Older houses definitely have them… but there was this trend at some point to renavate older houses and remove the oil heaters and fireplaces and wood heated saunas, and replace everything with electric ones. Why? No idea, trends are weird.
Electricity is usually less polluting than the various fuels, wood fires especially will fill a valley with smoke, the rest are mostly to avoid the carbon dioxide
It think above -20C or so, cold weather heat pumps are still way more efficient than resistive electric heating.
Good R-factor insulation is probably the most important upgrade in OP’s case. There are people where I live in the Northeast who heat their homes almost exclusively with the waste heat from cooking, electronics or old incandescent lighting. They have like R-30+ homes and really neat ventilation designs for cooling in the summer too.
I had plans to build a tiny home with Vacuum insulated panels and a small marine stove for heat, until we had a child and plans changed.
Now I’m looking at a solar battery setup with geothermal heat pump that will probably cost nearly what the whole tiny home was gonna be.
Solar is quite poor in Northern winters. Wind + solar + heat would be a better bet, but the battery required to heat your house for more than a day with low winds would be prohibitively expensive unless you added geothermal to the mix like a geothermal heatpump which is also very expensive. Betweem the gear, battery, geothermal, all installed your probably in the 80k$ range or more. A wood stove would be the best bet
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Older houses definitely have them… but there was this trend at some point to renavate older houses and remove the oil heaters and fireplaces and wood heated saunas, and replace everything with electric ones. Why? No idea, trends are weird.
Electricity is usually less polluting than the various fuels, wood fires especially will fill a valley with smoke, the rest are mostly to avoid the carbon dioxide
What about a solar + electric heating?
Well, here (in middle of finland) the sun set at 14:30, so there wasn’t all that much solar energy available.
Also heat pumps are always at least as efficient as straight electric heating.
It think above -20C or so, cold weather heat pumps are still way more efficient than resistive electric heating.
Good R-factor insulation is probably the most important upgrade in OP’s case. There are people where I live in the Northeast who heat their homes almost exclusively with the waste heat from cooking, electronics or old incandescent lighting. They have like R-30+ homes and really neat ventilation designs for cooling in the summer too.
I had plans to build a tiny home with Vacuum insulated panels and a small marine stove for heat, until we had a child and plans changed.
Now I’m looking at a solar battery setup with geothermal heat pump that will probably cost nearly what the whole tiny home was gonna be.
Solar is quite poor in Northern winters. Wind + solar + heat would be a better bet, but the battery required to heat your house for more than a day with low winds would be prohibitively expensive unless you added geothermal to the mix like a geothermal heatpump which is also very expensive. Betweem the gear, battery, geothermal, all installed your probably in the 80k$ range or more. A wood stove would be the best bet
Finland has about 5.2GW of wind capacity vs 4.3 nuclear. If it’s a windy day the spot price will usually be low.
Heat pumps only work to about -4c.