In the 1950's, when they were talking "clean", it's not the kind of "clean" we're talking about today. Clean for them is that you didn't have to deal with coal dust or fuel oil in the home.
Arguably however, GE was also building nuclear at the time, (As was westinghouse), and those are "Clean" in the sense they were (And are) carbon neutral. But yeah considering the early half of the 20th century was dominated by coal soot and other smog related soiling, electric was definitely cleaner.
I do want to point out that large power plants are also significantly cleaner than many small coal powered furnaces. You can look at pics of London from the early part of the last century for examples.
Yes, anyone who can remember a house with a coal bin in the basement would know that for the consumer it was VERY dirty. The electric companies were using marketing but marketing isn't necessarily a lie.
I live in the province of Quebec, Canada, where 99% of the houses are all electric but we have state-run hydro electricity that has been powering the province since the late 1800s. We have much more severe winter conditions for four + months of the year but we have the infrastructure in place to take care of our electric network in the worst wintery conditions... Except for the 1998 ice storm. But that was a once in a 100 years situation.
@@snarkylive That's alittle generalizing "into a land of not much". It's hard to say hydro-electric is destroying significant natural area ... look at what humans have done so far
The linemen of HydroQuebec are TOP NOTCH!! Many times when I lived in NH and we had big storms, the crews from Quebec would come down to assist. 100% the best crews I've come across in terms of equipment and professionalism.
I'm not sure this is that simply, technically yes, but the infrastructure has an ownership complication. I live in a state where the power utility has been spending millions to lobby the government to strip rights of home owners in terms of electricity. Once you centralize something heavily, others issues show up.
The problem is that most electricity in the US is from coal powered plants. Much better to go with something like LNG till that changes. Not much good if your house is green but the energy provided is not.
@@huejanus5505 LNG is methane. It's worse than coal for climate change (not smog) because of the leakage during capture. Better to stay with coal until non-fossil fuels arrive.
Having survived several week-long power outages here in the upper midwest, I can tell you that not all your fossil fuel appliances will work without electricity. If your gas water heater is power vented, it won't turn on unless the vent is operable. Neither will your gas furnace, nor your oven. You basically have your cooktop that you can light manually and that's it. So in terms of surviving another freeze, state of the art gas appliances might not be the help you are looking for. Your issues with the marketing of electricity as "green" is warranted, but to my eye it doesn't compare with the greenwashing marketing of natural gas. I do enjoy your channel. Thank you for the work you put into it!
A couple of 1500 VA UPS will power a midsized furnace blower for 24-48 hours. A 550 VA UPS will take care of the water heater vent (or you can just install it differently). A regular gas oven will work, but a convection gas oven won't.
@@wisenber newer ovens have electronic ignitions and can't be lit manually. Only ovens that have pilot lights will remain operable. The only point I am hoping to make is that in electrical outages your gas appliances don't really provide back up. Virtually everything has a circuit board and if it does it won't operate without some form of electric backup.
@@markohand6430 Electronic or piezo ignition? Gas appliances that will work off grid can be had, but you have to make a deliberate effort to find them. It's a shame that most seem to be designed where redundant energy sources are rendered moot. That being said, many part of TX lost their gas as well when the pipelines didn't keep up.
Green washing? I’ve never heard, nor seen fictional information on natural gas from an actual fossil fuel company or trade organization. OTOH, I’ve seen plenty of complete falsehoods from the green movement. Most of the early predictions from actual client scientists have now been proven false. I believe we have a carbon problem. I believe the rhetoric from the anti property, anti science, anti freedom LEFT has become the problem with progress. Peak oil was a myth, that was used to get policies All sides need to double down on the truth while reducing the snark and hate. You can’t convince the other side while insulting them. If you truly believe in a need for change, the place to start is on your own side.
Belinda: Thank you for bring back memories!!! My parents build a new home in 1965 and it was a "Medallion Home", 100% electric. In our case even water as we had a rural well. So if we lost power we lost ALL services. The trouble came when electric rates skyrocketed in the mid 1970s. I can remember the Blizzard of 1978 with an Artic blast. Our electric bill was over $500 which would be like $2000 in 2021 dollars. In the summer of 1979 we added a brick chimney for a wood stove in the basement and a propane furnace for whole house heating. That system was changed in 2005 when my Father died. My Mother could not continue using the wood stove by herself. So we installed a heat pump system with a propane backup for severe cold weather. Her electric bills now average less than $250 a month year round. I will encourage your thoughts on wanting a multi-fuel home. Heat pumps for heating and cooling with propane or wood backup. Then an electric generator for backup during outages. My current house is a 150 year old farm house. We completely remodeled it in 2010. Maximum insulation and thermal systems. I have a high efficient heat pump system for the normal heating and cooling. My system does have propane backup for extreme cold periods. I have a backup generator that runs on propane. I also have a propane non-vented wall heater in the central part of the main floor. This heater does not use electric or electronics to operate. So it is set at 50 degrees as a doomsday backup. I have a 1000 gallon propane tank. That supply will run the generator for three weeks at full capacity. The wall heater will only use 250 gallons a month in sub-zero weather, keeping the house above freezing so all the plumbing is safe. P.S. Three years ago we went to our daughter's house in Florida over the Christmas holidays. We had an electric outage. When the backup generator fired it popped the breaker. So no heat system. That $250 wall heater kept our house from freezing. Cheap insurance. Low tech too for reliability.
