Heating your home - Rocket Mass Heaters, Electrical Space Heaters, Geothermal, Natural Gas, and more

hi welcome back to the Food Forest it's been a little bit since the last video because we're getting near the winter equinox and when I get home from work it's pitch black outside I'm actually home um during the day today so I can squeeze a video out uh before the sun sets so if you're wondering where I've been I'm all right it's just when you get home and it's Pitch Black it's impossible to do YouTube content so I've had a lot of time to think about what I wanted my next video to be and I really want to give back in terms of um you know my engineering expertise and combining that with permaculture stuff and I thought a perfect way to do that is to talk about heat so we're going to do a heat video today now this topic is actually so deep that I could probably do like 3 hours on it so I'm going to try to cover as much as I can I'm not going to be able to cover absolutely everything um but one of the reasons why I did also want to cover this is that there's a lot of these uh it's kind of like a new fad to have these little plug in space heaters and there's a lot of claims that are made by these tiny little plugin space heaters that um I would consider actually on the scam category so we'll get into that as well when we talk about space heating but first I want to talk about what heat is so heat is nothing more than a measurement of the velocity of atoms in the atmosphere hitting against your skin it's what we feel and we're actually feeling the kinetic energy of the particles that are hitting us that that's what heat is so when we're talking about heating up a space we're talking about just making the molecules in the environment move around a little faster that's it now in about grade 10 we learn one of the basic heat formulas which is qal MC delta T and Q is the heat flow and it equals the mass of the thing that is having a thermal gradient across it which is the delta T uh part and then C is basically just how well that Medium will uh conduct UCT heat from one thing to another so when we're talking about the flow of energy the flow of heat what we're really interested in is that temperature gradient so for your house that means that the colder it is outside right where you have stuff like Windows or walls we really want to insulate them the last way we lose our heat is just from a direct flow of that indoor atmosphere that's moving round a lot to the outside that happens from density gradients it happens from heat gradients so you've got a lot of leakage you know if you have a window that's wide open or you have a leakage in and around doorways and all that then you're going to lose that heat environment outside you know everyone it's kind of Common Sense most people know that kind of thing but that's what we're talking about when we're talking about heating a space you've got a little black box you're going to get heat coming in from whatever method you're going to use to heat and then you're going to have heat going out and that's basically your leakage and your loss that loss is also sometimes called the heat load and that is basic basically the work that uh some kind of heating device has to pump in just to offset that and where you have them uh both equal then you've got no change in heat anymore so thanks for sticking with me through that I know uh some people who may already know that stuff might have found that a little boring but some people don't know that stuff so it's really important that we uh describe that because it's important now when we're going to talk about space heater so let me show you a little space heater unit here so I not affiliated with this brand or anything I'm not recommending that you buy bu this or anything but I just wanted to show you kind of what a you know space heater might look like and I want to talk about space heaters specifically because for the most part it actually really doesn't matter what kind of space heater you get so let me talk about that and why that actually is the case okay now this one here is an infrared heater and there's basically going to be two types of heat there's going to be infrared heat that's going to heat things with electromagnetic waves uh basically infrared waves and there's also space heaters that are going to heat things up by heating some kind of element inside the heater and then blowing that uh heat out mechanically using some kind of a fan okay a heater that's actually going to have a hot element inside of it and then it's going to blow that out what that's actually doing is it's heating up the molecules in and around that element and then it's blowing that energy out and as those molecules bounce off of other molecules they'll transfer their heat to the other thing this is a real direct way of heating and when you're heating this way you're actually heating the entire room up with an infrared heater it's a little bit different infrared heaters will actually just send um electromagnetic waves which is basically the whole visible spectrum um ultraviolet all the way up to infrared they focus on the infrared because it's lower energy it's longer wavelengths and it's not going to give you cancer for example they could heat you pretty quick with ultraviolet light but that probably would wouldn't be very good for um you know uh a sales pitch because you're actually going to be killing your customers they use infrared because it's low energy electromagnetic spectrum and also because the human body actually tends to just absorb that heat as well because it's low energy we just absorb it and it actually directly Heats us so what that means is if you have an infrared heater at one side of the room and it's pointing at you and it's hitting you it's actually hitting and warming yourself up it's not really doing a whole lot of full room heating now as you heat up then you will black body radiate out um heat to the rest of the room and wherever that infrared hits if it's hitting a couch or it's hitting a wall that will heat up slightly and then that will kind of radiate heat out to the room so you