this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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But have we solved solar + heat pumps in the winter problem? Hydrogen sounds logical but its not the hot thing right now.
Edit: I obviously wasn't clear. I meant operating heat pumps if main el. source is solar. I'm well aware of suitability of heatpumps.
Yes. You basically just shove part of the piping down past the frost line and congrats you now have year round heating via heatpump. The ground is basically a static temperature not all that far down and it solves the entire issue for really cheap during initial construction. Putting it in after the fact is quite involved though
And this isn't even a crazy new idea. I remember houses being built with geothermal climate control back in the '90s.
They should do this in London to bleed all the heat out of the subway system and surrounding rock.
Unless you live inside the Arctic circle heat pumps will work in the winter. I think they've been proven to work down to -20c
Even if you did live somewhere where heat pumps were not viable for some or the entirety of the year you could still use solar and just heat with electricity. So that mostly a solved problem. The bigger issue is that they are a pain to install into existing properties especially if they don't have ducted heating.
In a stroke of pure irony I've recently seen a study showing that really old central heating (water based) works quite well with heatpumps.
Here everyone still says that you need floor heating or modern radiators or it won't work. (Here air2air pumps won't get grants because it is easy to use them for cooling...) But it looks like badly insulated pipes in the walls and huge ass cast iron radiators work great.
Where did you get that last bit? Mini splits are so easy to put in on old homes. They run the lines externally and make a hole into the wall. I have it in my 1920s home.
It's a problem if you use radiated heating which is what most homes in Europe use. It's not impossible to solve you just hook the heat pump into a heat exchanger and transfer the heat into a hot water tank. It's just a hot water tanks tend to take up a lot of space and it's an extra component to you need added.
Why not both? I kept my gas radiated floorboard heat as a back up and mostly use the minisplits.
I have a heat pump and it looses efficiency around 45*, and once u get below zero it just cant keep up. I use my heat pump on the shoulder seasons, but have to rely on my oil furnace for the majority of the winter. If I had the loot I'd get a cold weather heat pump setup as they work much better, but I just spent a boat load of money getting my chimney redone and having a wood stove installed in the hope u can stave off my oil bill with wood ... (Chimney NEEDED done anyways, wasn't a big deal to add wood stove at the same time)
Hydrogen is just portable energy storage. Different problem than generation.
And yes, heat pumps run down to -20C or so now.