Montreal City Weblog

Kate 20:52 on 2019-05-06 Permalink Reply  

• Ian 21:38 on 2019-05-06 Permalink

  Ugh thank goodness I’ve been trying to talk my landlady into switching to electric for years. Oil is way more expensive than hydro too, environmental damage, bad smell, and general ickiness aside.

• Ephraim 11:26 on 2019-05-07 Permalink

  Apparently no one at the city realizes that it’s much more difficult to do some things with electrical… Large homes and apartment buildings can use half as large a water heater with natural gas than with electrical. So, instead of one 40 gallon tank, you have to move to an 80 gallon tank and you still may have trouble providing enough hot water, because it heats at about 1/3rd more time. Hydronic heaters are very effecient and most of the new ones does emit particles.

• Chris 11:36 on 2019-05-07 Permalink

  Ephraim, well you’ve got > 11 years, and these distant timelines are never kept, so I don’t think you need to worry.

• Ephraim 11:43 on 2019-05-07 Permalink

  Chris, not personally worried, but it’s not really something they are thinking through. Electricity is nice, but for larger apartment buildings it’s not something that can easily be changed. A hydronic system on electricity would need twice the amount of space… where are they going to find the room for this? If we wanted to do instant hot water in Quebec, it can only be done on natural gas that is outside vented… it isn’t even a dream to do it on electric. Imagine a Victorian aged triplex… to switch to electric baseboard heating would mean rewiring an entire home… and take up a good part of the walls…. or removing the flooring to go to radiant heat. It’s announcements without reality. (And of course, expenses that will increase rents….)

• SMD 12:24 on 2019-05-07 Permalink

  Fear not, your beautiful old Victorian radiators can easily be converted to energy-efficient electric ones: http://www.ecorad.ca/en/electrical-conversion-residential/.

• Ian 12:49 on 2019-05-07 Permalink

  My place is steam rads, putting in an electrical boiler was no problem for my upstairs neighbour whose oil tank needed replacing – the landlady went electric for him because it made more sense than putting in a new oil tank..

• Kevin 14:03 on 2019-05-07 Permalink

  @SMD
  Thanks for that link. Your definition of easy is not the same as mine, since that conversion still requires disconnecting all the radiator water piping.

  I can just imagine the fun that will be if all the people on the upper floors of duplexes and triplexes decide to convert to that look.

  I mean, we’re not going to gut homes, we’ll just cap and leave the pipes in place, right? But we’ll still need to patch floors and/or ceilings in every room.

  Or do we switch over to electric hot water furnaces, which last 8 to 12 years?

• Ian 15:01 on 2019-05-07 Permalink

  Or just install an electric steam boiler like my landlady did.

• Ephraim 17:04 on 2019-05-07 Permalink

  Electric water heaters take TWICE the space and electric boilers take double the time to heat, so you need a much larger one… which of course means more amperage, which means you need hydro to bring in more electricity, etc. Our friend, who is an energy efficiency expert looked at my system, he said to keep my natural gas water heater… if I converted to electricity, I would need a second water tank just to provide hot water. Also told me to convert to a new energy efficient. The modern boiler (natural gas) is 97% efficient, takes less space than the previous boiler (which was oil) and is extremely able to handle the extreme cold… which electricity just can’t. (Oh and when the power goes out, I can plug it into a battery and keep the system going… remember the ice storm?) Imagine a dip in the temperature… electricity can take up to 4x as long to catch up to natural gas when temperature dips.

• Ian 10:30 on 2019-05-08 Permalink

  Maybe in an apartment building, but the electric boiler we got was about the same size as the old oil one, and doesn’t require the giant oil tank. I’m not just talking through my hat here, we actually had one installed and there is literally no difference in heating costs or effectiveness, and since there’s no fuel tank it takes up less space. My landlady even got some money from the government for the conversion. Granted, it needed to be replaced anyway so she wasn’t out any money, but the picture you are painting is vastly different from my own direct experience. No changes to the water supply, pipes, or rads, and only an afternoon to do the installation including the hydro crew putting in new connections.

• david100 02:09 on 2019-05-09 Permalink

  Hydro man, the best. Ultra low life-cycle emissions (especially compared with oil or gas), and Quebec pumps it out cheaper than pretty much anyone else this side of Russia. Sucks to cook with it, but for everything else . . .