are going to heat the room up it's going to happen slower though now these infrared heaters can actually be really useful if you want to actually just you know keep yourself warm you're not necessarily worried about heating up your whole house you're not worried about heating up the whole room you're just worried about heating up the thing that the infrared is uh heater is pointed at now these can actually save you money but the rationale is that if you're comfortable in a colder house then your furnace isn't going to be heating the entire house you can just heat yourself and that way you save money that way but if you're just trying to heat your entire house or that room then an infrared heater and an electric filament heater for example are going to be exactly as efficient as each other so let me explain why when we're talking about another type of a machine like a pump or an engine then what matters is the energy that goes into it and then the work that you get out of it and how those two things compare the ratio between those two things um any loss from Power transmitted versus Power consumed is basically where the efficiency is lost in machines it's typically lost through friction either a machine moving through air or pieces grinding and rubbing up against each other or Just Energy loss through heat from like a combustion explosion where not all the poers delivered some of the power is actually delivered to heating the stuff where the explosion is happening for example in all of these situations the heat is actually the waste product in a heating application the heat is actually the goal that's what we're trying to do so when we have an electric Element heater we're actually taking electricity in and we're wasting it all we're wasting all of it so it's 100% efficient because it it's all being wasted it's being wasted as heat because that's the purpose of the device this is the exact reason why if you are buying a space heater and the goal is to heat the room up then it doesn't matter at all about the technology or anything they're all going to be as efficient as each other 100% efficient because they're all just a giant garbage Factory of energy the only thing that matters in a space heating application is the wattage not the technology not anything it's the wattage and it's very interesting that almost every single space heater on the market is at exactly 1,500 Watts why is that it just so happens that 1500 watts is by the electrical code the most amount of power that you can pull out of a wall and have it be safe still so every single electric heater device that's made for 120 volt circuits will all push right up to the electrical code and they will all emit 1,500 watts of power doesn't matter if you go like go to the store and look at every single unit and look at the specs every single one will be500 Watts and the interesting thing is some will say that they're for small rooms some will say that they're for big rooms and it literally does not matter it's putting out 1500 watts that's how much it's heating every single one of them is the exact same now when I say that efficiency doesn't matter in heating applications I'm talking about electric heating applications if you have say a furnace like a gas furnace as soon as you're burning something as soon as you're burning uh natural gas or propane then efficiency can matter for example a condensing furnace can be more efficient than a regular furnace what I'm talking about here is electric space heating so turning electricity into heat via heat waste okay so what does that mean for these little plug-in ones there's a couple plug-in ones I don't want to I don't want to bash any company's names but there's a lot of um claims that are made that you can put in this tiny little 350 watt um plug-in electrical space heater and it'll do the same as these big other units but they're you know $30 instead of $90 it's actually 100% false because again the only thing that matters is the wattage on on the actual device so something that's 350 watts is going to produce you know roughly a fifth of the actual heat as a larger heater it's just that's just the science it's that's how it works so if you're seeing any kind of commercial or advertisements for these little space and plug heaters keep in mind that's great for heating up a small bathroom or a closet it's not going to really work or do anything noticeable for a larger room unless your house is very very tight and you don't care about how fast that it heats up once it gets to that heat then if you have almost no heat load almost no heat loss same same kind of idea same same word um then that heater can offset that and keep the room warm but if you got a cold room and you plug that thing in you know you're going to be waiting five times as long until you get a warmed up room than uh any other space heater one other thing that actually might be nicer about an infrared heater that has nothing to do with heating is that if you have some kind of allergies or sensitivity to particulates uh being blown about the room then if you're heating via uh infrared then you don't have this giant fan that's circulating the air and that actually might be easier for people who have allergies so that's space heaters I didn't want to really focus on that at the beginning because there's a lot of misinformation out there and you know I can kind of help uh as an engineer push through some of that misinformation and hopefully save you buying something that's just not going to work okay so let's talk the perac side of all of this is an electric space heater good for you for your application if you have a large family in a large house and people are moving around between rooms it's probably not the best use if your electric grid is a dirty grid that runs on coal oil and gas then it's probably not the best use because that electricity is coming from burning coal which is then converted to waste heat so that that's a really uh stupid way I mean you would be better off just like in terms of the closed loop of the environmental impact you'd be better off just directly burning the coal in your