I live in southern France in an all-electric home, which I think works great. I was very surprised by how few all-electric homes there are in the US, I feel like they’re way more common here in France. The only difference is that I have personally never experienced a blackout in my entire life, the electric grid here is very reliable, and since 90%+ of our electricity comes from non-fossil fuels, it is actually very “climate friendly” to live in one.
Yep. Blackouts very rare even in rural areas in Europe in general. I do wish that other European countries would also do like France and heavily use nuclear energy. For some idiotic reason e.g. Germany has done excactly the opposite.
@@ukrytykrytyk8477 hardly embracing unfortunately, France is set to retire loads of their nuclear with overly optimistic claims about replacing them with renewables. France may well get less reliable and more expensive electricity if they have their way. Again though it is a good point that you don't need wasteful and environmentally destructive battery backups if you simply have a functioning government.
It's also true that your entire country is the size of some of our individual states. Put differently, on a localized level, it's perhaps more feasible to get to a higher percentage of all-electric homes...assuming that's a goal worth achieving. Also, the reliability of the electric grid can depend on location...rural, where power transfer lines run mostly above ground (and therefore subject to weather-related disruption), versus urban, where power transfer lines run mostly below ground. I've lived in all-electric homes, and those with mixed fuels...natural gas for heating (both air and water) and cooking. I prefer the mixed fuels approach, personally.
@@ScottHammet It's so insane when Americans use the idea that their country is large to excuse obvious faults. Large grids are more reliable! That's why the EU trades power between it's countries! America has a lot of reliable nuclear, lots of great hydro. The failures of the US are in it's politics not it's geography.
@@Alex-nl5cy I think you misunderstood my point. My point is that at a state level, there may be some in the US that approach a higher percentage of all-electric homes, and that would be a more appropriate comparison. It's just not an apples-to-apples comparison at a country level. And "obvious faults" is a subjective characterization unworthy of debate. Perhaps one day we'll get to nirvana where everything is powered by "green energy". That would be fine. In the mean time, I suspect the world will keep doing what it's doing, and making the best use of what resources are available.
As a Canadian living in Ontario, I've had a very different experience when it comes to living in an all electric home/apartment, even during times of total blackout... a few have occurred. Prolonged, major outages have only occurred twice that I can remember: once during the ice storm of 97, and again in 2003 when the entire north eastern grid tripped. Don't take those dates as accurate, I might be off, but the events are well known. During the ice storm, massive sections of infrastructure... just fell down... lines, pylons, transformer stations... it was a literal mess. My Aunt's house in the middle of no where, took almost a month to be restored, major cities and town, a few days to weeks. Life returned to normal relatively quickly, but we have robust regulations and mandatory emergency response protocols. Houses with no electric and no alternative heating sources, were lent generator, and in some cases, those generators were fueled by the utility. Most buildings over a certain height, have mandatory backup generators to provide power to elevators... It's just never been an issue up here like it seems in Texas, and frankly, I'm not sure most Canadians really understand what's going on down there, we've never experienced a failure on the magnitude as you all seem to, even when we did have a crisis. Even much more northern communities, whom have frequent electrical interruptions, have provisions, backups, alternatives... and experience relatively brief outages... If any community went more than a few consecutive hours without electricity up here, heads would roll, we just do not tolerate ill prepared or ineffectual suppliers.
here, most electric companies are private companies. this means that they don’t want to “waste” money on updating equipment that’s old/ in bad shape but isn’t broken yet. in texas, for example, they’d been warned about potential issues with the grid for decades, but the power company just never did anything about it. and state governments - especially southern state governments - are loathe to “restrict” businesses, even if it’s hurting citizens.
In my old neighborhood (small neighborhood with only 12 small house) have diesel generator. We lived outside of Minneapolis, we used this for emergency situation during blackout. All the house there use electric appliances and stuff, except for 2 of the house who have gas stove (one of them change to electric after a few years). I think this would be a good alternative for emergency use during blackout for all electric houses.
As another Ontarian I only have a power outage for more than an hour maybe once or twice a year on average. Only had a multi day power outage when a huge chunk of North America went out in 2003. Even during storms it is unlikely that power will go out. I have never had a gas stove but have had gas water heater and furnace as well as fireplace. Personally I don't think having any gas appliance is necessary and if you need to on an all electric house you can use a backup generator. We have a generator but I doubt it works because we haven't used it since 2003.
Same for me living in QC. I just don't get this whole power outage regularly in US... I come from France, with a relatively isolated village, and we got maximum 2-3 blackout that never went longer than 2-3h I think. In QC, there was some power outage. The worst I got was from like 2 days because some guy burned the lines. And the there is that storm of 97-98 as you said but i was not there yet. I just don't get why you have such poor service. Why is it acceptable.
Verry interesting topic. I live here in the Netherlands in a tiny house with no gas or oil. Everything runs on electric power such as heating IR and induction cooking. An electric boiler that is supported during the summer with heat-pipes. It is not off-grid but nearly. Greeting from the Netherlands!
I moved from US to The Netherlands 6 years ago. We use both gas and electric. The houses are much smaller but can be quite leaky too. We want to build a passive house 🏡 but it will be very expensive here because of high building costs + extremely limited plots for new homes. May have to go to Spain or Italy to make it happen.
Lithium iron phosphate batteries are available for $100 kwh... even if you don't put solar panels on your roof , you can buy as much energy independence as you want. Whole house inverters start at $2500
@@ukrytykrytyk8477 this is a correct response. Our highly insulated house in the countryside can lose power for days and the pipes will not freeze, all it takes is a person running a heat source for an hour to reset; we have a portable word stove to do that.
