Sales are growing so quickly that some installers wonder whether heat pumps could even wipe out the demand for new air conditioners in a few years and put a significant dent in the number of natural gas furnaces.

  • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Hot water continuously radiates it’s heat into the environment around it. City wide hot water infrastructure would be hugely inefficient and impractical as that water would constantly have to circulate to and from homes to be re-heated and re-circulated.

    Literally heating massive quantities of water; just to pump it out into essentially a field (of pipes), wait for it to cool, then pump it back and do it again.

    Without that recirculation to keep hotwater immediately available at each home/tap; you’d be waiting hours for all the cooled off water to flush out of the pipes and be replaced with hot water, wasting all that water while you wait. (kinda like waiting on a typical hotwater tank, but x100)

    Electric hot water on demand combined with green sources of electricity should be the goal.

    • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Lots of countries have city hot water. It’s a simple concept. I don’t there there is that much heat wasted covering that many people in such a small area.

      I just wondered about the economics. I think most of the current ones use waste heat from electricity generation