Comment by leguminous
Comment by leguminous 2 months ago
This is a good point that I had not considered, and I will add a few additional thoughts:
* In cold weather, solar heat gain can work in your favor as well. Much of the effect will depend on the orientation, shading, and properties of your windows, though. On the other hand, as another commenter pointed out, more sun in southern, cooling-dominated climate can also mean more, cheaper electricity.
* If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.
* At 65F (18.3C), most people I know would already be wearing a jumper/sweater. That's why I chose a lower target temperature for Berlin. The best source I could find[1] indicates that in November-December of 2022 (in the context of rising energy prices due to Russia's war with Ukraine), Germans actually kept their houses at 19.4C, on average.
* Maybe I'm moving the goalposts a bit, but I chose Berlin mostly because the numbers worked out conveniently. As someone who grew up in the American upper midwest, I wouldn't consider Berlin to be particularly cold. Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/80-percent-german-house... (original report is on German)
> If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.
In a cold environment, you can just take that energy from outside. If you’ve got a heatpump, then you can always set it up make sure that waste heat produced can be used to heat a space, and make sure that it’s always scavenging energy from a place you either want to keep cool, or from outside.
> Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.
If we’re talking survivable environments here, then phoenix isn’t a good choice. Places like Delhi are better where not only are the temps high, but so is the humidity. At times hot enough and humidity enough that the wet bulb temperature rises higher than human survivable conditions, in which case, without heat pumps, it’s literally impossible for humans to survive more than a few hours.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/wet-bulb-t...