living room you know obviously not for health reasons but you'd be better off doing that in terms of the planet because at least you're not transmitting the energy and getting the losses through you know I squ R losses through the grid if you're like me and actually have a fairly clean grid Ontario Canada has got one of the greenest grids in the world so environmentally for someone in Canada if if you can run off some kind of electric heating it's really good for the environment especially if that energy is coming from nuclear that is as low carbon as you can pretty much get and that's one of the reasons why we actually use a space heater in some applications in our house when we know that we're going to be kind of staying in one room for a while I'll crank the heat down and we'll just run the space heater I usually have the house pretty cold uh as it is I I definitely believe in gearing up and wearing warm clothes close in the winter time and I keep my pipes from freezing but we don't heat a whole lot more than that now right now in Canada with the carbon tax out there there's a lot of uh you know especially out east there's a lot of clamoring about how that's impacting people for heating their homes with oil now oil is mostly used in areas of Canada or the world where you're both remote so you can't get natural gas piped in that way you have a a tank of oil at the side of your house and then you're burning that unfortunately it's just it's absolutely awful for the environment it's awful for climate change we're already looking like we're going to blow past 1.5° which is when some really nasty tipping points happen and um if we continue this way we're going to probably look at roughly 2.5 de and you know around 3° is kind of like human extinction um in the next 100 years or so so we really do need to solve this I know that it's really really painful for people who are heating with with oil um but if you can kind of Lobby governments to installing things like small modular reactors and pushing that technology forward then we can heat more homes with stuff like efficient space heaters run off of nuclear power so regardless of what you think about the carbon tax you know I'm not a huge fan of it uh but I I understand that we have to do something um but I know that a lot of people who are especially if you're out East and you're heating your homes with oil it's it's really hitting you hard and people have to heat their homes to survive so I don't really like taxing things where we are pushing people we have to survive when the government's really not helping in other ways so transportation is a little different Government Can Help by building mass transportation that kind of thing uh I I like the idea of carbon tax on those things more than carbon tax on heating for homes which is necessity for survival for a lot of people people so other ways to heat your home you've got stuff like a a furnace like a natural gas furnace propane furnace any of these things they're burning carbon um burning natural gas is probably the best way to actually heat your home outside of you know if you're burning any kind of these uh fossil fuels burning natural gas is probably the best way uh you know it depends on your area definitely look more into it natural gas is a byproduct of the other things that we're pulling out you know the coal oil and gas whether or not we use the natural gas that is coming out in each barrel of oil anyways so as long as natural gas isn't the thing that we're going to mine the oil for then it's actually not really that much of an increased uh extraction of oil in the economy it's kind of more like weight like it's kind of more like using a a byproduct of our current oil hungry economy but using it for the smartest way we could use it which actually is for heating homes so because of that even though I am very much against uh coil oil and gas I do think that natural gas used as heating is probably the best use of natural gas in our current economy especially if we're going to be extracting coal oan gas anyways and it's more of a byproduct with the caveat that we need to come off of this we need to start designing in better Solutions in order to move forward because the end of oil is coming like no matter what it's coming so we need to we need to understand that we're using them temporarily to transition into something better now probably the best way to heat your home is geothermal with like a heat pump especially if you're heat exchanging through a pond that's outside you can get extremely efficient heat exchange in this way the biggest downside is that it's quite expensive to get it actually set up now there's two ways to do the heat exchange outside pretty much horizontally or vertically either you drill straight down and you do kind of like a big loop and exchange directly just with the Earth's core temperature or you do it more horizontally typically run around something with a lot of thermal Mass like a pond now geothermal itself is probably a 2hour rabbit hole that we can jump down so I'm going to leave it there because a lot of people watching this are going to be looking for ways they can retrofit or change the way that they are doing their heating retrofitting in a geothermal system can be really expensive it's ideally something that you get going the day that you buy your property or develop so I'll leave it at that for now but absolutely the most efficient thing that you can do is a geothermal heating the last way to heat the home and one that I usually talk about first especially to a permaculture audience is burning wood wood so burning wood is a great way to heat your home provided a few things so heating wood can be the single worst way to heat your home if you're putting wood in a open fireplace and burning that heat and throwing it straight up the chimney it's probably one of the most disgustingly wasteful things that I can think that humans do um with heat and it makes sense because you have this giant fire and it's just going up a brick chimney and straight out the roof most of the heat like I think it's somewhere around 70% of the heat