A Sol Ark inverter with a fortress power battery is about 10k and could give you days of power for critical circuits. 🙂 But the key is having an efficient house and redundancy plan as everyone has pointed out.
I'm in favour of an all-electric home for several reasons: 1) efficiency, even if your power comes from coal or gas - having a heat pump more than compensates for it: A good coal or gas powerplant converts 60%+ of energy into electricity. Let's take 7% loss on the grid. That leaves 55.8% of power. However, a heatpump properly buried in the ground always has a 180%+ efficiency, and so you get at the end more than 100% of the heat energy of that gas that was burned at the power plant. Same efficiency or even better on most days in the American south! 2) significantly increased fire safety and lack of risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, if there isn't a single gas pipe in your home. 3) you can power it in lots of ways, diversifying your sources of power can be done all by yourself, and every addition you buy over time is improving everything else. For example: you can buy solar panels to reduce your daytime electric bill and a chance of your neighbourhood blackout. Later you can buy a house battery and hook it up - now you got more stable power that extends into the night if the battery is big enough. Later you can buy a gas generator hooked up to gas mains - you still got no gas mains in your house, so you don't increase fire or poisoning risks, while still taking advantage of gas. Now you have a way to charge the house battery at night! And later you buy a small household wind turbine, if it's allowed - and you might be able to operate completely off the grid, with all previously purchased power methods working together! Just gotta make sure their fluctuating input power lines don't feed directly into your house, going through a big beefy stabilizer instead :D
I think it is important to point out that during the winter storm in Texas, natural gas prices went to the moon and many people were settled with insurmountable utility bills. Currently the wife and I are targeting an all electric home, with wood burning fireplace and a battery back up.
I live off the grid. I'm changing my kitchen over to all electric and getting rid of my LPG stove and oven and replacing them with induction and a small electric oven. My hot water is a hybrid solar and wood fired system. The wood fire that's just outside my lounge in the workshop that heats my hot water also heats water for my hydronic underfloor and radiator heating in my house. I've designed my house to need very minimal heating and cooling anyway. If I run out of power for my kitchen there's always a gas bbq.
I have an all electric home built in 1982. Enjoyed it all along. I also have 14 solar panels by Sunpower, with one Tesla Powerwall which covers about 50% of the yearly energy cost. I live in a Dallas suburb, and this house was bought right after it was built. We enjoyed it for 42 years. Then came the blizzard and the black out which lasted for 56 hours. Our power failed. The battery kicked on, and in two hours the battery cut off at 54% of the capacity. We had to move in with our relatives for almost 3 days. When we returned I noticed that the panels were covered with 4” of snow. They were not producing at all. Also, when the sky is gray production drops. I still believe we made a wise decision in in having the solar system. Thank you, I enjoy your vlogs.
The home I grew up in was a typical low-cost 70s ranch style home. Everything was electric because we don't have natural gas in the area. But, we always had a wood stove with a couple cords of firewood ready to go. There were only a few times during my childhood that we lost power, and never during something like the texas freeze, but we were very grateful to have that stove. If I have the option, I'm definitely having one in any of my future homes.
Belinda, +1 for your videos; I am a regular follower. I live in a self-build (or at least self-designed and PMed) passive-class house in the UK. We do have a in-hob 2 ring propane ring backup (which we've never used), but I made a design decision to go all electric before finalising the build: induction hobs, electrically heated PCM-based storage DHW, a 3kW resistive heater for our water based UFH in our ground-floor slab, MHVR, and a heating profile planned by my own RPi-base home automation system The slab is the sole heat input source for our 3-storey dwelling (other than warm bodies and other waste heat). I designed in for the later addition of an ASHP, but after 3 years occupation I can't make an economic case for adding one. Our current system is truly zero maintenance. We have use a green Time of Use tariff; so switching to an ASHP for slab input and a CoP of 4 rather than 1 will only save us perhaps $400-500 p.a. at an upfront installation cost of 10× that. I did have a heating outage 3 months back -- which was easy to fix, though the heating was off for 2 days before we noticed that the internal temperature had dropped and so realised something was wrong with the heating. We keep the whole house at 22½-23°C 24×7 year-round. When the house is this warm, you really don't miss an open fire. :-) BTW, I kept a very close control of our build costs, and we did most of the design, PM, procurement, plumbing, interior woodwork, and HVAC ourselves. There were +/- on costs. but overall the costs were a wash; there really wasn't cost premium for building to this spec, but the devil was in the detail of execution. I think that your reservations about an electric only solution are primarily a reaction to the uncertainties and lack of consumer orientation of the unregulated Texas energy supply market. IMO, this is a pretty much a uniquely US scenario that is quite alien to people living in the rest of the 1st world.
Terry Ellison, Europeans are well ahead of North Americans with energy conscious house design. I know I have a business helping people retrofit their houses to Net Zero in Ottawa Canada. I am interested in the DHW storage tank with PCM. Could you advise who is the manufacturer?
Greetings from Scotland. I’m gradually gearing up my house towards the “electrify almost everything” philosophy. Solar panels on the roof, induction cooker coming next. Batteries are being provisioned for in the future. But I say “almost”. While my propane boiler will eventually be replaced with a heat pump, there’s no way that I’ll be retiring the wood burning stove. I fully appreciate the value of having redundancy in terms of heating.
