloud-based things, or other "smart" things. Some bit goes sideways and nothing works anymore.
climate change is a hoax though... other wise explain why they're not recapping leaking methane wells several million of them are leaking..
Not a single one
lol "demand"
(as in electrical load demand)
I saw a pun in that
carry on 😎
I grew up in the 80s in Eastern Washington near the Columbia River, and I thought all-electric homes were just the way it was everywhere. I later learned that our cheapest-in-the-nation power, produced by our dams, was the reason for the widespread adoption of heatpumps in our area.
I am in a similar situation but western Washington. Washington’s hydroelectric dams have given us great experience that other states need to learn from. As you said the all electric house is reasonably common. The transporting of electricity is another one. We didn’t get much choice where the power was generated compared to where it was used. We are really good at moving the electricity from Snoqualmie Falls to Seattle. So when Bonneville power administration did a huge amount of wind, getting that electricity to Spokane and Seattle was nothing new for us. But most other states just put power stations 20 miles from their big cities. So when you tell them they can make a ton of solar electricity but it’s 200 miles away they freak out. Their engineers have literally never worked that problem.
Also from eastern Washington State. Hydroelectric yes, but also Nuclear Power. I built my home long ago before electric HVAC and stoves became reasonable to use. So my house uses gas. And thank god for it. My power bills are half what my neighbors pay with newer electric HVAC/stove homes.
Whatever the cheapest utility is in the area makes the most sense. In southern California, natural gas is cheap, the basic bill can be as low as $13 per month. We have lots of gas appliances here because it makes the most sense. Electricity is the most expensive utility by far here.
We have some apartments that are all electric but they are typically utilities included in the rent price. I would not want to live in an all electric home in California, the monthly bill would be as high as a mortgage payment.
...but your climate is also not super cold in the winter.
@@bpark10001 I'm not comparing my energy costs with someone from Wisconsin. I'm comparing my energy cost with my next-door neighbors. They have new all-electric houses which they put in because electric power is cheap around here. Even so, they pay twice the amount I do because, even if electricity is cheap, natural gas for high energy uses is about 80% cheaper. $200 for electric heating, $40 for gas. I have this financial advantage because I live in an old house that was not built to the modern standards. I understand that it is a little counter intuitive, and it may be the product of my exact geographical location, but electric heating for 1) HVAC, 2) water heaters, 3) stoves and 4) clothes dryers...is not always the cheapest choice. All four of these energy hogs in my old house are gas, becuause that is the way they were built 40 years ago. It was the best choice then, and are even a better choice now.
Unless I'm missing it, a huge limitation of SPAN that to me puts it in the "useless lockin" category are (a) no local API (b) no open integration, like Home Assistant which of course needs that API, and (c) it's a phone/tablet app only. I'm sure the control could be hijacked, but IMO anything like this needs an option for full local control. Using a base infrastructure control system with with lockin/lockout is a hard no go to start. (Just as a casual example, I'd probably add a button mounted in devices like dryers that could be "override priority" that set low priority devices as the highest -- when you really need it right then, and without having to juggle things in an interface. And also building in more complex scheduling and feedback systems...you could build your own system for having devices schedule their own power use based in predictions and human activity.)
It's very DIY right now, but there are several GET and POST endpoint available locally and a local method of generating an auth token. There's a lot of info in the thread on the HA forums titled "Integration with Span?", including interaction with some SPAN employees.
That’s a pretty bad one honestly. Like what happens if span as a company disappears in 10 years?
@@nasonguy I'd be shocked if a bad capacitor or a tin whisker doesn't take the electronics out before 10 years is up. I just wouldn't trust something as important as my main electrical service to a "smart" device unless I was sure it would fail dumb when the electronics die instead of failing dead.
@@disjustice I love the idea, but I'd REALLY hope if something went wrong it falls back to being a normal breaker. I like the idea of more control over items but I'd like a failure mode to revert it back to a dumb device vs. taking everything with it.
Even beyond the fact that most IOT things are fundamentally poorly designed systems, the fact that you're supposed to be okay with the utility company just saying "Nah no electricity lmao think of the planet." absolutely does not sit right in my moral view. Like - you are providing a service for which I am paying you, mind your own Fing business.
Cost-wise, the Span panel costs as much as an electrical service upgrade in my area, and that was going from a 60A pushmatic service panel to a 200A traditional breaker box _and_ moving the meter outside.
just came here to say basically the same that. that smart breaker panel alone costs over $3k
span panel? that's a Spanel
Perhaps it can have cost benefits if your electric price varies by time of day?
Rather just be careful not to turn-on a bunch of appliances at once. It’s common sense you don’t run a stove & dryer at the same time
.
I just put a timer on the hot water heater set from 1-5 am and the same with my EV both a high load come on when I sleep and power is cheaper.
Hi! I had a Span panel installed with my ground-mount solar system last summer, and yes I am one of those NERDS. I wanted to clarify one thing about the Span panel, at least in its current phase. Earmarking breaker priority is only done with battery energy management and is not implemented to manage grid power. It will only be used when grid power goes down and you are forced to extend the life on your battery backup.
I have solar but do not have battery backup, and I cannot even access the priority page on the app. I am hopeful they will figure it out someday but as of today you cannot do what you stated with Span alone. Now, I do have direct access through Home Assistant and can manage this through custom automations, but hardly home user friendly.
About thirty years ago, my father installed a load controller into our panel that sounds similar to the electric management device you described in this video. It had a simple interface box that was mounted inside the house and showed which devices were currently enabled and disabled, along with the number of kilowatts being used by the house. It also shut devices off based on a preference order that could be programmed by the homeowner. The electric utility charged both based on overall kilowatt-hours used and peak kilowatt usage during daytime hours (between about 9 A.M. and 9 P.M.). This device helped us save quite a bit of money during the very hot Phoenix Arizona summers.
We just called them energy management systems back in the day.. I never saw one that wasn't buggy back then
You ought to prioritize stove over HVAC. House will maintain temperature for a while. And you wouldn't want to be denied the ability to cook, or have food come out undercooked because the oven shut off halfway and now you don't know exactly how much longer to cook something. Pretty unlikely either the stove or HVAC would get cut off either way, but that's how I'd do it.
I was thinking the same thing. I’d rather have the ambient temperature change slightly for a moment than mess up my food.
And the heat from the cooktop ultimately ends up in the house anyway. Not as much as the same watts from a pump, but still, not zero either.
I was thinking I would probably give washing machine for example quite high priority as I wouldn't want it to suddenly stop in the middle of a program.
Can confirm. We have a small farm house, all electric, 100 amp service. Everything works great, and when we cook the baseboard heaters in half the house don’t run because the oven and stove kick out more heat than the heaters.
@@MauryMarkowitz What if it's 100 degrees outside and you already run your air at 76 to save energy and you don't want the expense of replacing all this stuff just for the inconvenience of your house being a sauna when you are cooking?
How on earth does he captivate me into watching home electrification, turn signals, brake lights, fridges, etc???
Same here.
People like to buy keen new junk, rather than save and invest.
This kind of thing is the male equivalent of a passion for marble countertops and kitchen remodels.
One extra thought on throttling your resistive heat- if you reduce your heater's output by 20 amps to run 20 amps of stove, your house is still getting 20 amps of heat! In a much more localized way, but if anything that's good, because you're probably in the kitchen with the stove anyway. Dryers and water heaters have this effect, but to a lesser extent as much of the energy goes away through a duct/drain.
That extra heat is not an advantage, unless it's cold outside.
@@dizzywow This is in the context of "throttling your resistive heat" so yes, when it's cold outside.
assuming your home doesn't have a very poor insulation quality, it may be better to just leave your heater on a lower temp all day and throw a shirt/sweater on when you're not cooking than try to throttle it specifically, just from a practicality standpoint
While not common, there are heat exchanger systems that pass incoming water to a water heater through a heat exchanger connected to the waste water drain pipe, thus recovering a majority of the out going heat in the water going down the drain when taking a shower. Not so good for baths since the hot water is drained after the tub is filled. There are also heat exchange, or energy recovery, systems for clothes dryers that warm the incoming makeup air into the laundry with the dryer exhaust air. My home has an energy recovery ventilation system for the incoming and outgoing air, and a minisplit for heating and cooling. Very cheap to operate.
A lot of this comes down to cost and the homeowner being willing to invest in these systems. It is also much more expensive to retrofit than to include in new construction. I believe building codes need major upgrades for new construction to increase overall efficiency, especially commercial buildings. I also believe that buildings should be required to be brought up to new codes as part of any resale. As an electrician who has crawled into a lot of attics and underneath a lot of floors, and worked in a lot of walls, it always amazes me how many buildings still have little to no insulation.
@@ayaderg The heat will still be on and throttling on/off (at full effect) independent on the temperature it's set to(within reason).
You would still risk the heater turning on just as you are using your stove.
I just wanna say your videos scratch a very specific part of my brain and I appreciate you so much. I love having you on in the background of basically anything I'm doing because I do genuinely learn some neat stuff by listening. 1 note though: more heatpumps
I absolutely relate and agree
I think a lot of why this is hard for people is that they only think about most of the these appliances when they're broken down. If your gas furnace breaks in the middle of winter, running a new wire to switch to resistive heat may not be simple and you need to fix the heat ASAP. Just dropping in a new appliance that uses the existing power/fuel hookups is a lot easier when you're in a hurry.
