I live in a moderately cold area and pay less than $2000 a year to heat a ~2000 square foot home. So something that improves the efficiency of the building would have to have a pretty low cost to even pay back at all.

There's probably a few lower cost things that I am overlooking, to the tune of netting out a few hundred dollars of savings after however many years they took to pay back.

> Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder?

In the UK, houses have energy ratings, which are largely not that useful, but they do allow estimated annual running charge.

The house that I live in we moved in and were spending ~1.7k on gas a year.

We needed to re-render the place, because it has a few missing pieces. we spent the extra £4 to put in 90mm of external wall insulation. We also had to replace the glazing. It was cheaper to get triple glazing (for some reason), however the results of that was that it was 6degrees warmer in winter, and 10 degrees (celcius) cooler in summer. Even with gas prices doubling, we spend about £70 on hotwater and heating.

Maybe a law forcing disclosure of average heating/cooling bills in the listing would do the trick?

That's an appraisal problem. Even cars are valued on more things but they do have mpg plastered everywhere.

You don't even need to go that far, put 100m of tubing 2m underground and plug it in your heat recovery ventilation system, bam free winter freeze protection/pre warming and free summer cooling, all you need is a 30w pumps and you will save hundreds of kw per year

same here. 1940's house with slate roof and vermiculite "insulation". You can't just use modern insulation techniques or blown-in foam because that would make exterior wood rot. You need to keep the air flowing the right way to dry out the wood.

A house built to passive house standards requires less than 10w per sqm of peak heating demand, a 500w toaster will warm 50sqm, which is a decent room already.

There are passive houses built at 2000m altitude in the Alps, some are made of wood and have literal strawbales for insulation, there are no excuses left in 2026 not to build good houses, it's more economical, more practical, more comfortable, more ecological

You could put that 500W into a heatpump.

Passive house standards first gained popularity in Germany and Scandinavia but it seems the principles have been adapted to quite a wide range of climate zones now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

Take plants that can use enery from the sun 'freely'. Is it cheap for them? Not really when you look at the evolutionary battle between plant species. There is always another plant willing to take your place if you're inefficient, slow growing, not poisoning the ground around you, or some other trick to keep you alive.

Any means to keep energy cheap and abundant must be by force because it is not a natural order.

Not saying it shouldn't, I'm just saying it isn't. Housing should be free and taxes illegal but here we are. Some retard decides to go to war with Iran and it costs 30% more to tank your car, I'm not making the rules. Solar panels got 15% more expensive over night in my country too. What happens when they decide to mess around with China? They make 70% of batteries and panels.

I'm replying to someone who bought a 30kwh battery and 24kwp setup, in my country that's already classified as a "local energy provider" I think they're doing OK financially.

People still spend literal millions on poorly built and poorly insulated mcmansions today btw, it's not a money issue.

GP's argument is the marginal cost when building new is roughly that amount, not that any house can be retrofitted for that amount.

However, it's not that far off for retrofitting, if you do it when your siding already needs to be replaced. Add 3-5" XPS foam to the exterior of any standard house; if a basement you bring insulation several feet down and out below the ground. If cathedral ceiling, when replacing the roof you put 6-8" polyiso down over the sheathing before the new roofing material. If vented roof, get 1.5x code minimum blown in the attic. Air seal first, of course (1-hour of air sealing is the best ROI of anything you can do in an old house).

But nobody wants to put that money up.

Modern heat pumps can heat efficiently at -25 degrees Celsius or even lower. Not sure if they are available in Canada, but in Scandinavia (similar climate) they are pretty common.

I also agree that 66F (about 19 degrees Celsius) is not comfortable during day time. It is fine for sleeping temperature. During winter homes in heating dominated climates typically have higher indoor temperatures. One advantage of lower inside temperature is that relative humidity stays slightly higher when it is very cold outside.

I actually live on the same latitude as Ontario so -40F/C is not unusual. Add in windchill, and it gets even more common, given my windy location.

Yeah, I understand I'm probably an outlier at 66F. I was using the numbers more to point out how little a house temperature will drop with good windows and insulation.