Build all electric for sure. Also build passive solar and super insulated with a lot of thermal mass. If this is done correctly, it will take days with no sunshine or power for the temperature to come down.
Reminded me of back in the 70s when my dad was building his dream home. Being an electrician naturally it was, other than a fire place built more for form than function, an all electric home. That is until the energy crisis hit in the late 70's and the electric bill sky rocketed. It did not take long before what was meant to be a store room became a room containing a wood furnace. So between that and mom's love of the fireplace my name was officially changed to "get wood". Oddly I still burn wood even though I have a modern propane furnace. We like the steady heat from the wood stove and my honey enjoys watching the glow of the fire. Anyway I think your on the right track. Experience has taught me that some redundancy is always a good idea.
I built in rural Colorado years ago and power outages were to be expected, so I used propane fueled water heat and had a gas fireplace as well. The only drawback was that the circulation pump on the heat system was electric. I've always cooked with gas when I had the choice. Induction is really being pushed here in Ecuador, but they are fragile, need specific cookware and still fall short of the specificity of temperature which gas allows. I would argue that Induction and Gas run shoulder to shoulder on paper, but in the real race, gas wins out - look at professional kitchens; they're gas. As always, I appreciate your balanced, reasonable, full-perspective approach - keep up the good videos.
Ms Carr, You said it in your video: "Never put all your eggs in one basket." Your gas company continued to deliver their product even when the power company could not. Another point: my understanding regarding heat pumps is that they are very efficient in warm and hot climates, but go to straight resistive heat at temperatures near and below freezing. That's why you don't see many heat pumps in northern latitudes. If you insist on building an all electric home, I suggest you design a "living" core in the home that can be heated with a kerosene or gas heater. I also suggest you design the plumbing so you can gravity drain the system when the pipes are in danger of freezing. These small resilience factors will help you weather the emergency with minimal discomfort and may even enable you to help your neighbors who are not so well prepared.
All my life until early this year I had lived in all electric homes. I was honestly pretty nervous moving into a home with gas heating because I didn't know what to expect. It's a smaller change than expected, the cost difference is so subtle in my area. When the units eventually reach end of life and die I'll probably move to an electric heat pump with a gas emergency heater and a hybrid water heater. Having a natural gas fireplace and grill is really nice, though. I don't miss chopping wood, and I don't miss buying propane bottles. I don't know why electric heat pumps took so long to catch up to air-conditioners in popularity. The difference between the two is literally a single valve.
Thank you for putting out this information, I have been in the construction industry for over 30 years and I have always wondered the requirements for the medallion on my parents home.
I wouldn't want to give up my gas stove, and we've had a gas water heater in the past, too. The way our gas furnace is set up, the basement never gets very warm; but we have a fantastic fireplace down there, and it can heat the entire 400 square foot room. It helps that I love splitting wood, stacking it, and playing with fire in general. You're so right about the fun of having a real fireplace! Diversification is an excellent hedge against power outages.
Belinda (if I may), i get where you're coming from but would still go all-electric including with a heat pump. (Disclosure: I live in Climate Zone 6, sub Arctic.) What I'd do first is insulate and seal to a PassivHaus standard, then choose the smallest and least complicated heat pump i could find. Then for backup, if concerned with cold, I'd get a small wood stove with good venting/flue technology to control particulate. You're right that energy is a paradoxical and complex field, which is why i love working in it. Natural gas has some great qualities, and some renewables some wasteful qualities. However, natural gas and coal have already killed many times more humans than any other energy source. We really do want and need to decarbonize and your concern is for an event which just happened and remains rare and short-lived where you are. I'd focus more on insulating and maybe re routing and redesigning your piping system. Maybe there are better backup plans but I'm more than fine with losing power because we've considered the scenarios in advance.
@@Sekir80 Quite right. Things clicked for me once I realized that building to code or to ‘the standard’, means that doing anything less than that is actually illegal. I’m amazed that some builders can advertise proudly that they ‘build to code’. That’s almost embarrassing for the real professional, I assume.
@@acchaladka Oh yes! Where I live the code (probably the term used code than standard) is strict, but as I learned more on american codes, like your Climate Zones I'm not that confident anymore. I can't even fit my country to your Zones, so I need to look it up.
@@acchaladka So, after some grind I figured out that our code transaltes to your R 24 for the main walls. The design we'll start to build soon is ~ R 44. It seems I've got a pretty good insulation planned. I'm excited to see how it will translate next winter. :)
@@Sekir80 , I recommend putting most of your insulation outside of the cladding (rock wool if you can afford it). many high-insulation homes can have problems with moisture because they can't breathe. any mistake in insulation or any roof/window leak in a modern high-spec house cannot escape and will generate mold rapidly.
I never brought house without mixed energy for this reason. The only thing I want to add to my place is battery and fire place just in case a Texas happens here. Also geo cool system
Just met someone a few days ago who had their power, water, and gas shut down during the Snowpocalypse. They had a natural gas generator. I had a gasoline generator - I had heat and a powered living room and they had to stay in a hotel - but stores around me started running out of gas - Wal-Mart only had 93 octane left... but, much to their credit, they dropped the price of 93 octane to match 86 octane, so I bought $20 worth of gas - which was about 14 hours of running time for my generator (6500W, about half loaded). Multiple options are always nice to have, but you never know what's going to happen.
As much as I dislike fossil fuel powered grids, I have to admit that gas stoves are definitely the best. Plus the mini split with gas furnace combo seems to be a good heating mix for most climates right now.