Also, the gas network never goes down.
@@mark.audacity Exactly, a 15 amp genny can get you through a blackout in the dead of winter.
I think most people don't want to spend $10-20k and throw away perfectly good appliances and breaker panels just to make themselves feel better. It would make more sense to throw up some solar panels and actually contribute to the energy mix rather than burn loads of cash becoming more of a siphon on it.
@@mark.audacity this is a joke, right? It absolutely does.
@@mark.audacity Be careful making sweeping statments, its not happened to me, but nor does power(I have had strangely reliable power for most of my life, but its mostly buried in my area), but it is possible, heck, the day im writing this comment there is currently a Gas outage in Woodstock, Oxfordshire.
There is a lot of components that can fail in a gas network(Compressor stations), and a lot of Electricity is used to process both Nat Gas and Petrol/Car Gas. I would arguably say its not more reliable and has about the same risks for outage.
Another excellent video! One problem with the smart breaker panel temporarily switching off breakers to keep the house under the 100A limit is that some devices don't like to be *hard disconnected*.
For instance, the EV car charger: when re-connected by the smart panel, the charger will be in its default "standby" mode (0 amps) and not resume the previous charging (20 to ~50 amps) and you may end up with a uncharged EV car in the morning if not paying attention to it.
This could possibly be remedied by firmware programming. But its probably not programmed like that for kitchen cooking appliances (microwaves, toasters, waffle iron, etc). That is unless the appliance uses old spring timers and heat dials! But almost all of the mid- to higher-end appliances use touch screens with microprocessor control and will be in standby when its power is reconnected.
Yeah -- I don't think a smart panel is necessarily the answer. It's more that we need to get on with developing standard protocols for power management control interchange, that isn't tied to AN app, or even AN company.
@@nickwallette6201 A?
@@hgpo27 Eh!
@nickwallette6201 *A company (not an)
Yeah plus it might damage your devices if they experience recurring intermittent blackout power outages
Absolutely love your videos. The little details, like the dimming of the video when describing the thunk when the heat strips are activated, make these so fun to watch!
Your channel convinced me to get a dual head mini-split system for my house, and it's been great so far. Kept my poorly insulated house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. I have a very small home, but I've never had an electricity bill more than $180
Same here, I haven't even turned on my traditional boiler this winter season!
Aren't efficient ductless mini-splits awesome? Had ours (triple head) just under 2 years and it's been a great upgrade. We are also about halfway through a full renovation (which includes upgraded insulation everywhere), can't wait to get it all finished!
See my home would benefit but I’m in New England where one corporation controls the electricity supply so the rates are too high to justify the change
@TheSpaceCoyote82 He actually does explain the cons… The grid is being expanded constantly when it comes to energy production whether that’s solar on homes/businesses or new power plants. SMRs will eventually evolve into the ability for us to have nuclear power that is cheap and highly adaptable.
@TheSpaceCoyote82 The only thing that runs without electricity in my home is water heat (pilot light heats a thermopile to keep gas valve open). And maybe the Internet for about an hour (UPS).
I'm skeptical that a Span panel would cost less to install than a service upgrade from 100A to 200A (at least in most cases), especially in areas where electric distribution is aerial (on overhead wires, rather than underground). It's a cool option, but it seems like it's not (for most users) going to be less costly than upgrading the panel and the feeder wires.
And it's worse in every possible way. Your load panel isn't where you want complexity and imagine you want to charge a car or something, too. At some point you just need more watts. This video really feels more like an ad than anything else.
The environmental cost of smart circuit breaker sounds lower than everyone upgrade to 200A. The maximum total electricity load to the electricity grid will be lower. Even if electricity energy can be stored in battery then be released to the grid for high load, battery charge-discharge is far from 100% efficient.
But I agree, the subscription model of most "smart" stuff and their "cloud" / phone-home tendency are putting people off.
@@billyswong upgrading to 200 amp service does not mean you are using more energy. I completely disagree with your conclusion.
@@pkuras The electricity companies need to take care of potentially higher peak energy use. That peak energy use can occur and will occur. It doesn't matter the new peak is in fact 120A or 150A. Higher is higher. Factor in that the cost of electricity generation does not line up linearly with the amount generated because of infrastructure issue etc, I hope you get what I mean.
@@billyswong sure, no argument there - as electricity use increases over time (for all reasons), the grid will need upgrades to accommodate higher usage. This has always been true, and the adoption of EVs is not unique in this regard, though it may result in a faster rate of increase in demand. But for one or a thousand electric customers to upgrade their service from 100A to 200A by itself has zero bearing on actual usage. There is zero causal link between a service upgrade and an increase in electric usage, and your original comment implied as much.
Have you done a video on home insulation yet?
Would love to hear your thoughts on things like weather stripping, window film, etc.
This is something I would like to hear more on. I live in an older house with really old windows, but I'm not keen on replacing them (partially just because I just think they're neat). So other forms of improvements would be interesting to me.
@@Descriptor413 when i moved into my 1905 Queen Anne style home in 2008 I had a window professional give me an estimate for all new wood-clad vinyl. He was honest enough to say that my original double-hung sashes, coupled with tight-fitting aluminum storm windows, would be more energy efficient than replacing everything with new vinyl. I'm sure he was right. My house isn't drafty and utility bills are low, despite the size of the house.
@@Descriptor413
Last week I had 4 windows replaced by Pella. One was a big 6'x3' single pane window. The other three were the cheapest vinyl windows you can find. After all were replaced, you could immediately feel the difference. The house is staying much warmer than it did before. Especially good timing with the arctic vortex this week. On the other hand, it cost $8K. So it gets pricey fast. If I'm being honest, it probably won't pay for itself in dollars for a very long time. But I will be more comfortable and feel less worried about running the heat or AC.
Next up full energy audit.
I have to say the stove should always be above the HVAC in priority. I won't feel a short lack of HVAC, but I want the stove to always work when I want to use it. I grew up in an all electric home in rural Canada (switched our heat from oil to ground heat pump when I was a teen) and never tripped the main breaker.
Unless I'm missing some nuance of active priority, the first two on the list are functionally interchangeable, as they don't exceed 100 when added.
What about the concern of potentially fucking up something by essentially "unplugging" and "plugging in" a potentially high-value item to turn it off/on while it's drawing power?
@@grafzeppelin4069 My laptop's battery and four power divider's switches broke when I flicked my breaker to pull a wire. Good times. Yea, I don't want switches breaking on their own, and I surely won't ever run unprotected wires to any of my electronics again.
Ya cooking is more important than keeping your pipes from freezing and ac who even need that anyway but your stove if it was gas could heat your house enough to keep water from freezing and eat but electric stove will be insane to leave on and open I guess that's why all restaurants have electric stoves what gives that nice grill marks right and I am sorry not attacking ya you have your opinions and can set whatever you want in your home for priority just depends on your situation I guess this is my opinion
@@Koogz406 Since you were so polite in not attacking the OP with your passive aggressive comment, I'll make mine similarly polite...
Bluntly, you're being unserious. A heated home heated to 18C cannot drop to below freezing in the time that it would take to cook a meal. It doubly cannot do so while the meal is being cooked by a heat producing device INSIDE THE HOME. This is the whole point of the video. The heat is not shut off indefinitely, it is only shut off for a short time to manage the load.
I have no idea what you're even off about on restaurants?
Hi, Italy here.
I really enjoy your video!
I find it quite amazing that your "smallest" electric service is 100A.
Here in Italy the standard household electric service is around 14A, single phase 230V.
A normal oven pulls between 10A and 13A, and a washing machine or an hair dryer around 10A. A dishwasher is around 10A.
Gas cooktop and gas combi-boiler are the norm. AC it's not present in most of the houses. It's normal for us to manually switch off or wait to use an appliance when something else "power hungry" is running. For example if the dishwasher is running and i've to use the oven, i stop the dishwasher or wait for running it.
That sounds really underpowered to me. Speaking from Norway, the standard for an apartment nowadays is 40A, 3 phase 230V. But if you're unlucky you could even find 25A, single phase. It also depends how heating is conducted. Many houses and apartments have electric radiators, which can draw a lot of current. It is not unusual for breakers to trip if too many radiators are on at the same time. 14A single phase sounds like you have to walk on egg shells all the time.
@@Eduard2004 In our apartment in spain the main circuit is protected by a single line 20 A circuit breaker (MCCB) with c tripping charateristic . We have been using all all electric appliances since the 90s, including conventional electric heating. The only time the MCCB tripped was using the electric heaters, while cooking a multi course meal using the oven and several plates of the stove.
Tl;dr Use heat pumps for everything. That solves your problem too.
Yes, same here from the Netherlands, with 8 (or 17 nowadays) kw being the norm. The upgrade to 17kw 3P costs €250. But then again, our heat pump dryers consume up to 1kw in practice, and the heating of the house at max maybe 3-4kw. Keep in mind that we often use the same heat pumps for water heating as for warming the house. And as long as you have a way to dynamically limit the car charging, you will never have any issues, even if you are full electric. A whole video about how to "cope" with a 24kw instead of 48kw sounds so foreign to me. My historical max in a full electric house (no car) is 9kw for about 2 minutes.
I live in France were things are a bit different.
