boonhet

@boonhet@lemm.ee

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boonhet ,

As an European I had to convert this and... 10996 square feet is absolutely MASSIVE and I don't mean just for an apartment in a tower in NYC either. It's massive for a house in the countryside.

boonhet ,

How big are we talking here, really? Or should insulation be considered too?

I have two tanks in my house that are heated by different elements of the (fossil fuel based, unfortunately) heating system - the stove and the furnace, which used to burn coal, but now we're doing wood and briquettes.

Either one of those can be heated to near boiling temperatures in about an hour, carry about 100-150 liters of hot water, but sadly will cool down over less than 24 hours so if it's freezing, but not "fuck my balls are going to fall off" freezing, I have to use the electric boiler at great expense. But both of those are bare metal tanks, no insulation at all AFAIK.

PS: House was built by grandparents, I'm too broke to put 10-30 grand on either an air to water or ground to water heat pump right now, but if anyone's interested, I can tell horror stories about the current heating system and house altogether. Soviet era design choices and modern prices for literally everything make for an uh... interesting combination. When it hit -28C (around -18F), I was up all night fueling the furnace, literally feeling myself burn through money.

boonhet ,

Welcome to my personal hell!

The house is divided into 5 semi-floors, but of those, one is basement level, and another is halfway underground. There are 3 above-ground floors. The entire thing is heated mainly using a furnace in the basement that drives hot water into the radiators and also a hot water tank that by default always runs into the toilet sink, but a switch can be made to use it in the other faucets too. Otherwise, the upstairs bathroom has its' own electric boiler, that can also be used downstairs in the kitchen, and also the sauna, but for it to run into the kitchen, you'd have to switch around some valves again - otherwise the kitchen and sauna use hot water from the stove in the kitchen, which also has a massive tank. The stove tank I believe is the only one that can't be used in the upstairs bathroom. I'd also like to add that there used to be a separate tank in the sauna that got its' heat from the sauna furnace and ONLY heated water for a single faucet in the sauna, but NOT the shower in the sauna. That's been gone a long time, because there was no real need for a faucet there, you can just get water out of the shower which has a faucet attachment anyway.

Now, insulation. The house has a total of 5 big windows and 10 small ones. The big ones are now double or triple glazed (they weren't all done at the same time, so 2 are double glazed), the small ones have two single pane window panels, which does technically create an air gap, but all the windows leak hair like crazy. The walls themselves are actually well insulated I believe. But the roof has been insulated using sawdust. Naturally, mice have carried it all away, there's none left. But also the upper half of the roof leaks water, so I can't add new insulation to that half until the roof's fixed. Also it's lined with asbestos-cement panels, so those are going to be fun to remove. Luckily the lower half was repaired years ago.

The kicker? The house being as big as it is, the furnace is absolutely massive and burns through wood like there's no tomorrow. It's meant to be used with long-burning coal, which was cheap in the soviet times. Now it's expensive and hard to find, so the heating benefits don't really outweigh all the drawbacks anymore.

Ah and if it gets really cold, there are two additional fireplaces I could make a fire in. You know, in addition to the furnace, stove and sauna.

Do I want a ground-source heat pump with under-floor heating? Hell yeah. Is it feasible? Not even close. The yard isn't big enough to fit a horizontal collector big enough for the house and I'm not sure I could have deep enough holes drilled for vertical ones. And even if I got the heat pump, it'd have to heat the existing radiators, because I'd simply lose my sanity installing under-floor heating here.

boonhet ,

I'm happy those exist (after all, not everyone can get a proper heat pump installed, maybe because landlord is an asshole, maybe because other people in your apartment building say they don't want the noise, maybe you live in a historic part of town), but holy hell are they useless compared to a real heat pump.

If you CAN get a real one installed, but your current finances only allow for the portable one - I'd recommend considering waiting for the real deal if you're able to save up for it. I spent ~300 euros on a portable one, it was OK for cooling a tiny room, never used for heating because the damn thing made too much noise to be worth it in a big house with a working central heating system. I then spent nearly 3000 euros (including installation) on a relatively powerful heat pump. It's probably cut my winter heating costs in half (at the cost of driving up the electric bill a bit of course).

The kicker? The noisy portable one isn't JUST gutless, it also uses more power.

And don't even get me started on sealing it properly with european style windows (you know, the kind that tilt on two axes rather than lifting up).

boonhet ,

At the end of the day

Way to make me feel incompetent, building all this in a day /s

boonhet ,

I have no questions, but I want to let people here know that there are two excellent websites related to this: http.cat and http.dog, for looking up HTTP status codes.

For an example, if http.cat/418 doesn't brighten your day, I don't think there's much that can.

boonhet ,

But then people would think they are a teapot

boonhet ,

You're welcome! I try to share this with people whenever I can, hoping that it makes someone's day better. It certainly gives me a lot of joy when I can respond to something with a relevant http cat, though the few people I do it to might be getting a little annoyed.

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