actually just goes straight out your house it doesn't do anything for you and then we're burning all that wood creating all that pollution and cutting down environments and habitat in order to provide heat it's just so extremely wasteful it almost makes me sick and I think when you like see where we are as a society and as a CI civilization the fact that you know a lot of people do do that um it it's it's it's mindboggling it's as mind-boggling as how normalized urinating in water you know pumping water filtering it cleaning it and then urinating in perfectly clean water and then pulling the urine out in a water treatment plant when basically we could walk anywhere and and urinate and it it's actually like a soil mment so we're we're taking something that's beneficial and then we're doing this absurd thing to one of the most pre ious resources water with our waste product I think that's probably the most absurd thing that's normalized in society I think heating your home in a fireplace is the second now that being said there are so many ways where we can take that um ridiculous setup and make it actually pretty good so if you are instead of sending that heat straight up the chimney if you are winding that through a thermal Mass to store hold the Heat and then have that thermal Mass radiate heat outwards into your house slowly over time and then you're releasing a very low load of heat to the atmosphere in the environment that is fantastic what I'm talking about here obviously is a rocket mass heater stove now I don't have a rocket mass heater stove specifically because it is not allowed by code in any of the houses so I could heat an outdoor space uh with a rocket mass heater stove the amount of work that it takes to make a a rocket mass heater stove um you know it would probably take me between 6 months and a year to actually make it slowly you know after work plus getting all the materials and all of that stuff I've thought about doing it because you know I I wanted to do it even just like as it'd be a really good video for permaculture but it just makes no sense at all in my application here Way North in Canada and I could only use it to heat an outdoor space so if I could heat an indoor space with it by code and and I wouldn't you know uh invalidate my home insurance then I would definitely do it but if you can build a rocket mass heater and it's allowed in your area then I would definitely look into it the number one uh place to look is Paul weaton but I'm also going to leave a link right here to a fantastic build and video series from another permaculturist who's just getting started in this so check out this build video it's fantastic if you're thinking about making a rocket mass heater these things are amazing the second way that you can improve burning wood to heat your house is if you're combining it with say cooking so if you also have a cooking wood stove and then that's doubling as a heater for your house then that is a fantastic use the third way that you can really improve this equation is then if you're actually quenching the fire or burning it in um an oxygen starved environment and you're generating charcoal with it which you then use as biochar to act as a soil amendment so that at least roughly half to uh two3 of the Char of the carbon in the wood is actually getting returned back down into the soil and only about a third of it gets released into the air this is a way that we can also take heating our homes kind of to the next level and where heating your homes with wood can actually start making a lot of sense if you're then taking that carbon and you're building soil carbon with it as well you're going to be releasing a little bit of carbon but if the tree just falls in the forest and decomposes it is also going to release some carbon and it'll release about the same a tree that fell and just decomposed naturally will release about the same amount of carbon as if you burn it in a charcoal furnace get the heat out of it but then take the charcoal because you quench it or you burn it in pyrolysis in an oxygen starved environment check out my videos on biochar for more info on that that and then you take that charcoal and you put it back into the soil then that is actually you know in terms of the carbon footprint that's basically about the same it's probably actually a little better to actually run the biochar furnace as a heating for your home in terms of actual carbon releases so don't let anyone tell you that burning wood for heat is wasteful and bad for the environment it is 99% of the time but it can be done really really well and it's one of the reasons why permaculture talks about using wood in things like a rocket mass [Music] heater [Music] so thanks for watching this bit of a longer video on heat if you have any questions let me know in the comments below maybe I can direct the questions and funnel them towards a part two Series where I answer questions on this or maybe expand and elaborate on some of the topics that I discussed in this video last thing if you got any value out of this video or any of my other videos and you want to support the channel the best way to do it is through patreon or the YouTube membership below patreon's a little better the cuts a little smaller um but if you've gotten any use out of any of the things that I've ever told you if you save some money on a space heater now then you know I have the level set at as low as possible like a dollar a month I figure I'd rather do that and have more people sign up then set them too high so if a dollar a month sounds like something you can manage then consider supporting the channel it does actually make a big difference when enough people do it right now I'm making videos for less than minimum wage and I'll be honest I've thought it sometimes that my life would be a little simpler if I just simplified out the YouTube stuff um but if you did want to support it does go a long way to making me think hey maybe I should keep doing this uh and there's a lot of value people appreciate uh what's being put out there so thanks for watching I'll see you on the next [Music] video