When we bought our house it only had 6kW which was fine, since it had a gas boiler and stove.
We have replaced all that with a heat pump and induction stove, and we updated the connection online to 9kW, we also have an electric car. A technician is coming soon to upgrade us to 12kW, which should be fine.
Listening to Americans talk about 100A/24kW as small seems hilarious to me.
I got a span and span drive (EV charger) installed. Pros: everything you said. It is a really awesome product. Cons: cost. $10,000 for installation not including the panel (another $5,000). IRA has incentives but this is still way too expensive. Also there are smart features when our battery kicks in but there is no way to schedule circuits for time of use for instance. That feature may be coming but is not part of the mix. If you are putting in solar + storage and considering a critical loads panel and you can afford this, Span is an excellent choice. It will get even better with software upgrades. If you are just interested in electrification, there are way cheaper ways to accomplish this including just getting mechanical timers on your water heater, putting notes on your dryer to not use during certain times, etc. You can do all that you need to do for a few hundred dollars.
EXACTLY. Too many people spend money they don’t need to spend just because the technology is new. “Penny wise but dollar foolish.”
Classing home improvements as business expenses is one of the most genius things youtubers have figured out.
A loop hole that should be closed. Pay your fn taxes. 😠🤨🧐
@@tomtheplummer7322 So the government can queef it away? Nah
@@tomtheplummer7322 if corporations paid the tax they should be then none of us, including our old pal Technology Connections would have to pay any 🤷♂️ I'm not going to cry about someone saving a few grand when corporations fuck us on the daily.
Linus from LTT is the king is this regard.
It's one of the few things that usually make sense when it comes to renewable energy outside of being wealthy enough.
I'm from one of those areas where all-electric homes have been the norm for all my life. I knew about gas stoves, furnaces, and water heaters; but I had no idea before watching this video that there are gas-powered clothes dryers.
I live somewhere where gas is the norm for those three, and I hadn't heard of a gas powered tumble dryer. Granted, not a lot of people have them at all.
They're rare. Most people use electric. Gas water heaters are more common.
I've never owned an electric dryer. Lots of gas appliances where I am
Gas dryers are more common than electric in Michigan.
There used to be gas-powered refrigerators. I'm not sure if there are any today.
This video reminds me of those old disney tomorrowland TV show episodes where they excitedly told you how technology available today or soon could easily help us improve our lives or do really cool things. I wish we had more optimism like that (considering all the awful stuff in the world that makes futurism seem depressing). Great video!!
Many years ago we had a show in UK called 'Tomorrows world' and 99% of the exciting stuff they showed never happened in the 'real world'....
sadly, "think of the convenience of controlling everything from your phone!"
turns into "don't protest the government or your [bank account / home] gets freezed"
Too bad it's largely ignored!
We live in Peoria, IL and took advantage of that solar program "Illinois Solar For All".. We had 35 panels installed for free on our roof and have not paid for Electric since, even in winter months. We do pay around $40 a month for natural gas. We have a EV charger at around 32 Amps, to charge our car at night to 80%. I'm enjoying your instructive videos, like the dishwasher, (even though we don't own one.) Since your also a Midwesterner, that caught my interest. I was a handyman for 35 years, so I'm still learning after retirement. Thanks, Steve!
With recent electrical power outages (brownouts and blackouts) being in the news, I am very interested in your take on backup power generation/storage. I personally have a whole-house natural gas generator system that allows my home to continue functioning as usual during electrical outages.
I wonder about this too. What's the current start of battery backup? How practical are they? At what price point?
Isn't what you have already a decent solution? A generator is perfectly fine for emergencies when there's an electrical grid
thats not relevant for 99% of the country. Just move out of Cali
Maybe fifteen? Twenty? years ago, it was in many places cheaper to run your house off a IC car engine running on natural gas, hooked up to a generator, than it was to get electricity off the grid. This required using the engine exhaust for heating, of course. It essentially gave you high efficiency natural-gas based heat plus free electricity. Naturally this all relied on cheap gas and an environment where you needed the heat, so as soon as the weather gets warm enough you would need to switch back to the grid.
@@RyanDiederich How is it not relevant? Blackouts happen everywhere and most houses have natural gas service. I live about as far away as you can get from California and the house across the street from me has a whole-house generator that kicks in as soon as the power goes out.
I'm very glad you discussed the code and load calculation considerations - the smartest idea in the world is valueless if it's not legal to install in your jurisdiction!
The idea of intelligent breaker panels is fascinating, and I can absolutely see it being a game-changer for electrifying certain older homes; your take is absolutely on point that it's almost never the case you legitimately *must* have all your appliances running simultaneously, so if accepting that saves a homeowner a few thousand dollars (or more) when replacing their gas appliances (motivating them to go fully electric) it's totally worth it.
On a related note, I live in a multi-tenant dwelling and would love to install an EV charger in my parking space, but there's currently no easy cost-effective way to do this. Our meters are located in the electrical room also in the parking garage, but the panels are up in our units so there's no simple way to "split off" a circuit at my meter for the charger. Apparently there's a new meter collar device called a ConnectDER that could in theory be used for this purpose, but so far it's not a legal option in my location to install these (simply by virtue of being too new). I'm hoping they become acceptable at some point, because it would really change the calculus around the costs to install proper per-owner EV chargers that are simply and easily billed to their existing account for anybody with a similar building arrangement.
Have you checked out Orange or Plugzio for your EV charging needs? They offer a solution without directly tying to the meter that gives landlord or tenant options for monitoring charging costs.
@@jdlutz1965 There are plenty of companies like this offering various "managed" charging solutions, and the reality is they're all a terrible deal because the monthly "management fees" form a significant fraction of the cost of the electricity in a typical residential dwelling with a "one charger per owner/stall" arrangement; Orange for example looks like it charges $20/month per outlet, which translates to 750km of range in my EV per month "wasted" on unnecessary fees. In most cases, a building looking to deploy charging for a bunch of the owners (when you otherwise can't tie it to their own meters) is better off just deciding on a fixed average rate (adjusted based on measured aggregate usage) that approximately covers typical power cost and just charging that to owners directly themselves (no middleman required). It might be slightly less "fair" but when half the money isn't going to some other company to "manage" the solution you still come out well ahead. Still, this kind of thing requires buy-in from all/most of a building to bother installing which is currently still a hurdle with uptake of EVs low in multi-tenant dwellings.
The whole point of a solution that hooks directly up to a tenant's/owner's meter is that it _avoids_ these management fees entirely - you pay nothing other than the incremental per-kWhr cost for your charging. Particularly for those who don't drive a whole lot each month, this can be a huge savings and it's also just a huge reduction in administrative burden and grief not having to deal with managing a whole other system, especially for smaller buildings (ours is only 18 units).
Another option that is relatively conventional but could be a solution to your dilemma is a meter/breaker combo panel. I'm not sure if you have a gang meter but if each meter is in a unique housing, could employ this method that provides a disconnect and some extra breakers in housing that holds meter.
As an architect major, I love these video essays to listen to as I AutoCAD
I thought architects were switching to Revit?
I'm a building engineer and we use Autocad but a lot of our architect clients use revit
@@poisonpotato1 Revit is easier in a lot of ways an I am familiar with it, I just chose to use AutoCAD for this project, it's just easier and faster to just draw rather than model
@bookymydoor that's the idea
@@TheRubyGamesOG I’ve used AutoCAD in my HS’s drafting class and i can confirm it absolutely succs sometimes. Would love if they had revit
My wife and I purchased a home recently and I REALLY wanted to get a SPAN panel (agree on the nerdiness of it). We had to do a service upgrade because of the age of the panel (yes, a nightmare AND expensive) and it was just way too cost prohibitive at the time. Not to mention they didn't have an installer in our area. My wife and I plan to build a house in the future and a SPAN panel or something similar is definitely going to be in the budget.
Something that I was told by our installer that will give some of the monitoring features is the Sense Home Energy Monitor. This wouldn't give the circuit level control, but it apparently lets you see how you are using power.
Get a house that uses Passive House standards. The insulation is so perfect, you don’t need a heater (though one is included for backup)
Leviton makes a good alternative smart panel with smart breakers. Check them out
I think you'll be surprised to know how many homes still have 60 amp services. 😅 My parents have a 60 amp service, electric hot water heater, and electric stove. The way the house is set up, it does not work very well, and they trip breakers semi-regularly in the winter. When the furnace is runs the fan, the electric kettle trips the breaker for example.
Their previous home was also 60 amp service, but with gas everything but the dryer (I've literally never knowingly seen a gas dryer). And that was never a problem, despite having two buildings with full kitchens, etc., on that 60 amps!
The way power is managed and distributed is definitely very important to how well this works. I used to use my welder at my friend's house, again 60 amp service, never ever tripped a breaker there even turned all the way up, and again the appliances with the exception of the furnace were all electric.
It's also quite common in Japan, and the voltage is even lower.
@@meneldal i lived in japan, it is also 110 like the us, and the outlets are the same.
@@WeedMIC Japan is officially 100 (though it can get to 110), while the US is 120V so you do lose a bit there (and also makes a lot of appliances perform much slower).
That SPAN panel you mention is cool, but it's $4500 just for the panel. I upgraded my main panel myself with a bit of help from a friend for about $1000. It's not very difficult to do, especially if your panel is a surface mount.
