That massive spike of 50c/kWh at the left looks tiny compared to today even though that’s already insanely expensive
Calls on Foam and Mineral Wool?
Polyurethane is better insulator, doesn’t absorb moisture and doesn’t require a vapor barrier but is also much more expensive. It’s what I insulated my shed with so that I can let it get cold if need be and will not have moisture problems later.
I always underestimate oil biproducts in the market, but maybe that is the play.
If you’re in a granny cottage then just burn wood instead? Doing this rn and am very happy to go off-grid for ca. 48 hours
I unfortunelately don’t have a fireplace in my house. It was removed when the house was renovated in the 80’s
In a place where it’s regularly cold? Whose brilliant idea was that?!
When I said my house is tiny I truly mean that. I don’t even have space for a medium size house plant let alone a fireplace. The attic was converted into living space and I believe the fireplace used to be where the stairs are now.
I have a wood burning sauna on a separate building though
What was the price before the Ukrainian war?
You could get fixed price plans for around 5c/kwh. However take into account that yesterday was an anomaly. The average price for the last 28 days is 12.65c/kWh. During the summer time it was around 1 to 3c/kWh.
Is there a specific reason the price spiked that much? That’s a 950% price hike within four hours.
We’ve had negative 20 temperatures for over a week which happens about once every 10 years so the demand is extremely high and on top of that few of our powerplants are out of service for maintenance so that electricity has to be bought from abroad too.
Few cold days in a row is not an issue as buildings still have heat stored up in the structures but when it lasts for a long time the demand for more heating goes up drastically.
This sounds exactly like the freeze in Texas in 2021.
That happened because winterproofing windmills and power plants is expensive and no one was forcing the companies running them to do it.
Scheduling power plant maintenance during winter in a country where it gets that cold seems a tad, uhm, insane?
I don’t think it was scheduled maintenance. Something broke
i keep a pile of coal in the cellar for the extra cold days
To do what with? Light a coal fire in the living room?
It doesn’t sound safe even in a proper fireplace.
found one whose never felt the heat of a coal stove
it’s handy to have backup heat source when the power goes out so pipes don’t freeze
Nope, I am far too young for that.
I have never heard of anyone that currently has a coal-heated house. I thought it was entirely dead in the developed world. Here these heating options are common district heating, geothermal, direct electric heating, some other kind of heat pump, biofuel (like pellets), and a tiny bit of oil and gas.
The most popular by far is district heating, after that comes electric heating (which includes electricity used for geothermal heat pumps and other kinds) and then biofuel. Gas and oil are barely visible on a graph.
I just tried to find a place in my country which sells coal for heating but alas I didn’t succeed. You can of course buy coal but its intended purpose is always grilling or smithing.
Your thinking of charcoal, which are chunks of wood converted into almost pure carbon by heating them above their combustion temperature in a low oxygen environment. He was talking about coal that was mined out of the ground. Plants from an ancient swamps that didn’t decompose, but were converted into almost pure carbon from millions of years of heat and pressure from being buried.
No.
I don’t think any type of coal heating has existed for homes in quite a long time in my country.
I honestly thought it was phased out decades ago in pretty much the entire western world.
Is heating with electricity common in Finland? That seems like it would cost a fortune even in good times.
Pretty common here in France and it’s cheap enough. Why would you think it would be expensive? And expensive compared to what?
When you say it’s common, are you talking about heat pumps or old-fashioned resistive heating? I’m not very familiar with heat pumps since they weren’t common at all when and where I bought a house, but at least where I lived it was normal to have either an oil or a gas furnace for heating. Resistive electric heating cost a lot more to operate and so it was generally used only where it would be too difficult or expensive to install a furnace and hot water pipes or hot air ducts. For example, some friends of mine lived in a 19th century house which was meant to be heated by a wood fireplace and they also had electric heaters in the bedrooms, whereas my own house was built in 1980 so it had an oil tank, a furnace in the basement, and hot-water radiators.
(My own house also had a modern wood stove in the living room and buying firewood was even cheaper than buying heating oil, but the problem was that the wood stove took a lot of work and it only heated the living room since it wasn’t connected to any mechanism for spreading the heat to the rest of the house.)
