This is a reason I never understood modern homes in the US being built with natural gas furnaces and appliances. My house had a gas furnace even though most other homes around have electric. You have a flammable gas under pressure going through miles of pipe to get to each home. A leak anywhere could be really dangerous along those many miles. Yet, exceedingly rare to see fires from this (maybe I’m wrong in that I just don’t hear of many). Meanwhile, electric appliances use the electricity that has to come into a house anyways.
Electricity arcing over something flammable can also cause a fire that burns down your house and kills you.
It isn’t just your imagination. Houses burning down / exploding really is a rare occurance. This is not by accident. There are layers of dumbass-proofing in every part of the system, from the way wire and pipe are manufactured, to the availability of easy-to-use tools and materials that make doing the job the right way also the easy way, to detection systems like fire alarms, to building codes that set standards for how things should be constructed.
I think my curiosity is more around the “why” of the gas lines. I put in another comment above but it’s a good amount of effort to run and maintain these lines when we already have and need electric. We’re adding an additional source of risk to these environments for what additional benefit? I’m not talking trash about gas I’m just wondering what the selling point is. Like I said, I have a gas furnace and it’s fine…no complaints. Is it much more efficient than electric? Hotter? There has to be some compelling reason to put in the effort.
Gas is much, much cheaper. Like, insanely cheaper. Many homes were built long before it was normal to have 200 amp service.
It’s only in relatively recent years where heat pumps are becoming more common. And resistive heat uses a lot of electricity.
Gas has had decades and decades to be made safe. We have odorants so people can smell it, meters and sensors to monitor for abnormal usage and leaks, and it needs to be contained to cause an explosion.
Leaks outside suck, but aren’t really that dangerous because they can dissipate and be blown away by wind.
We had a week long power outage after a winter ice storm a few years ago and would have been screwed without our gas water heater and fireplace, so I’m a big fan of having both gas and electric.
You just answered your own question. The techniques for running gas lines into houses and hooking them up to furnaces are very refined at this point, it can be done safely.
I guess my question was more about the “why” for gas lines. I mean it’s a lot of extra effort to put them in place and maintain them when we already have electric coming into the houses.
Oh, probably because it’s cheaper and more efficient.
If you wanted to use the gas in a gas power plant to produce electricity to run an electric heater, there’s a bunch of steps where energy gets lost. The turbine and generator isn’t 100% efficient and the transformers and transmission wires lose energy along the way to your house. Whereas burning something directly for heat is nearly 100% efficient, the only waste is whatever heat gets carried away by the exhaust. Which isn’t much with a modern high-efficiency furnace. I’ve got one of those and every once in a while I knock icicles off of the exhaust vent outside when I pass it. They use countercurrent exchange to keep all the heat inside the house.
This is no longer correct. We have heat pumps that can be more than 100% efficient, even air-sourced heat pumps in -30° weather. There are still many places where this will still be more expensive than a gas furnace.
I don’t know how you’re measuring efficiency, but a heat pump with greater than 100% efficiency lets you build a perpetual motion machine. That’s not possible.
You just change the definition of your isolated system. It takes less energy to move heat from one place to another than it does to excite matter to release energy. For resistive or combustion heating, the isolated system is your house, plus the gas if using gas heat. For heat pumps, you include the rest of the world.
As an aside, heat pumps are generally considered good when they reach 300% efficiency, i.e., when every watt of energy expended adds 3 watts of heat to your home.
Ahhhh. That makes sense. I guess I had always assumed that it would be more efficient to have one centralized “burning of the gas” event to create and distribute electricity than numerous individual burning events to create heat but it makes sense that due to the efficiency of just converting gas to heat directly it would be more efficient.
There are some cities that do things a third way; they have a centralized facility that burns the gas (or other fuels) to generate electricity, and then also pipe the heat out to the city in the form of heated water or steam running through insulated underground pipes. Buildings tap into those pipes and run it through radiators. That has the potential to be even more efficient because you’re using what would otherwise be “waste” heat, but it depends on a relatively compact city to avoid losing too much heat while sending it through the pipes. I understand this is not uncommon in Eastern European and Russian cities. I’m not familiar with the details, though, so if you want to know more about this I’d recommend Googling around a bit.
New York has one of, if not the largest steam systems like that. A pretty significant chunk of Manhattan is hooked up to it.
Although it should be pointed out that those systems aren’t without their own risks, there have been a handful of pretty bad explosions and such caused by that steam system. Not saying to knock it, any system where you’re trying to distribute a large amount of energy has the potential for some catastrophic accidents to happen, it’s all about weighing the relative pros and cons.
They’re also pretty common on a smaller scale for college campuses, industrial complexes, etc. places with a lot of different outbuildings and such, it can be easier/cheaper/more efficient to have one central boiler room/house and pipe steam around than it is to have heaters in ever building.
Also, bit of a tangent, but many moons ago my dad was a pipefitter/steamfitter, and worked with a lot of steam systems, and from what he’s told me about those days it sounded like absolute hell having to go into cramped service tunnels around searing hot steam pipes, all kinds of dust and asbestos everywhere, rats, high humidity, etc. that was probably almost 50 years ago, but I suspect things probably haven’t improved all that much since then, so kudos to the people who are willing to put up with all of that.