I was definitely wondering how much it would just cost to upgrade from 100A - 200A. I'm assuming the cost can vary significantly, though.
A much cheaper option than Span is an EV charger with load management (for that load) capability. Usually that is enough to fit all else in a 100 A panel. It works by monitoring the main feeder current and adjusting accordingly.
In my case it was $5000 more expensive than the 200A upgrade. I really wanted it, but I couldn't justify it.
@@ehhhhhhhhhh If you hired an electrician to do it - yes. Costs will vary. But like I said it's pretty easy to do. I was without power for a few days and borrowed a generator from a friend.
I really appreciate this kind of content as someone who moved from the sweltering south to the frigid north. I’d love to see more how to live in the north content - your humidifier video was extremely useful this winter
I would love a video about different refrigerant types e.g. HFC/propane and their pro's and cons and environmental risks, I think it could be a great addition to your heatpump videos. P.s. Thanks so much for all the great informational content you provide us with, it is so valuable 🙏.
My biggest concern about going all-electric is grid reliability. Here in Michigan recently, winter storms knocked out power to nearly one million people, many for over a week. Thankfully I did not lose power, but it has me thinking twice about switching to a heat pump right now. I can run my furnace on a portable generator, but a heat pump would need something much larger (and more expensive).
Brian Gerst
I install heating and AC units in Alabama. I have a 4 ton heat pump in my own house. Last summer I removed a very good, very functional gas furnace because of the price of natural gas. I replaced it with the heat pump. Last winter we had a gas bill that went all the way up to $400. That is WHY I replaced it. This winter I actually had a power bill of $600 . And as I said, I am in Alabama. I couldn't imagine how HIGH the bill for it would have been in Michigan. KEEP YOUR NATURAL GAS. If nothing else, keep a couple of gas heaters as backup. I am an HVAC tech of almost 20 years.
This is a much bigger problem than people realize. Power plants are being shut down because of the fight against fossil fuels, and they're not replacing them with anything. They've simply been reducing the capacity of the grid, borrowing electricity from neighboring states when their demand exceeds their output. This has left us in a precarious position because the overall capacity of the grid is decreasing as demand is going up. There's nothing wrong with using electric cars and appliances, but it's incredibly foolish to increase electricity usage and decrease production at the same time. This is already leading to an increase in rolling blackouts, and it's going to keep getting worse.
and the "local" pumping station goes out ???
it DOES happen then NO GAS to run your Furness with
Staying on natural gas doesn’t protect you from that. The pipelines that bring the gas to your home require pumps to run. Pumps that utilize electricity. That was one of the problems that happened in Texas, there was no power to run the infrastructure to bring to fuel to power plants to generate the power needed to run the system.
In theory keeping a wood or coal stove, or keeping a gas tank would work, though the former two are relatively inefficient at heating homes and produce a lot of particulate matter that’s not good for your health (though still preferable to dying by freezing), gas tank would be better, though that is a potential safety hazard in that if there’s ever a leak and a fire, your house would quite literally explode (which still should be rare enough that it shouldn’t happen). Alternatively, battery storage and home renewables can provide at least some basic power even if the grid collapses, or a mini-diesel generator if you want to be old-school about it.
Finally it’s usually a good idea to pressure your state politicians to ensure that the state’s electrical grid isn’t going to fail during critical weather events, like what happened in Texas two years ago. Writing to your representative helps let them know what issues you’re worried about, and relatively few people do it, so it can be a decent way to have an outsized influence.
I live in the Buffalo area so blackouts in the winter are just expected most years. I have animals that need higher temperatures to survive and I currently live in a mostly-electric home because that’s what was available. Not having a gas stove to be able to heat water for them in the winter is one of my biggest worries in this house.
Here in Italy the default is 230V 3,3kW, less than 16A, on one phase.
You can upgrade it (or downgrade...) and even if up to a certain range it's all made by software (they send a command to the smart meter, it's the device responsible for breaking if you go beyond your limit) it will have a one-time cost and also your monthly bill will be a little bit higher.
If you want more than 6.6 kW (or sometimes 11 kW) you have to switch to multi-phase.
That’s neat, but average American home uses at least 11kwh per day. And that’s not even with electric vehicles or going all electric as most American homes have dual fuel.
@@scallywag1716 kW is not kWh...
One is power, the other is energy.
@@scallywag1716 yes, you have indeed a higher demand that justifies the higher maximum, because of your quite big houses too compared to European ones.
But I can tell you I use something like 6000 kWh per year with a 230V 5 kW service, so a little less than 20 kWh per day.
However our demand is spread across the day because our main use is HVAC both in winter and summer. We still use gas for hot water and cooking (100 smc/year)
Before 2022 I used gas for heating too while using HVAC just in the summers.
Back then we had a 3.3 kW service and we used 4500 kWh per year.
But we used something like 700 smc of gas per year 90% of which in winter.
Other italian viewer here! yeah having 100A available is pretty insane to think as an European where the standard is 3.3/6.6 KW max! Electirfication seems like a no brainer with that much of overhead available
@@mirkomilova most homes in the USA are setup for between 6kw-48kw. A big reason we use NG for heat especially where I am is gas compared to electric, gas is significantly cheaper cost wise per year. Electric heat would cost 3x as much(at least compared to my 95%+ efficiency furnace)
Here in Europe they always said they want us to go electric. Then, with the current GAS crisis they raised electricity prices (and electricity taxes) way more than their gas counterparts. Plus we have price caps that only protect people who use gas to heat and cook. If you use more than your allowed quota for electricity you pay much more because the "government price cap" isn't applied to you even if you use almost no gas (or zero gas). (I live in The Netherlands).
It's nice of you to bring the technical side of it for people who might benefit.
Merrit Order
And that craziness hit France as well despite the fact that 70% of the electricity produced in France is nuclear and another 10% hydroelectric. In other words there is no real price crisis, it's scripted.
Profiteers gonna profit
Thats because the EU is hyper-corrupt.
@@srfrg9707 It's because the electricity pricing in Europe is based on the most expensive energy source, ie coal.
I live in europe, a 200A (or even a 100A) service is mindbogeling here. I have a one phase, 230V 35A service. So about 8KW. And that is without a gas supply. I had a heatpump installed about 2 years ago. When I'm not home (so only fridge/freezer, modem is running) my entire house uses about 150-250W. When I'm home with the heat running, its usualy about 1kw depending on the temperature outside. The only time its even close to the max 8kw is when the heatpump is heating the tapwater. wich draws at most 3kw and for desinfection rises to about 6 but thats maybe 15 minutes a week. The heatpump is capable of loadsharing, and when I buy an electric car, the charger will need to be able to do loadsharing to. But 99% of the time it wouldn't even need to.
The only time I have over 4kw running through my panel for hours is sunny days, when i'm not home. And thats solarpower going out :)
I have casually looked at solutions like the SPAN panel before, but never realized how comprehensive they really are. Great video!
My parents recently downsized to an all electrical house, heat pump, solar, etc. The insulation alone was $14k to install
Yeah insulation can be crazy expensive and replacing old windows too. But I keep seeing folks saying we need to save energy, yet they tell you you don't need to change your insulation. It's just ridiculous.
During peak hours, I turn off the heating in my apartment to save money: the temperature drops from 22.5C to 18C in a matter of 2-3 hours (when it's -25C outdoor). It's even worse if it's near -40C outdoor, it drops to 18C in about 2 hours. I don't care as I'm not home when this happens, but the days I am, it gets really uncomfortable quickly. I let you imagine how cold it is near the walls if it gets to 18C at the thermostats.
The proper way is to insulate. Then, if the enormous energy saving isn't enough, it's way easier to turn off the heating for a few hours when you're house is properly insulated.
In Europe it is a pretty common to use a device called priority relay, it is a relatively simple device that can disconnect a load if it would exceed a total allowed current limit. It can be used to disable the water heater when another devices are running.
Never heard about such a device in Denmark. We have 3x48A @230V in our apartment. Houses tend to get 3x64A @230V. There is loads of power. But prices have increased.
Just as long as the government can't override the relay and turn off your stuff without your permission, something that I feel is inevitable since politicians are control freaks.
@@trex2099 3x48 or 3x64A @230V, geez! Here in Hungary, the norm for homes is 1x32A, or 3x16A, but plenty of homes have 1x16A @230V. Including our house, and if it's not crazy enough, we only have a 16A breaker on the input of the power meter. On the output of the power meter, there is a single 10A (ten Amperes) breaker, and the entire house runs on that, because there are 60 years old aluminium wires inside the house in some rooms. There is a separate, remote controlled power meter for the water heater, though. But we learnt that we can run either the washing machine, the oven, the microwave, but only one of these at the same time, otherwise the 10A breaker might trip. But after the oven is preheated and cycling on and off, and if we use the microwave at reduced power, two of them can work together, because thankfully the 40 years old 10A breaker is slow, so it can provide 16A for about 10 minutes before the thermal cutout kicks in (maybe even 15-20 minutes in cold winters, because it is outside).
A "Lastabwurfrelais" is only used for very special applications or fixing a design flaw in your circuit.
@@kttk4564 I've seen those priority relays in quite a few Finnish homes, most cases I've seen it's just a simple case of preventing Sauna from going on at same time as Kitchen Stove.