Heat pumps have been commonplace outside North America for a long time. We call them “reverse cycle air conditioners” in Australia and they’ve been around for at least 20 years.
It’s not new technology. Your fridge is also a heat pump for example.
Older houses burn oil for heating the house and water but even most of them have heatpumps installed. New houses usually also have heatpumps or geothermal so direct electric heating is more and more uncommon. Apartment buildings generally all have district heating and even some private homes do.
Yes it’s expensive but so is everything else too. Our houses are way better insulated than in most places though so that helps a little.
Do you have a heat pump then? I’m curious if this spike is the moment the heat pump froze and some sort of resistance backup heat kicked on
If you voted Liberal, you voted for this. #Leopardsatemyface
What’s the renewable energy like in a Finland during the winter? Solar, wind, or geothermal common and working?
Finland is too much north to hope for efficient solar energy.
In winter yeah but we have long ass days in the summer and even in early spring they work surprisingly well as solar panels are more efficient in cold temperatures.
Last 12 months Finland had electricity 87% with low carbon sources and 43% with renewables (source: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI )
During winter it stays pretty similar, because nuclear is 45%, wind 17%, hydro 17%, biomass 8% and solar is only 0.03%.
Coal is only 8%, but produces 58% of all CO2, which shows how bad it is.
It peaked there right? So the rest of the day it was lower wasn’t it? Still very expensive!
Have you tried burning reindeer?
Crazy how it is with dynamic electricity price. Must be extremely inconvenient to monitor and react!
Here a border away in Saint Petersburg, Russia, we have electricity at a fixed rate of 4,9c/kWh in daytime and 2,7c/kWh in the night. There aren’t any variable price tariffs in here, so the bill is always about the same.
We also have central heating (part coal/gas, part nuclear) that goes for 21€/Gcal (1,8с/kWh), so there is no need to expend electricity.
RIP to those running a 4090 on their rig.
I kept the main room of my condo warm for a winter by having two rigs running 24/7 while I didn’t have a baseboard because I was doing renovations!
How are you using 21kWh/day heating a small home? Do you have any insulation at all?
50kWh and closer to 90kWh on days like this. It’s a log cabin and I’m keeping my root cellar and insulated shed above freezing aswell. Even running a 1kW heater all day would result in a consumption more than 21kWh and that wouldn’t keep any house warm.
Outer walls in new homes in the Nordic countries are often 25-30 inches thick filled with insulation. They will keep out some cold (and some heat).
That’s a perfectly normal number for any home that isn’t very new and perfectly insulated.
My 37sqm appartment needs approximately 5000 kWh in natural gas per year, 876 kWh last December, so 28 kWh per day on average. The building is admittedly old and not perfectly insulated but it’s also not a log cabin out in the open in Finland, but instead a flat enclosed within 3 other flats in the middle of cosy, never below -8C Germany.
21 kWh in a log cabin in Finnland actually seemed pretty low to me. It’s sort of obvious OP is using a heat pump and the cabin must really be absolutely tiny.
Why are you measuring natural gas in kWh? How do you even measure that as such?
Very common in countries that use the metric system (ie literally everywhere except the USA). It’s measured either in kWh or in m^3
Cubic meters (or another similar measure of volume) is what I’d expect. It’s the conversion to an unrelated and theoretical (since it’s not actually being converted to electricity) unit that confuses me. I presume it’s to make it easier to compare electric vs gas heat, but the variable efficiency of burning gas and the existence of heat pumps ruin that.
Probably because it’s about -35C outside.
Dude is basically living on the set of The Thing at this point.
What’s the average price during normal times? In Germany we are usually paying a fixed price, so fluctuations on the market do not reach the customers. However, this price is somewhere between 30 and 40c/kWh.
On average winter days it’s around 10 to 15c/kWh and in summer like 5 cents or less. Some days in the summer the price literally goes negative.
How’s the heat pump gang doing in that kind of temperature?
It’s what I exclusively heat my house with
They should be using supplement heat sources at that temperature.
Since it’s a cold area, they’re likely using a geothermal heat pump, which isn’t affected by air temperature. It uses the ground for heat exchange rather than the air.
