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Damien C. Tanner's avatar

I suspect the higher uptake of heat pumps in colder wealthy countries is driven by the better insulation and air tightness of housing there.

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Liberty's avatar

Hmm, maybe.

But whatever you're using to heat (gas, resistance electric), if you have bad insulation, you'll lose heat and it'll cost you more than in a better insulated house, so I'm not sure if heat pumps are more vulnerable to bad insulation than anything else, unless I'm missing something 🤔

I suppose that in many European cities, they have district heating, and I'm not sure how that is metered and if maybe the incentives are weaker on insulation/waste..? That I don't know.

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Damien C. Tanner's avatar

Worked it out: heat pump efficiency changes based on flow temperature. Less insulation means higher temperature is needed to heat the home. Whereas a fossil fuel boiler is efficient at a high temperature by default.

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Damien C. Tanner's avatar

Yeah I guess you are loosing the heat either way with bad insulation. Maybe it's more noticeable with a heat pump because the flow temperature is lower versus a fossil fuel system.

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Kevin Bracker's avatar

Love the idea on "systems thinking". One of the things I used to stress over the last 10 years of teaching was getting away from the false precision of calculations and trying to understand the "how and why" of things. With finance, you're never going to gain an edge by improving your calculations, but instead by understanding what drives cash flows, discount rates, rates of return, etc. However, convincing them to pay less attention to the calculation and more to the concepts was difficult. Classes are designed to teach content (how do you calculate the WACC) rather than what is the cost of capital really telling you. I'm sure other disciplines are similar, so would love to see the switch!

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Liberty's avatar

Indeed, I suspect it's the same almost everywhere. "False precision" is a good way to put it.

Classes are optimized largely for what is easy to measure and teach, not what is useful or effective.

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