On the use cases mentioned in this video, you could just do same but vs. the car charger.
They're simple things that allow people to have lower service level.
Here in Finland it has been common for over 50 years to have mainly electric heating and appliances, maybe one or two wood-burning stoves to give more heat during the coldest months (we hit -35C just this morning) and heat up your sauna. Gas has been a thing in the past, like early 1900s, in bigger cities.
And for decades we have used simple contactors to turn off loads like space heaters when something like the sauna stove is heating up to avoid tripping the main fuses. Also many car chargers and geothermal heat pumps come with current sensors that you install in your breaker panel and they will dynamically limit their power draw if the total draw of the house is nearing the service limits.
@@dave655467 Well we have nuclear power in Finland so this winter shouldn't be too bad unless the nuclear power stations break
@@dave655467 They get the uranium mainly from Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia. They've got multiple suppliers and long supply deals so there shouldn't be a sudden price hike.
@@dave655467 I don't understand your point? You're saying that nuclear power plants consume more energy than they produce? I'm an electrical engineer so I am fairly sure I know how electricity is produced here and thanks to nuclear we have more production than consumption in the country so unless several nuclear power plants go down at the same time, we're fine.
@@dave655467 Well I know the situation is worse in some parts of Europe, but Finland has enough nuclear for our own needs. Coal is only about 10% of the electricity production in Finland, oil is only the last resort if the grid is about to go down for example if a big power plant gets disconnected from the grid. Anyway electricity will be cheaper this winter than last winter for sure.
Biggest issue in Ireland and UK is looped supply. Where one incoming is shared between two or more houses. In many cases you are not allowed to add an EV charger or heat pump/air conditioner, because the usage between the two houses will exceed shared incoming supply cable.
I have that in Australia. It is such a pain
We have shared service transformers in the US as well. It's one of several significant oversights in this video.
But, even if you have a 60A DNO fuse, the lowest that is usually fitted, could you not pull 60A without consequence?
@@charlesbridgford254 Both houses could not draw 60A at the same time for long, without damaging the shared wire. EV and heat pumps are more likely to have high current for a long time, than electric showers or cooker.
@@nua1234 EVs usually draw 32A for several hours, but I think heat pumps are overestimated. Mine draws about 8A steady state, 16A when working hard to warm the house up.
I’m only 5 minutes in, Alec, and I’m sure you deal with this: gas often works despite electrical outages. I can run my gas boiler*, range, and hot water heater even when the power fails.
*I can run circulator pump and thermostat off a generator.
Not to mention the much much higher efficiency than electric when it comes to heating things.
@@xy4489 I think he did a video explaining that electric is 100% efficient at generating heat.
@@jakeaurod But the generation of the electricity at the source is not 100 percent efficient
He did say he was gonna discuss this in the next episode. I’m interested to see what’s in store!
@@vasiaswolfram3113 When it comes to heating a house, a heat pump is closer to 400% efficient, though that goes down if the temperature difference is really large.
My entire life we've lived in an entirely electric home here in Northern Indiana. It's meant chopping and stacking a lot of wood from our woods to heat during the winter to save money. But we have the woods and the energy, might as well! I love chopping wood! And a nice fireplace is an awesome way to heat the house
Wood warms you up twice. Once when you chop it, then again when you burn it.
Where I live, California, some areas banned wood burning fire places years ago and they are attempting to do it everywhere here.
@@fretbuzzly I would LOVE to hear the BS excuses for passing that regulation.
Especially in the context of this video, using wood-fired heating means you do not have an entirely electric home.
@@grafzeppelin4069air pollution. When a number of homes in a dense suburban neighborhood are burning wood, particulates go up and it hits air quality.
I really like things being electrified. I have an induction stove, and an EV. However, we aren’t going anywhere without nuclear energy, so its good that it is making a comeback. Especially where you live, in Illinois, you guys are already doing very well with clean electricity due to your largely nuclear grid.
I'm glad someone mentioned nuclear. Anyone who's serious about energy will admit how inherently limited solar and wind technology is, and anyone who thinks we can rely on either (or both combined) to entirely replace fossil fuel burning is incredibly naive. The only solution is to stop being afraid of "Chernobyl events" and embrace nuclear. This might come as a shock to some, but nuclear reactors that are constructed today are WAY more sophisticated and safe than those made by the corner-cutting Soviets back in the day. There is no longer any reason to fear nuclear.
Your video on heat pumps helped me decide to get a heat pump when taking out my old oil furnace. I also have a mini split for my bedroom thats not ducted into central heating. No issues so far with either of them. With my new solar panels I can see a baseline 2.1 kw/h draw and an evening spike to approx. 5.5 kw/h when I come home
I'd just like to add in to the list of gas appliances in a house that gas based refrigerators and freezers are still a thing. A thing that may be cool enough for its own video if you haven't done one yet. Apologies if this is covered further in.
I've only ever heard of those being used in RVs.
@@eDoc2020 I know some people use those on their non electrified cabins in the middle of nowhere. But newer seem those used id grid power is available at all.
Came to see if anyone mentioned that. And yeah, they're mostly in RV's, but I do know at least 2 people that have them in their house, but not as their main fridge.
Adsorption refrigeration requires little heat or energy to start the refrigeration cycle, maybe a large candle flame, a 30 pound propane tank lasts for months.. I have seen these appliances in off grid wilderness homes where electricity is solar, water turbine driven, wind driven generators. Lighting is all low voltagae, low current Light emitting diode upgrades from older RV 12 volt direct current bulbs. These led bulbs use a tenth or less of the power the present 120v ac lights use, and many already have been swapped over to led style, so lighting is not the demand on the power...it's the work horse designed appliances like cooking range, electric element heating appliances (home spaces and water).
The best heating fuel would be one that burns clean, leaves little or no carbon ...
That would be hydrogen as one that can be generated from plain water..yes..plain water contains hydrogen and oxygen.. H2O...how do we separate them is another science. Check it out..
@@Barracuda48082 Absorption refrigerators use much more energy than typical compressor-based refrigerators. And 12v LED bulbs are similar efficiency to 120v ones, not that it matters because the power is low either way.
The problem with burning hydrogen is there's a lot of energy lost during electrolysis if you generate it from water.
I'm glad you covered smart circuit breakers. I've heard of them a few years back, but haven't heard any updates since then. I hope we can get some open source ones.
Only way I'd even consider a "smart" load center is if it was capable of being managed entirely on-prem and the protocol was fully documented. I've had way too many idiotic fails with proprietary "cloud" services and won't even consider vectoring my home lighting through "the cloud", let alone much more essential equipment.
The energy corps would just regulate your energy use as they see fit for their convience. Happened in Texas with smart meters during that snowstorm.
the amount of logistics and planning you were able to devise amazes me. if only we had more creative people like you taking decisions; true and passionate engineers.
I just finished my house electrification today with a heat pump water heater. 2 weeks ago I replaced my furnace with an air source heat pump. Did all the work myself and saved a bunch of cost.
What heat exchanger u used ?
Is it owned by you, did you install the system yourself, a community project ?
Why u needed to replace the pump, more compacity needed ?
I hate my stupid hybrid water heater. Have to disable the heat pump in the winter or else the basement will get into the 30s. And I still don't see a big drop in energy usage even when it's in heat pump mode.
@@person749 I like the ones that have a separate evaporator that goes outside but almost no options for them in the US currently. Where the "all in one" units seem to make the most sense is warm climates where the water heaters are electric anyways, they tend to not have basements, and they have the AC on 80% of the year. In Australia I have seen people have their water heaters outside their house!
@@randomvideosn0where Can confirm. Where I grew up in Australia, the government was paying people to replace their electric water heaters with the dual heat-pump types. Mine was outside on the side of the house. Pretty much no one I knew except for rich people had basements either.
@@randomvideosn0where Oh if I lived in Texas it would be a miracle machine!
District heating (and maybe cooling) would also solve a great deal of energy need as well. I live in downtown fake London (Ontario) and we are on district heating that is provided by a co-generation plant. I know some places now take waste heat from industries and use it to heat homes. However like you said, lots of homes are not built for upgraded electrical/heating systems right now, so retro fitting with smart systems is a good solution. I think a climate scientist said it well with "there is no one true solution, we must take a portfolio approach to our energy needs and climate policies."
One big issue I see with the idea of smart-panels to manage loads like that is most houses seem to be wired somewhat randomly. If i need to make sure the freezer is running I also need to have the master bedroom, master bath lighting, half of one bedroom, and some random lights all powered. If I need to keep the reptile tanks and aquariums running, I also have to keep the refrigerator, half the kitchen outlets, a hall outlet, and a dining room outlet all powered...which actually is something we have been getting changed (not cheap due to finished basement) because its problematic running on a generator if you are near max and the fridge goes into defrost overloads.
I also really don't like the idea of cloud connected critical things. One thing comes to mind is how will it fail if internet goes out? Will it fail everything-on and overload? Will it fail and not turn things on/off keeping state? Will it default everything on? What does it do after a power-failure, especially if there's no internet?
TC seems fairly measured and well through through on most things, but it seems like he's got a fairly large blind-spot for the GLARING ISSUES with this new "IOT" fad.
Too blinded by the flashy gizmos to see the cracks in the foundation.