The new electric Ford F150 has a battery large enough to power your home for 3 days. It's like having two or three Tesla Powerwalls that double as transportation.
I’m definitely still happy to have an electric only home, i want it to be net 0, but i will want a backup generator, and a fireplace, as well as a battery and solar. The battery and solar will work most of the time, but having a generator for -25 weather just in case is just smart. And a fireplace is fine, i don’t really see why it would not be.
@@jesterblackdog definitely want something that can be airsealed, 100%. although I wonder how airtight that really can get. That said I don’t want gas because gas lines require maintenance and are their own pain and I don’t need gas for anything else so I want a wood fireplace for one ambience two back-up if all else fails.
@@jesterblackdog there are systems that solves this problem. We have a double airtight shunt in our chimney wich cuts the leakage to negligible levels.
I've been watching a few videos on this channel lately. Much respect. Just a few random comments. I'm a big fan of induction cook tops and highly recommend them. Low energy use since almost all the heat goes into the pot and relatively little into the surrounding area, reducing load on the air conditional. I completely agree with not being dependent on one single energy source. I'm happy I have a natural gas fireplace that operates with out electricity. I rarely use it, but if the power goes out, I can keep my home comfortable. Regarding solar and grid tie, yes, if the grid goes out you can't extract energy from the solar. The system needs something to separate your internal electrical network from the grid. The Tesla power wall system will do this and you can keep lower consumption devices in your home operational indefinitely when combined with solar.
Belinda, I came across your channel a week ago. I’m a physicist, I have been teaching at the college level for over 10 years. and I am also training to be an power grid electrical engineer (my father was one for over 30 years). You do a really great job reporting and stating facts, and being objective. You are very correct and accurate on your analysis. Please keep up the good work! I also wanted to compliment you on this dress. The whites and blues are very beautiful.
I have an all electric home. A 5000 watt generator and two heavy duty extension cords keeps the refrigerator and pellet stove running. We use a little camp stove for cooking. No hot showers but even if the power is out for a week it’s good enough to carry on. The most important thing is to implement a simple back up that fits you and your home before you need it.
I agree that one should not limit ALL energy to a single source. I am buying a property in Arizona and wish to generate my own power via wind turbine, solar panels and with many redundancies built in to the system. For instance, an on-demand tankless water heater is a great idea, but in sunny Arizona it's silly not to take advantage of the sun to passively heat the home hot water and the swimming pool during the day. Once you've installed the pipe it's essentially free heat. The greatest challenge is to throttle it back since it is very easy to surpass 120 degrees (50 degrees celsius) safe operating temperature. With excellent design it is also possible to drastically reduce the NEED for power. By using Earthship style "cooling tubes", high venting transom windows, proper shade structures and landscaping, and taking advantage of the huge potential of adobe thermal mass, a well-designed home reduces demand by 90% even in building zone 5 cold high desert. Its a LOT easier to run on back-up batteries or a generator when you only need 10% of what the average household needs. I agree with you also about the fireplace. A house is not a home without a hearth. (Hominids have been using fire for over 2 million years, so it's pretty primal). Although, it is possible to get a Rumsford fireplace with make-up burn air drawn from outdoors, that is powerful enough to heat my (planned) 1,400 square foot house on it's own when every other source of power fails. Love your content, keep up the good work!
We live in an all electric 1,800sf house in Georgia and our average monthly power bill is $125. I too worry about power outages, so we are pricing a whole-house backup generator to run off propane. A 500 gallon LP tank can run the entire house for about a week. We've never been out of power that long, and I'm considering running a line for the stove and converting it to gas. I always enjoy your well-thought-out perspective.
It seems to me that a lot people confuse energy storage, energy transition, and energy usage. I actually think an all-electric home is substantially easier to keep powered during some kind of crisis because you only have to worry about providing it with one "type" of energy. I used to live in an off-grid house that was "powered" completely by propane. It had a 500 gallon propane tank that was filled a few times a year, a propane hot water heater, fridge, and stove. Plumbing was gravity fed from a spring. The one big thing missing was lighting. The house did actually have electrical lighting and outlets but we'd have to run a generator to power them and we rarely did, instead relying on gas lamps after dark. Honestly it was a really nice setup but it definitely left an impression on me about different "forms" of energy and I think it's clear in this day and age that electricity is the most complete and ubiquitous form of energy. So I'll always go with electric. A side note about intermittent and sustained power outages: having a battery backup for a home is definitely more expensive but your house will never lose power even momentarily when the grid goes out for a short while. Which to me is very worth while. In a very long outage like Texas experienced, I see off-grid setups as the only real protection and, as I think you mentioned, that's only possible with all-electric houses.
I totally understand being independent from a powergrid especially in winter for heat. Having a wood fireolace saved us from freezing during the 1997 montreal ice storm. We were out of power for 2 weeks.
One of the most important things you do is encourage people to not "demonize" the process, the industry, the material, the trade, and ultimately the market and people. etc. Nice touch. from Texas
As the saying goes....DON'T Keep all your Eggs in 1 basket! A mixed system allows you to be more versatile. A wood burning fireplace is a must. It may have helped keep the house warm and prevented pipes from freezing, while keeping you warm, as well as provide a place to cook on...think chuckwagon kettle.
