Comment by rawgabbit
17 hours ago
I see some places in the Japanese countryside where homeowners get propane tanks delivered to them for cooking? I believe in an earthquake prone country, this is safer than having natural gas piped to their homes?
The problem I think is that Japanese culture values hot baths daily. Heating water for the bath using electricity is still too costly.
Propane tanks strapped to your house is common even in cities since it's cheaper to install (but then costs more per cubic meter).
The downside to propane tanks is they become fireworks if a neighbor has a fire which heats them up.
In Japan anyone who goes all-electric these days is getting a heat pump water heater ("eco-cute") by default, resistive electric heating doesn't really exist out of small plugin units like kotatsu and radiant heaters.
If you have a link to an "eco-cute" water heater, I would like to learn more. Thanks.
All the big Japanese makes have them. They basically look like a water tank with the outside portion of a mini split air conditioner hooked up next to them.
With my power company in Japan, by going "all-electric" (having an eco-cute and induction stove), I qualify for a rate plan where I can trade off solar power peak hours (half price) for the duck curve hours (double price), so I have my water heating only running during cheap hours and cut down on air conditioning during the expensive hours.
Ours is from Mitsubishi and is just the builder-grade one from our fix-rate renovation company. It will connect to the wifi so you can start a bath from an app on your phone on your way home from work. There's also an intercom between the bath and the kitchen so mom can tell the kids to get out of the bath, dinner is done. Traditional Japanese values.
Mitsubishi https://www.mitsubishielectric.co.jp/home/ecocute/
Panasonic https://sumai.panasonic.jp/hp/
Daikin https://www.ac.daikin.co.jp/sumai/alldenka/ecocute/structure
Corona https://www.corona.co.jp/eco/
Noritz https://www.noritz.co.jp/product/kyutou_bath/ecocute/
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From a quick look, these are very similar to the heat pump water heaters that are starting to become common in the SF Bay Area (it looks like gas water heaters will be banned in the next few years, so people are hopping on the band wagon).
At a glance the only difference is the ones I am seeing have the heat exchangers in the body of the unit (so take the heat from the room where the tank is), whereas these "eco-cute" look like they put that outside the home.
Where I live in the US (near Seattle), there's no piped natural gas, most detatched houses have a 250-500 gallon propane tank. Seattle has piped gas, but my county never had the density to justify the expense to install distribution piping and now its disfavored.
My house has a second tank for a backup generator. We use the main tank for our stove/range, water heater, clothes dryer, and a decorative fireplace that's rarely used. Some neighbors have a propane furnace, but we've got a heatpump with resistive strips as backup heat.
> Seattle has piped gas,
This is block by block. Long ago Seattle asked home owners on each block to foot the bill to run gas. Many blocks said yes, some said no. For blocks where only 1 side was developed, the cost was higher and there was a greater chance of everyone saying no. That is what happened on the street I grew up on, when the city had asked everyone to pay for gas lines, there were so few houses on that working class block that it was cost prohibitive for everyone to pony up how much $ would have been needed.
So instead people had oil furnaces installed and now that block will at some point require serious environmental remediation. :/
It's interesting all the permutations there are out there. We have gas from PG&E. Our house has an electric clothes dryer, gas stove with dual-fuel oven, gas furnace, and gas water heater. No air-conditioning other than a portable unit for "emergency" heatwave and AQI events. Our furnace is ancient, and the winter gas bill is the painful part.
I have a long term interest in full electrification, but find the process daunting due to the interlocking set upgrades. Between insulation envelope upgrades and electrical system upgrades, there is a lot of potentially disruptive work needed to even allow permits to be issued for heat-pump HVAC and water heater or fully electric kitchen.
If the internal wiring also needs much work, it threatens to be almost as invasive as a gut renovation. Then, I ponder what other work we'd want to piggyback on it. But then it all sounds too much for life and budgets, so we procrastinate...
Yep, when I was in the bay area, we had a gas furnace that was built in week 53 of the year before the 78% efficiency standard took effect. Our plan was to put in a heatpump to replace it when it stopped working and get A/C to manage (at least) the heatwaves, but it kept going, so you know. That house was built in 1907 and had an unfinished basement for the original footprint and a generous crawl space for the addition --- wiring would have been pretty simple, but it would still be a lot of investment to replace something that was working ... of course a heat pump system would be way more than replacing like for like.
Were you there for the earthquake in 2001? I was. I still find it surprising there hasn't been another large quake in Seattle since then. Pretty fortunate.
No, I moved in 2018; long enough to complain about all the people moving here even though I did the same thing ;) I did get to experience the viaduct, and did the tunnel / viaduct ride before the grand opening of the 99 tunnel and the demolishing of the viaduct; so I've got some street cred?
I think the area got off pretty light from the 2001 quake and the pace of retrofits has been too slow, but has had fortunate timing so I think things won't be too bad for the next quake, depending on exactly where it hits.
Wow that's interesting. If you have to do it all over again, would you still get the heatpump?
Yes, our climate rarely drops below freezing, so the heatpump is a good fit. My house has little shade, so a/c in the summer is very nice.
I would have a separate unit for the basement and the first floor though; we do have zoning dampers, but it's not very effective and the basement gets too cold.
Propane deliveries are expensive, if starting from scratch, I might have wired for electric clothes drying and water heating. And I would have probably gone with owned tanks instead of the current system where the delivery company owns the tanks. Electricity prices doubled in the last 5 years, but propane may have gone up more.
seattle is basically the ideal location for a heatpump.