I also don't get this device. Replacing a 100amp panel with a smart panel often will have similar costs to just upgrading the service to 200amp.
Alternatively, better than a panel shutting off circuits would be a device that measures current flow then communicates with the appliances to either not run or run at a reduced capacity. Mainly car chargers, water heaters and maybe it could tell a clothes dryer to pause for a bit.
A breaker panel is a safety device. Let it just be that.
@@Coconut-219 to be fair I think I also am more risk-aware having an unstable ISP I have learned the hard way how many things puke if they can't phone home. Also with trying to segregate them on VLANs I have learned just how inflexible most IoT is expecting a single flat subnet and no security controls between. Many manufacturers don't even disclose what ports are required to have it work at all.
There are far worst issues.
If the company is Venture funded what happens if they go bankrupt? Or they decide a new business model and all of a sudden your breaker box now requires $20/month because the know it is hard to swap out.
There are business side things that are legit risks and IOT is a graveyard of them.
It's like Apollo 13. You just have to turn everything on in the right order.
"Explodi Gassis" was my radio DJ name back in the 80s, so thanks for the shout-out!
since i found your channel i wanted to improve my home. the idea of fully electrifying the home is nice, but i have a lil problem. in my country, we had two country level blackouts in less than five years. depending of the zone, it can take even a whole month to get back electricity.
there are still a lot of things to improve everywhere unfortunately.
The *thunk* had me laughing out loud. Great editing.
Also, just for "how it is done elsewhere". Here in Belgium a high load connection is 63A@240V (15120 VA) and a typical home gets 40A@240V (9600 VA), but it gets complicated when you go for three-phase. Personally I have 25A@400V+N for example which is three phase 240V with 400V available between the phases, the math gets kind of funky with sqrt(3)*400V*25A but that becomes 17300 VA. Which is in between the typical US numbers of 100A@110V (11000 VA) and 200A@110V (22000 VA)
The only headache is that you need to keep the legs balanced and not exceed 25A on any side.
Now, the main big change being done here lately is that people will get billed extra based upon their 15 minute rolling peak load. This is to incentivize people to reduce their peak load (and the cynic in me thinks it is also to save on electric grid upgrade costs)
Correction: The US 100A service is actually at 240V, so the total power available for 100A service is 24 kW, and with 200A service, it's 48 kW.
@@radishpineapple74 oh. That's a lot of power then.
@@radishpineapple74 Which is interesting when you realize that even a small car has 100 horsepower or around 74 kW. So your car engine could easily power your house and the neighbors and heat them both from the waste heat. Which would be stupid environmentally and economically but interesting nonetheless.
That is a fun fact! Is 400V used frequently, for water heating maybe?
@@timgerk3262 For electric on-demand water heaters it is used (as those need a LOT of power). But the normal boilers are typically only 1400 or 2000 watt and just use regular 240. In my house it is only really used for the stovetop/oven combo. It is more of a headache than an advantage really. But its not something easily changed and it was like this when I bought the house.
Because as mentioned I really had to pay attention to balancing the phases. (don't put all heavy consumers on one phase for example, figure out the stovetop really only uses 2 phases to get 400V and use the third one for all plugs in the kitchen so if you run a heavy duty appliance on those + the stovetop the whole thing doesn't overload And yes electricians, I know it doesn't really 100% work like that, three phase gets really confusing when figuring out actual load on the phases when you have 400V consumers)
It might be advantageous in the future for the electric car charger. But with the capacity charges they now introduce you want to charge slowly anyways so it really isn't that much of an advantage.
The main reason it was often used is to save on copper wiring. as with 400V+N I can get 17300 VA over 3x4mm² (15AWG) wires whereas 63A requires 2x10mm² (8AWG) or even 16mm² (6AWG) when crossing larger distances and that is for less overall capacity. (The earth is sourced locally and always in 16mm² here)
Internally it is probably that way for the stovetop as well, by using three phase it can use thinner wires as 400V carries more power in less amps.
Sadly - unless we reach a point technologically where I can have my own fusion reactor in my garage - I don't trust the people in positions of power enough to not make... lets just say "questionable" energy policy & infrastructure decisions.
*Look at the California EV trashfire - Now imagine that but for YOUR HOUSE.* I like electricity as much as the next guy, but we need more products that "just work" and a correctly-designed electricity infrastructure to handle them.
Also its been said a thousand times, but the natural-gas infrastructure in the US is GOD-TIER and makes it essentially dirt-cheap to use gas for heating in most heavy appliances. That doesn't mean electricity is unattainable, that just means it has to be better than "mediocre".
As someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest and has never lived in a home with any gas connection, this video amused me.
I'm gonna add that if you have a forced air gas heating unit, ADDING an AC unit to it is a 1 day job for a qualified installer. We did this at our Townhouse a few years ago, and it was so nice to be able to keep the windows closed and avoid the noise of our neighbors across the driveway from shouting at each other.
And adding a heat pump is just about the same as adding a cooling-only unit. The main difference is in the thermostat wiring.
I live in a single family home sitting on a concrete slab with a flat roof (i.e. no attic). Running new circuits is... challenging. I'll stay tuned for Part 2.
The mental gymnastics at work here are astounding.
It's a little mind-boggling. New construction? Okay, maybe. Even then I'm not completely convinced. Ripping apart your entire house and throwing away working equipment isn't green at all. You'll spend significantly more energy doing that than you'll ever recoup, whether we're talking about out-of-pocket or some more ethereal concept like carbon footprint. If you like chasing house upgrade fads because it's your hobby, I think that's fine, but let's not pretend it's something else.
That chubby dude is trying to up his ESG Social-Credit Score
I'm already all electric, but I friggin' love this dude explaining things anyway.
Woah! The full video felt much shorter than it was. Thanks for the well written content! I'm not a homeowner but I love listening to this type of information.
One of the big concerns I have is electromagnetic interference. Some of it is so bad it even messes with wi-fi. And vice-versa! Ask ham radio operators what they think about arc fault breakers which trip when you transmit. Thankfully some are getting better.
BTW span is a cool product. (I am a certified installer).
I remember we were having a big problem with inverter microwaves tripping some brands of AFCI breakers, luckily i don't do much residential anymore.
That is interesting. I don't think I've come across that one. I do more PV and ESS these days rather than basic residential.
My issue, as others have said, is putting all of your eggs in one basket. Look at how one bad snow storm decimated Texas, and people literally froze to death due to the electric heat going out in their homes.
I'm sorry, but I'm a firm believer in having a diverse set of essential appliances to prevent that kind of disaster. Keep in mind, I'm up in North Eastern Pennsylvania, where we get slammed with winter storms and extreme cold regularly.
I want a gas stove, and preferably gas or oil heating options as a backup. Even when the lights are out, I can still easily use a lighter as an ignitor or pilot-light.
I also just prefer cooking with a gas restaurant style burner, but that's just a bonus.
I have nothing against sustainable energy, but when our sh*thole country has proved time and time again it can't manage infrastructure due to deeply seeded corruption, I don't want to rely one one single power/fuel source.
Perhaps a wood burning stove and heater would be perfect if I were in a more rural area, but suburban living doesn't leave any options other than gas or oil. Unless there's a way to create efficient at-home electrolysis, and run a burner/heater without blowing up your home, I foresee natural gas being around for a long time.
Edit: I don't use natural gas with a blower, but good try.
I'm in South Western PA, so I don't have it as bad as you, but that was my thought. However, gas heating doesn't help you (unless you have individual gas burners in your house) because the blower still won't go.
A combo of solar panels and gas would do it, but that's pricey. Plus, it is super cloudy here.
Renewable energy isn’t there yet. It’s at least 40 years out
Except that there aren't many systems that don't already have all their eggs in that basket. My furnace burns stuff, sure, but it still depends on electricity to run the blower and power the electronics.
@@legitskills9230 i gots generator in that case.
Go watch the 8bit guy, he acutally has created a solution for the power outage.
I want to see a Part 3, where you talk about Battery renew-ability, and how to rebalance battery charge capacitance; a way to re-enable your battery accepting charge; this can be done using a basic enough circuit, I think you could handle this amazingly, and it fits your second video theme nicely.
Excellent content, I am certainly convinced that it is not impossible to electrify a home. However I would raise two potential concerns that I have. First, homes with many occupants will have a difficult time manually limiting power usage, as simple as it may be for one person. It's not uncommon in my home to have the drier, oven, hot water heater, and A/C on at the same time, I would be concerned about inadvertently exceeding the limit. And second, I think your dismissal of the risks of IoT-controlled breaker panels is mistaken. There are indeed serious privacy risks, reduced serviceability, and dangers associated with placing essential functions of our homes in the hands of VC-backed tech companies.
That said, I would seriously consider everything you discuss in my own home, should I ever have the opportunity (except the smart panel!)
I'm mostly sad that he didn't mention the cost of building and shipping the new appliances. All 4 of the things he mentioned are gas in my home, and 3 of them are less than 5 years old. I sincerely doubt the environment would be better off if I threw them out to get new electric models instead. It's weird because I could swear his electric car video mentioned the heavy toll of producing and shipping automobiles of any sort and advised us to just make sure our NEXT vehicle did better by the Earth rather than urging us to go get a new EV right away. I'm sure he didn't mean for the takeaway message to be "go buy new appliances right now", nor did it come off that way to me. But I am still disappointed that he didn't even mention it.