Well now I would be…
This is a reason I never understood modern homes in the US being built with natural gas furnaces and appliances. My house had a gas furnace even though most other homes around have electric. You have a flammable gas under pressure going through miles of pipe to get to each home. A leak anywhere could be really dangerous along those many miles. Yet, exceedingly rare to see fires from this (maybe I’m wrong in that I just don’t hear of many). Meanwhile, electric appliances use the electricity that has to come into a house anyways.
Electricity arcing over something flammable can also cause a fire that burns down your house and kills you.
It isn’t just your imagination. Houses burning down / exploding really is a rare occurance. This is not by accident. There are layers of dumbass-proofing in every part of the system, from the way wire and pipe are manufactured, to the availability of easy-to-use tools and materials that make doing the job the right way also the easy way, to detection systems like fire alarms, to building codes that set standards for how things should be constructed.
I think my curiosity is more around the “why” of the gas lines. I put in another comment above but it’s a good amount of effort to run and maintain these lines when we already have and need electric. We’re adding an additional source of risk to these environments for what additional benefit? I’m not talking trash about gas I’m just wondering what the selling point is. Like I said, I have a gas furnace and it’s fine…no complaints. Is it much more efficient than electric? Hotter? There has to be some compelling reason to put in the effort.
Gas is much, much cheaper. Like, insanely cheaper. Many homes were built long before it was normal to have 200 amp service.
It’s only in relatively recent years where heat pumps are becoming more common. And resistive heat uses a lot of electricity.
Gas has had decades and decades to be made safe. We have odorants so people can smell it, meters and sensors to monitor for abnormal usage and leaks, and it needs to be contained to cause an explosion.
Leaks outside suck, but aren’t really that dangerous because they can dissipate and be blown away by wind.
deleted by creator
Seems like you answered your own question.
We had a week long power outage after a winter ice storm a few years ago and would have been screwed without our gas water heater and fireplace, so I’m a big fan of having both gas and electric.
You just answered your own question. The techniques for running gas lines into houses and hooking them up to furnaces are very refined at this point, it can be done safely.
I guess my question was more about the “why” for gas lines. I mean it’s a lot of extra effort to put them in place and maintain them when we already have electric coming into the houses.
Oh, probably because it’s cheaper and more efficient.
If you wanted to use the gas in a gas power plant to produce electricity to run an electric heater, there’s a bunch of steps where energy gets lost. The turbine and generator isn’t 100% efficient and the transformers and transmission wires lose energy along the way to your house. Whereas burning something directly for heat is nearly 100% efficient, the only waste is whatever heat gets carried away by the exhaust. Which isn’t much with a modern high-efficiency furnace. I’ve got one of those and every once in a while I knock icicles off of the exhaust vent outside when I pass it. They use countercurrent exchange to keep all the heat inside the house.
This is no longer correct. We have heat pumps that can be more than 100% efficient, even air-sourced heat pumps in -30° weather. There are still many places where this will still be more expensive than a gas furnace.
I don’t know how you’re measuring efficiency, but a heat pump with greater than 100% efficiency lets you build a perpetual motion machine. That’s not possible.
You just change the definition of your isolated system. It takes less energy to move heat from one place to another than it does to excite matter to release energy. For resistive or combustion heating, the isolated system is your house, plus the gas if using gas heat. For heat pumps, you include the rest of the world.
As an aside, heat pumps are generally considered good when they reach 300% efficiency, i.e., when every watt of energy expended adds 3 watts of heat to your home.
Ahhhh. That makes sense. I guess I had always assumed that it would be more efficient to have one centralized “burning of the gas” event to create and distribute electricity than numerous individual burning events to create heat but it makes sense that due to the efficiency of just converting gas to heat directly it would be more efficient.
There are some cities that do things a third way; they have a centralized facility that burns the gas (or other fuels) to generate electricity, and then also pipe the heat out to the city in the form of heated water or steam running through insulated underground pipes. Buildings tap into those pipes and run it through radiators. That has the potential to be even more efficient because you’re using what would otherwise be “waste” heat, but it depends on a relatively compact city to avoid losing too much heat while sending it through the pipes. I understand this is not uncommon in Eastern European and Russian cities. I’m not familiar with the details, though, so if you want to know more about this I’d recommend Googling around a bit.
New York has one of, if not the largest steam systems like that. A pretty significant chunk of Manhattan is hooked up to it.
Although it should be pointed out that those systems aren’t without their own risks, there have been a handful of pretty bad explosions and such caused by that steam system. Not saying to knock it, any system where you’re trying to distribute a large amount of energy has the potential for some catastrophic accidents to happen, it’s all about weighing the relative pros and cons.
They’re also pretty common on a smaller scale for college campuses, industrial complexes, etc. places with a lot of different outbuildings and such, it can be easier/cheaper/more efficient to have one central boiler room/house and pipe steam around than it is to have heaters in ever building.
Also, bit of a tangent, but many moons ago my dad was a pipefitter/steamfitter, and worked with a lot of steam systems, and from what he’s told me about those days it sounded like absolute hell having to go into cramped service tunnels around searing hot steam pipes, all kinds of dust and asbestos everywhere, rats, high humidity, etc. that was probably almost 50 years ago, but I suspect things probably haven’t improved all that much since then, so kudos to the people who are willing to put up with all of that.