When I first began my electrical career in the late 80's, I worked with a gentleman and my primary job was removing the old electric "storage" heaters installed by the local power company back in the day. It came with an elaborate system that heated bricks inside the storage heating device during non-peak generation times and supposedly radiate that heat back to you during peak times. The water heaters were set up the same way. Completely off during peak times, and only on during non-peak times. It was a great concept, but we usually would remove them all and replace them with standard baseboard heat. They too had plaques, but I assume that was our electric company (PP&L) just hamming it up mimicking the 50's They also had the random odd thing like fully lit house numbers and fully lit door bells (24/7). We live in an older duplex that suffered from the all-electric heat phase. Frankly, I turned off the electric heat breakers and we use space heating and electric blankets when it's super cold. We cut our electric bill in half over using baseboard. The key is keeping the RH up above 40% I prefer 48%.
Where I live you can setup your solar panels so you can use them when the power goes out, but they usually aren't because it costs more. So it might be worth investigating if it can be done where you live.
In my little Lithuanian wooden house we have a wood burning stove which heats the radiators and you can heat water too with it... the best thing about this is it needs zero electricity and there's a lot of burnable materials in the garden that are often used together with firewood we buy.
There’s a simple solution to your all electric home problem, get solar with a battery or buy a v2g car which can give you security during power outage.
wow thanks for the memory. In the 1970s my parents purchased a new Centennial tract home in N. Dallas area and it was all electric complete with the Medallion emblem next to the front door! My father survived the blitz as a teen in London and witnessed countless natural gas explosions including the house next door (not to mention bombs and falling shrapnel). It is one thing to have the electricity fail when your being bombed to smithereens but gas lines are even more precarious. Hence he refused to have a natural gas furnace home.
We had an all-electric home in the early 70s. We couldn't afford the electric bill so heated it with a wood stove instead. At that time, -40 degrees F wasn't all that uncommon in our area of the high mountains of Colorado. The wood was free for the gathering of dead trees in the area. That obviously affected how we compared the cost.
I grew up in a house that used gas stove and heating. It almost killed us several times LOL. Granted we had primitive heaters with open flames and an old stove without many safety mechanisms, but still.
I grew up and my parents still live in a medallion home. I've still haven't completely gotten used to gas especially on the stove as an adult. Yes, get a backup generator. It made all the difference in the world during that snowstorm. I have neighbors will over $100K damage. Ignoring landscape damage, we had ZERO.
My house is new and all electric, during one of our ice storms this last month we did lose power for a couple hours, temp dropped a degree or two. Ask the people around Boston how fun it is to have explosive levels of gas pumped into so many homes the fire dept stops coming for fire only. Electric is easy to replace source on, Sunbelt does deliver generators.
Greetings Belinda from Cincinnati. We just built a production home, we are happy to be diversified. My teaching experience was being without power for 9 days after hurricane ike made it's way up this way (still as a cat 1). My neighbor across the street had power after just 3 days.
For housing built off the grid, solar+battery bank+ all electric everything+ a wood stove that you can cook on seems to be a popular option. Those stoves don’t fire up often, but boy are they nice when they do. Propane also can be used in place of wood.
My power went out for 5 days, but I have natural gas, so I was able to run my stove, furnace, and hot water heater of a invertor I have in my truck.. It was in the low 30s... But it wasn't that baf
Belinder, Agreed, several sources of energy for your home has many advantages. In Western Oregon we just had an ice storm that caused our power to be out for almost 3 days. We live in a rural area (5 houses on a 5 mile long road) and we are not top priority for restoration of power. Natural gas is not available in our area. We run an oil furnace but also have propane for the cook top and a fireplace insert. We also have a wood fireplace. During the outage we can keep warm and protect the pipes from freezing with the propane fireplace insert and the wood stove. The cook top has an electric valve that prevents it from running without power (dual fuel type cook top and oven). We cooked on a camp stove (the camp stove and small propane canisters are something to always have pre-staged and available). I also have several small generators (3K-5K) that are either gasoline or diesel. Not enough to run a whole house, but enough to keep the refrigerator and freezer cold and some lighting. Note that a diesel generator can run on the oil for the oil furnace. It is just #2 fuel oil that is dyed red and does not have the "road tax" applied. We have a 175 gallon tank so always plenty. We are on a community water service with gravity fed pressure so water was not an issue. If on a well, a decent size generator capable of running the well pump, freezer and refrigerator would be very nice.
This might be different and off topic , but I watch your videos not only because of how interesting and well informed they are, but there are those little bits of GENERAL ADVICE you give , that only an engineer can can give ( reminds me of my late father ) thank you
I agree with you about wood heat. It is much better than electric heat. We had a wood-burning stove when I was a kid. The heat was very comfortable, but it was a LOT of work.
Some great points. Your woodburning fireplace may not be able to heat your home as well as you expect. Fireplaces are mostly for show, not function, and theyeare sources of air leakage. I'm a wood stove heat guy, been using wood heat for 50 years, currently using a high efficiency rocket stove. Backup heat is electric heat pumps. Once a decade we get ice storms that shut down the power for up to two weeks. In that case, we reconfigure things so an inverter runs the fridge and the internet/computers, toss a couple of potatoes in the coals, the propane stove doesn't care. We have a portable generator (not hard wired) , and a solar travel trailer that can provide independant solar power. We've planned carefully against the certainty that the power will be out for up to two weeks in bitter cold weather. Wood heat isn't for everybody, but it can be a very sustainable backup and a way to reduce your bill. A rocket stove or a high efficiency woodburner can be a comfy backup.