As an Australian, I assumed off-peak electric water heaters were common. Old systems used a clock in the meter box (breaker board) to disable the heater except during off-peak hours (sometimes with a switch in the house to enable it if you ran low on hot water). Some regions had mains signalling to turn waterheaters on and off.
As always - really interesting video and the concept of a smart breaker box is very cool! Looking forward to part#2!! It's funny - but until you mentioned it at the beginning - I did not realize that gas-dryers were actually a thing (I always assumed the only gas appliances in a house were the furnace/water-heater/stove). Where I grew up in southern Quebec/Canada - everything in our house was electric except for the furnace and water heater ...but these used oil and not natural gas. We used to have this large tank in our basement that Shell would top up at certain times of the year thru an intake pipe in the outside wall (you always knew when this had occurred because there would be a distinct smell of heating oil for an hour or so after the tank was filled). In the early 90s (after I moved out) my parents decided to switch over to an electric furnace and water-heater and the oil tank was drained/removed (I think there was a gov't incentive program at the time encouraging home owners to upgrade older oil-based systems to electric). I don't remember my family ever having problems with the old oil system...but I was happy when my parents decided to upgrade (i.e. you'd occasionally hear about old oil tanks corroding/leaking and all the problems that would cause....so it was definitely some extra peace of mind having the old system upgraded to electric).
My family home just went through a tornado and we and our neighbors were without electricity for a week. Thankfully, we have a natural-gas water heater and we did not lose gas or water service, so we were able to not evacuate, instead sheltering in-place, shower regularly, and clean up our home and community. I am thankful that we are not reliant on a single source of energy and only needed a gasoline-powered generator for short periods each day to keep our refrigerator running and a bottled-propane camp stove to cook meals.
Yeah smart thinking gas still works when power lines are down and generators are the best thing in power outages especially for weeks on end. 73
A tornado is a rare event for individuals. Probably first tornado your neighborhood has seen in 200+ years. Including inefficient & dirty fossil fuel for the 1 per 200 year event is silly.
My house is 100% electric. Even after hurricanes is still works, because it’s underground & not affected by high winds
@@electrictroy2010 I don't have that choice all power lines are above ground with lousy poles. We don't deserve the ones of metal or concrete. Well I have a generator and my water heater is propane. Even if you have underground the substation is above ground. And can be knocked out. Hope that never happens. 73
@@electrictroy2010 It was a once in 25 year storm…tornadoes and straight-line winds are rare, but not once in 200…that’s just exaggerating to prove a false point. Power outages are common. From a few hours at a time to a day or two, especially during the winter due to ice storms and the spring due to wind events, natural gas is quite literally a lifesaver here. Electricity is not 100% reliable, but natural gas is. It would be better if we had all underground utilities, but that is cost prohibitive in established neighborhoods, and still wouldn’t make it 100% because most of our outages start at the substations and other mid-level distribution infrastructure.
I knew about gas ovens, but gas clothes dryers were a new one for me! 😄
I have one... I use it mainly in the winter, they work very well and are pretty cheap to run and the hot air blowing out goes through a water filter (to catch debris). This is awesome in the winter as it is also keeping my house warm (ie. Get twice the benefit at same cost).
In the spring and summer I use clothes lines which cost nothing.
yeah. I didnt even know those were a thing
Gas dryers are very common in Michigan
Even at 30 minutes, your topics are always useful and informative
For the record I think you could probably create an outstanding video on the power grid and it would fit well in the series. I know it's a fine line to walk but it's something that maybe we don't talk about enough. I can respect your decision not to open that can of worms though.
Maybe Alec could do a collab with Grady from Practical Engineering?
Grady at Practical Engineering already has a playlist about the electrical grid, there's about a dozen videos already.
I think that the issue with the power grid is that every states will take care of it differently. Not only that, but politics seems to get in the conversation as soon as you wanna build renewable energy.
@@cedricpomerleau5586 politics are in the conversation when you switch off natural gas now so, it's already going to piss people off
28:55 I feel like it's important to point out that running the stove also heats your home, so you're not actually losing that much heating output.
"Stop extracting gross sticky explodey goup out of the ground!"
And what? Extract rare rocks like lithium, cobalt and nickel to make batteries instead? These aren't renewable either.
Chubby dude is brainwashed - working on his ESG score to hit on the blue-haired girls
@Technology Connections - Alec, this was an excellent video! You did a really great job of covering all the major points and addressing the common concerns regarding home electrification. And I say that as an architect who specializes in this topic and passive house design. Your argument for why 100 amp service can work was well thought out and reasoned. I can't wait for more in this series!
For me living in Europe 100A sounds just bonkers, currently have 3x16A....
@@matsv201 remeber that our EU grid works at 220V, US at 100 if i remember correctly, we get more energy per A basically. Still here in Italy homes run with just water/home heating with gas and just 16A contract
@@8paolo96 No. Alec said for a 100A they get 24kW of power, meaning the main breaker is 240V. And 100A. Enormous amount of power. Where I live in Europe the "normal" amount is 32A.
It is against national code in America to install a new service at only 100amp.
@@AKguru762 This was presumably not the case 60 years ago when my house was built. And there's lots of houses like mine.
Smart panels are neat, what worries me is whether Leviton and Span will continue to support their products in the future. If the adoption rate isn't good enough, Span does not have other product lines to support itself and could die. Leviton at least is a multi product company and can weather slow adoption better than Span but you have to consider the fact that you can still buy a breaker for a Square D panel from 1970 and a Siemens panel from 1974. In other words, Span is going to have slow adoption because slow adoption can kill the company and Leviton will kill a product line based on a business decision as panels are not their primary business.
Great topic! It reminds me of the time I rented an apartment that only had 40 A of total service. The breakers would trip if I had both window AC units on (it was 105 F at the time), and when we brought an electrician out to work on the birds nest of a panel, he just said "Nope." and walked away. It actually worked out, though, because I was able to get a high-efficiency fridge and only use one AC unit. That left me enough overhead that I could charge my EV to full every night on the 120 V service to the garage.
My house was built as entirely electric in the early 1970s, but with a *40A* (on 240V) service. This lead a previous owner to move to oil fired water heating and plumb the house for radiators - the old air plenum heating system cabinet got used for the fridge. I've have 80A service supplied so I can get a car charger installed but it'll be a while before I consider changing the heating; considering the boiler was only replaced a few years ago with a gas one.
The previous owner learned from experience that when the power goes out, if you have no heat or hot water.. it really sucks.
@@joseamadorsilva7395 the oil or gas boiler cannot run without power either. Also with fully underground power distribution here, there are very rarely outages caused by weather events
@@cian87 some of the older systems can run manually or have a car battery backup for those times.. I used to work with a guy who owned a lot of rental property.. he said his biggest fear was freezing to death with fuel to use and an electric system that thinks it's safer if he freezes to death without it
a house I rented had 60 A service
built in 1920s
but I suspect its electrical was 1950s-ish by clues on the panel
and I bet a good dozen houses on that block shared the same 50 kVA pole-mounted transformer that happened to be in _my_ back yard LOL
My opinion is that the public money should be used to due replacements in the areas where there is the highest gain. So that'd probably first be homes that just need a reversing valve. But also homes with upgradable service but without appliances or furnaces.
I love this type of topic on your channel(s)- but if you ever want to make a series for homeowners to optimize these things in a more step-by-step matter, please please do.
Great video! Thanks from Sweden. Ps: running a heat pump at -35 Celsius has not been an issue here the last 10 years or so (or so I thought), turns out it's just that the standard packages comes with the "backup heating" included, meaning a whole lot of consumers believe their pump works down to -40 degrees Celsius which they don't.. But then also they really do work fine at -40. 🙃
assume "backup" kicks in around -25 or so
in Canada there are "mini split and built in airsource units that will heatpump down to -25 and ground source OR "watersource" units THAT WILL go down -40 OR LOWER
@@jasonriddell same here in mn; being in the middle of the continent we see some really cold air temps, which makes ground source ("water source" generally being against code now unless grandfathered in) way more appealing.
Although I'll just keep heating with my wood stove. Good exercise year round, i have a very efficient stove so relatively much less pollution than in years past, carbon neutral because the trees sucked the carbon from the air in the first place... and free!
I'm in Canada and I have use the heat pump exclusively for heating to -5C.. Combo of electric heat and heatpump down to ~-18C and electric heat only below that.
People in the US assume heat pumps are like what went into housing in the South and border states in the 1980s. In other words, underrated for the home. There's a night and day difference between those and what they're installing now but so few people seem to know it.
Are there current home heatpump refrigerants that can extract heat at -40° and spit it back out at 40°C or 100°F ?
thanks to your video on heat pumps, I got a ductless mini split installed, and it has changed my fiancé’s life. i’m excited to hear about heat pump water heaters.
😎 definitely worth my Patreon subscription
oH mY gOd 2 DaYs AgO!1!1!1!1!1!one
Doing laundry often involves hot water and a dryer. I'm not sure placing the dryer above the water heater is the best idea. I'd almost always rather have access to a shower or cleaned clothes. It's a hassle but if I need to my clothes can sit wet for a couple hours (they sometimes do that now anyway.)