People acclimatize pretty well if you let them. We keep our house at 65F all winter, and set the AC for 85F in the summer and everyone is pretty happy. The payback period on a good sweater is not very long.

“elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.”

At 66 degrees F? That sounds like put a sweater on if you’re chilly, not some near death extreme.

Any evidence that such an ‘extreme’ would cause issues?

>66F is ridiculously cold to me...I would find that very uncomfortable and elderly people would be shivering constantly and highly susceptible to respiratory illness.

I know people who live in the Mediterranean and get by with no heating during the winter with indoor and outdoor tempuratures this low or lower, so it seems that one can be conditioned into doing so.

Perhaps it's the presence of more sunlight on average rather than the temperature that makes the difference.

Thermal curtains are a godsend. I remember reading about your journey and I hope it works out! I think it'd be money well spent.

In my last house, I replaced single pane windows with properly installed, sealed, and insulated double-hungs and it practically cut my heat bill in half. I agree that modern window to modern window replacement probably won't get you much, though.

Weird because a significant number of humans beings in the USA immigrated at some point from a country in this climate.

What? They store the surplus in their batteries during the day and use it at night.

I genuinely do not understand why people are so afraid of solar. It's baffling.

I use a desktop heating pad under my keyboard. It's an Apple thin, metal keyboard, which works really well for this. It uses about 20w.

There's nothing farcical about wanting one's own space where there's space to have one's own space. I'm grateful to no longer be sharing walls with a domestic abuse couple on one side and a midnight banshee on the other wall when she got busy. Energy is cheap, people are exhausting.

I believe a lot of that demand is due to there being no incentive to increase energy efficiency.

SEER, while a useful first-order approximation of efficiency, is for cooling and not heating. HSPF-V is for cold climates. Likely you just don't have a cold-climate heat pump which maintains full capacity down to -10°C (and some a little lower still), even before you get into appropriate maximum capacity.

things have not improved.

Too many folks here do not understand or care to appreciate the constraints of the real world. Heat pumps are excellent and relatively cheap but have limitations. One of the biggest limitations is that a heat pump's efficiency drops as ambient temperature drops. This is the worst possible situation for heating as the conditions when the risks of losing heat are the highest, are precisely the conditions when these devices are least efficient.

> the battery capacity isn't large enough

This. You have enough generation to keep a mansion toasty, but you don’t have enough storage to last a long winter night.

I imagine my system is probably sufficient to keep an 800 sqft house comfortably warm in a climate where it goes down to the 20s in the winter.

> The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics who can't even imagine how crazy they sound to most everyone else.

Most everyone else? Only about two percent of the Earths population live above the 55th parallel. There’s a big gulf between that and the ‘subtropics’.

I don’t disagree that solar/battery isn’t the answer for 100% of power needs, let alone 100% of heating needs, but if we got to even 50% we’d be in a lot better situation than we are now.

> The article is typical handwavy crap which is popular among people living in what amounts to subtropics

To be fair, 90% of the population lives within 45 degrees of the equator. If we're talking about global energy solutions for CO2 reduction, we can go a long way just by focusing on what works in these areas of the globe.

The article does also point out that hydro/wind are going to be important at higher latitudes in winter, but they also acknowledge that they don't account for seasonal variation in demand. That's the biggest flaw I can find in the analysis.

FWIW: I'm down in a mild arid climate at 35N, and yeah, 90% of our winter days are nearly sunny, even when the lows are in the teens. It's a different world for sure.

> "... handwavy crap ..."

handwavy argument. Yes, in the (sub)tropics the argument is even stronger pro-PV, not the least because it'll give you the opposite of heating - aircon - for free right when you need it. And considering summer heatwaves as have been seen the last few years "way north", that benefit will extend that way even if you wouldn't bother considering letting it "assist", if not fully replace, your heating. That said though, for 50° polewards and above, if you wanted to use PV in winter orient the panels vertically. If you can clad your too floor with shiplap larch so you can with PV panels. Given the price of timber ... there's a plan.

(only saying handwaving goes both ways)

Approximately 1% of people in the world currently have an EV with a more than 30 kWh battery... and we're very early in the adoption curve of EVs and other large batteries.