A properly designed grid isn't that sensitive to cold (the texas grid isn't winterized, but neither are their gas lines) but some sort of backup is always a good idea. On the other hand, gas stoves are simply better and ground source heat pumps are expensive to install so gas lines are not obsolete yet.
Co-generation is a much resisted concept that can add efficiency and robustness to our infrastructure. Many of the mechanisms that we use in our lives use processes that have multiple effects and we routinely only use one of them, and ignore the others as byproducts. Electrical generators not only produce electricity but heat as well, and the heat is normally a considered waste product and radiated (dumped) away. For example if a natural gas electrical power generator was used in/near a home it could provide useful electricity and heat for the home at the same time and saving a lot of energy. Combining a battery storage system with the co-generator/heater and you could have reliable heat and free backup electricity as well. It also can be considered free heating when generating electricity...
The good thing about all electric, is that if you design it right, you can have it run on a whole house backup generator. If getting a large enough generator is to much you can get a smaller unit and flip off the breakers for different circuits to moderate load on the generator. This is what I want to do for my custom build. That and have a solar system with battery backup when it gets cheap enough.
Modern all electric heating with a heat pump is very efficient but only works in a tight well insulated home. Make sure to spend some money on a high performance building shell first before trying it.
In the northeast I diversified my house with 3 totally independent heating system. Pellet, oil and heatpump. Pellet and oil I can run on a 2000w generator or inverter and heatpump is my big gen. So 3 systems 3 different power sources. Zero worries about a multi week even
Born in 1961, but several of the homes around us were still heated with coal. Our house was heated with oil and we were far ahead of many.. lol... I remember to this day how horrible the smoke was coming out of chimneys when I was a kid. I also remember several chimney fires. I was born and raised in Western NY. Right on Lake Ontario. We had power outages and ice storms and water main freezes and along with those freezes they would shut off natural gas just incase.... Our fireplace had been converted to a natural gas fireplace, but in those days they were very sketchy, so ours was never used. I have lived in Tampa Bay, Florida since 1994' and have been through several power outages and yes, several freezes. I have a lot to say about solar and the BS POLITICS behind NOT being able to use our solar panels when the grid is down. It is all GREED!!!!!!! I would love to do a one on one with you on all of this one day, but for now, I will say this: Homes must be built FAR BETTER than they are today in most parts of this country. ALL HOMES should be built with a storm room or rooms that can stand up to any weather and provide security and comfort. A kitchen and master bedroom with bathroom that can be powered by batteries, generator (ON DEMAND). Solar powered homes with battery back-up, but maybe each home with solar that normally runs off from a single transformer shares a battery bank. Maybe also a generator. How about every high power line and power station now has it's own solar. We have thousands and thousands of miles of power line roads all over Florida and this country. Why aren't they lined with solar panels and battery banks to maintain each section they provide for now???? We deal with hurricanes, high winds, flooding, smoking hot temps and freezing temps here and the occurrence is more and more often, but instead of making real repairs to everything, politicians are blaming the other party... WHY???? Because those companies are the ones with the real paychecks for those same politicians... When we ALL understand that, we can ALL work at LOCKING THEM ALL UP!!!!!
You said everything I told my wife about our all electric home. Choosing the right energy provider make a world of difference. A new community here in red oak is providing gas and electric. I too will be getting a gasoline/propane generator and propane heaters. Stocking up on fire wood too. Good presentation.
I lived through the "big freeze" in Texas in February. My water heater and stove are gas, and the water heater worked until the water was shut off. I had turned my master bathroom into a "sauna" of sorts to warm up a bit. However, my gas stove has an emergency shutoff valve that turns the gas off instantly if the electricity is cut off. So my gas stove is useless without electricity. I'm in a condo, so I agree with the battery backup idea. That's really my only option in this scenario.
Interesting point! Keep in mind: a natural gas powered furnace is NOT diversification of heating your home if that furnace is relying on electronics! If our home cut off of electricity gas burner goes with it!
The first morning of snow without power I was woken by the formerly Panamanian family I live with (a Dr, two nurses, and a lawyer, non of whom knew how to start a fire in our gas fireplace. When I was done laughing, I made a fire (no need for the gas here), and used the fire to boild water for the French press and for tea, and cooked four tosted ham, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches so they wouldn't starve. I miss the snow allready.
Electricity all the way! Having a Powerwall would make it a bit less risky (maybe even having an electric car with car-house power transfer). For comfort and redundancy, a fire stove is the best addition for a house. The only downside are the complications with the chimney in a modern, well insulated house. Takes a bit more effort and money to make it airtight, but electricity and fire are without a doubt the most resilient energent combination for homes. And wood fired stoves have become much more efficient and cleaner burning with the use of modern materials that can withstand high temperatures in the combustion chamber. Great video Belinda!
I think I'd lean towards something else for backup power, at least until batteries are definitely being recycled or use something other than lithium. They're not great (although not the worst thing, don't get me wrong). I feel like if the backup is truly for emergencies, the better thing to do is something like a propane or gas generator. The impact of filling a few cylinders of propane during rare emergencies is likely much less than a powerwall (which you'd need a few of if you actually want to last more than a day or two in cold weather). But, a wood stove is nice for aesthetic reasons and does have the side benefit of being a backup.
Back in the 1950s the main reason all electric houses were built was that the appliances were much less expensive and not having to plumb gas also reduced cost. I lived in an all electric apartment in the late 1970s. Cooking was a nightmare and winter heating was expensive. If you are a gourmet cook you never want an electric cook top. A few years ago we had a 4 day power outage and I could still cook and hear my house as well as get hot water because they all ran on gas. The main problem with all electric is power reliability.