In large houses with 3 or 4 kids this will certainly be a headache. In some houses a shower, an oven/cooktop, and dryer are almost always running. Obviously every house has different needs, but larger families use more power than smaller families do. I don't think this is a system/plan of action for everyone, but it's an excellent proof of concept regardless.
I don't know about newer dryers, but older ones certainly won't restart a cycle when power is restored. So in an underpowered scenario like what the video addresses, everybody using the dryer would have to be aware that they have to check on the dryer before it's too late in the evening. I think I would lower the priority of HVAC, put it just above the water heater at the bottom. It's the interactive things that require touching and tapping that need to be higher priority.
I was thinking a similar thing. Wet clothes can always be laid out or, in a real pinch, dried with the good ol' hairdryer and wear it damp method. But when I'm cooking, chances are I've been using hot water. Washing hands, dishes, and utilizing the hot water from the tap to make bringing a pot of water to boil faster are pretty much all guaranteed. I'd say dryer is likely the least important besides the car charger, and I might drop the HVAC a peg too just because my house is pretty well insulated and I can stand a 4 degree change in temperature a lot easier than a half-raw meal or a cold shower.
As a Norwegian, it sounds so foreign to hear you talk about the things i grew up with as something novel like this. I want to highlight how much easier everything is when it’s all electric! This is great, you can do this! 🎉 a couple of years ago furnaces became illegal here!
It's not really novel to go all electric in the US. It is pretty common in places where other sources are not available. Where other sources are, the issue is cost. Even at 0.10USD/KWh natural gas costs about 1/4 vs. resistance heating. Air source heat pumps are comparable to operate but cost much more up front. Ground source heat pumps cost less vs NG to operate, but installation is very expensive. Of course this varies by region.
Also it isn't extra effort from the homeowner perspective. Most of the time it works in the background. The reliability between electric and gas or oil based devices don't differ greatly, so not much to be gained there either.
IMO the major problem in the USA is that most people aren't planning to keep a home for life, so spending extra on better appliances and better design and construction (insulation, windows and air sealing) hasn't had proper focus historically. Better homes don't get enough credit when being sold. The improvements are largely hidden and ignored. That is getting better I think, but getting that return on your investment when building is difficult.
As that mindset shifts, better products will be installed.
My parents' live in the United States. Their home was built in the 1960s. The address plate on the front of their house says "Powerhome", and it's illuminated by a bulb that has not been changed since the house was built. The plate signifies that the home was built to be an "all electric" home of the future, a novel idea in the 1960s. We could accomplish it then, and it stands to reason that with recent technological advances we can most certainly accomplish it now. Hoping we'll get up to those Norwegian standards.
Illegal for new constructions/new renovations to the HVAC system or illegal as in they take your furnace/fine you for continuing to use it?
Yes, I'm from one of those more primitive countries (the Netherlands), and looking at doing what's normal for you. Quite a lot of work, as it's still fairly novel... But I understand you also do underfloor heating with electric heat mats? Mine is water based... Ha det....
@@DarthCiliatus As in taking your furnace.
I know you said that you are referring to the American market. However, in my country we're going the opposite direction! We used to have an extremely reliable grid (one of the best in the world), but decades of neglect has caused the grid to become so fragile and unreliable that we're all forced to switch to "burning stuff".
We've switched to LPG (a very clean version of gas) for cooking and plain old wood stove for heating in the three/four winter months we have. Our water heaters (geysers) are directly solar heated.
The rest is still powered by electricity, but with many homes now using battery-backed up inverter systems - even in the city, where I live. PV solar is used for supplemental power and charging during the day. It's a weird mix of renewables and back to burning more stuff for cooking/heating.
Great video! I will add that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Replacing one’s A/C unit with a heat pump but keeping a gas furnace would allow one to use gas as the backup instead of heat strips. Since this backup isn’t used very often, you are still significantly reducing your carbon footprint while not going all in on electrification right away. This can be good in extremely cold climates where it can sometimes drop down to -30C or even colder. Note I said sometimes, when it isn’t that cold the heat pump can take over. A smart thermostat can also choose the energy source that is cheapest at the time, based on current rates and outdoor temperature.
Hahaha, he thinks it's a TV show for housewife people, US only, this is America, in Cuba he is ?
Smart breaker you needed, is that replacing the A/C unit ? You did the transition, heat pipes, heat exchanger ? You did that all yourself, great job !
what energy sources you have, low power grid and heat pieps only, never needed any gas ?
You could but its one of those why bother because ng often has minimum service cost/fixed fees. So probably cheaper to just run electric heat on that one or 2 days you need it.
@@KingOfKYA It typically costs a consumer more to use electric heating for a month than NG furnace for the whole heating season.
You need to consider the "social regulation" problem. Many municipalities forbid such gas furnace + heat-pump, or tax the crap out of you if they find out you are doing it.
RE:roger1818. Having gas appliances for backup purposes can be an expensive way to do things. Many utility companies have switched to a new system to scam customers. It's called a "customer" or "service" charge, which you must pay monthly regardless of how much power/fuel you use. As customers keep trying to use less and less power/fuel to be more efficient and save money, the utility companies keep raising the "customer" charge higher and higher to make up for it. In a normal house where you are using the average amount of power/fuel, the "customer" charge may be 20% of your bill. But when you are only using it for backup, you may be paying 95% of your bill for "customer" charge. Essentially, you are paying them for "nothing". Until governments wise up and quit allowing utilities to use this scam, energy wasting, billing technique, there is no incentive for consumers to reduce energy consumption.
My parent's house was built in the early 70's and was originally built 100% electric. After my father inherited the house from his parents shortly before I was born, they installed a coal stove because the coal was a lot cheaper than using the electric resistive baseboard heaters.
They still use coal to this day.
When the government starts to force everyone into electric everything the price will skyrocket as the upgrades will be paid for by us from both our bills and taxes.
@@FishFind3000 They have plans to install a heat pump this summer because coal is getting expensive too
Interesting video. And I'd like to preface what i'm about to say by saying that I have a heat pump (two actually, Fujitsu, with a CoP of 4). I have an electric dryer (gas ones are also available in the UK but not so common any more) and I have about 5kWp of solar PV on my roof. Now that i've said that, I'm happy that I still have a gas boiler (heats the home and the water), because it costs me a third of the cost of using electricity to heat my home, even with the heat pump (they're ASHPs btw). I also have an induction hob, and a gas hob, I bought a combined one because on very sunny days I can cook for free. However, when it's not sunny, it's much, much cheaper to use gas to cook with. A unit of gas costs me about 5p per kWh. A unit of electricity now costs me about 37p per kWh. (That's 6 us cents and 44 us cents respectively). So since our energy prices (specifically electricity) have gone through the roof, all I can say is that I'm glad I did not rip out the existing gas boiler and gas cooker. I am trying. I do have both options. Just one is considerably cheaper to use than the other. Come summer time, we run almost entirely on electricity and for much of the time, for free. But there's no way i'm giving up gas any time soon.
That’s understandable, but that’s also very specific to the UK.
In France gas costs about twice that and electricity is about half that, so it’s much closer.
I have just installed a heat pump with a COP of 5, and it should be way cheaper than anything possible with gas.
We have decided to even remove our gas meter to save approximately 400€ per year, yes it costs that much per year to have the luxury of using gas. No thanks.
I must say, gas stoves are a godsend when there's a power outage. When you have a gas stove and the power goes out, you can pretty much just go on as normal for the evening and wait it out. If you have an electric stove, sorry Charlie, you're going to have to go somewhere else for the night.
Of the four typical gas appliances, I have the misfortune of having them all be gas _except_ the stove. Every time my power goes out (which is thankfully rare), I have go somewhere else. Meanwhile, looking back at my previous home (where power outages happened multiple times per year), I _never_ had to leave because my stove was gas.
I'm interested to see the solutions for power outages presented in Part 2.
Counterpoint, if almost all houses run 100% on electricity that means higher demand for a more robust electric grid. Losing power for any significant amount of time here in Sweden is extremely uncommon.
If it's a short outage (1-12 hours), just have sandwiches or something else that doesn't need to be cooked.
If long outages are a common issue in your area, either pick up a camp stove or stockpile a few MREs per person.
Yeah, a camp stove is still (probably?) a gas stove, but it's being used FAR less often than your main stove is, so you're relying on gas far less often. And MREs aren't as memetically bad as they used to be - they also usually come with chemical heating elements, add water to it and it makes your food hot for you.
A grill also works - it's just a really big and non-portable camp stove, after all.
The first thing I did after moving in to my new apartment was to disconnect from the gas grid. 😄 Power outages are extremely uncommon here though, so it's basically a non-issue. Induction stoves provide all the same benefits in terms of speed while not posing any of the potential health risks of gas stoves. Cleaning also becomes significantly easier.
@@blunden2 Yep.
Unless you're prone to consistent and extended power outages (over a day long, several times a year) for non-disaster reasons (as those would interfere with gas as well) there is zero sensible justification for a gas stove in your house.
In all cases beyond those VERY narrow ones, electric/induction ones will do just fine. Keep some food that doesn't need to be cooked (cereal, sandwiches, etc) just in case, and maybe pick up a camping stove or a grill as a backup in case of an extended outage.
@@synvila Also this is a good point yeah. More electricity means a more robust grid is *required.*
Plus it's not like gas lines can never be interrupted either.