Adding a backup generator is definitely a good idea no matter how you power your house. Here, in the northern states, burning oil or gas is still a good choice for heating your home. If your electricity goes out you won't be able to feed oil to the burner and you won't be able to circulate heat throughout the house.
Great vid - Thanks! We live in a motorhome. We can: A. Plug into the power grid B. Use the backup generator C. Run the coach motor for power and heat D. Use propane for heat, water and cooking So we were not inconvienced at all by the storm. We felt bad for those who were.
I lived in Baton Rouge, LA when hurricane Gustav hit and took out power to most of the city for several days. My home was duel fuel powered by gas and electricity. The water heater, and stove were gas, while everything else was electricity. I was very happy to have those gas devices. They allowed me to have a hot shower and cook food when others were forced to run generators for their basic needs. Fast forward to 2017 and I lived in the Tampa Bay area when Hurricane Irma hit. My home was all electric and I hated it. No hot shower, no cooking. I've since moved to another all electric house and plan to have a whole home generator installed. Other fuel options were not available for the house I live in and and the existing solar is tied to the grid.
I once lived in Houston and got caught in the 2000 flood. I've lived in Louisiana during many hurricanes, some that were mostly rain, and some that had the wind to make them very destructive. Having said that, an all electric home sounds fine and dandy on the surface, but when the bull muffins hit the fan, and the power goes out, It is best to have some kind of backup or alternative in place. A backup drinkable water supply, a fuel stove, Storm Lamps; anything that will get the job done when option "A" is no longer available.
I'm in the process of designing and building a house. I always planned on having three sources for heat, a wood burning fireplace, electric heat pump system, and a propane boiler for in floor radiant heating. As technology advances and I'm able to use solar and storage, I can always convert the radiant heat system to use solar/electric boiler.
If you're building new, wouldn't you seal and insulate more than enough to eliminate needing a radiant system? The fire would be more than an adequate backup.
@@ericscott3997 Yes, I don't plan on skimping on insulation or air sealing, but living at over 6,000 feet in the southern Rockies, there is nothing like having a warm floor in the winter. It isn't a necessity but more of a want. Burning wood will definitely offset the cost of propane and electric.
@@jackskellington6cs ground source heat pump might work a bit better, and systems also come with underfloor heating. Don't know about the costs in the us though.
Great VID! yes up in Grt North West lots of homes were all electric homes in 50's! Why not look at all hydro electric power at that time. My battery back ups came in real handy. I originally got them when my mother was still alive make sure everything could still run for a while.
I largely agree but it seems like having an all electric (or mostly electric) home seems like it has the most flexibility for having on site back up systems. Is it legal / safe to have a large cng reservoir in a traditional residential property? Though as usual I found your video to be informative and interesting. Thanks.
more common is propane or diesel-powered generators. I personally prefer propane as it can sit in the tank for 20 years+ and still be good. Just fire up the generator a couple times a year to exercise it and your good. The problem with batteries and other forms of backup power is the stored energy will degrade over time whether used or not which is wasteful.
I grew up in the rural south. Everybody had a (liquid) propane tank which had to be refilled every few months by a tanker truck. The tank was about 3ft diameter and 8ft long. This ran stoves, central furnace, water heater. If you wanted a backup system, then propane tank + continuous duty generator would be your answer, or even a natural gas generator. Natural gas furnace, stove, and hot water heater. While I've had lots of power outages (storms, someone hit a power pole, etc) I have never had a natural gas outage. Having natural gas appliances/heat/hot water, you reduce the size generator you need.
I'm with you, Belinda. I rely on natural gas for heating, new solar panels for most of my electricity, battery backup on the offgrid solar (manual transfer switch) and an outside wood burning stove for backup heat (I hate smoke in the house). I may get a small 2.4ton split heat pump which can run off my solar panels during blackouts. Forget selling electricity to the grid. They no longer want it and some places are penalizing people who install solar on their homes!
All electric home Northern California Coast with a pellet stove in the front room. Tesla Solar, 3x Powerwalls, split duct, heat pump water heater. 100% solar 8 months of the year with 30-60% savings from Oct/Nov-March (depends on cloud cover). 3x Powerwalls electricity 5-7 days during a power outage….although solar panels usually recover the deficient. Pellet stove creates great comfort at low cost during the winter…about 20 bags of pellets for 4 months at a cost of $6-7 a bag. Great channel, thanks for the information and your hard work! :-)
A big key here is if the homeowner can control the means of production. A solar roof, or a wood fireplace, or a generator with an independent fuel tank (not just plumbed into the house natural gas pipeline) allows the flexibility and reliability to focus typical usage on all electric.
I live in an all electric house in the UK. It was built in the 70s. It's not uncommon in more rural places where the infrastructure for gas wasn't put in yet but huge numbers of new build estates were created. Gas arrived to our area around 2000 but only a handful of people have had it put in. We do get a lot of power cuts but we have become used to it. If it were practical I would love to have a wood burning stove but there's not really anywhere to put it in our house.
I live in an all electric home, and it's pretty common where I live, too. I think I've only experienced a single blackout in my entire life (and that lasted for less than 10 minutes) so that's not much of a concern for me. What is a concern though is the cost. While I would never trade my electric stove for anything cause I'm so used to it, electric heating is so so expensive. There was a huge bonus for electric heating installations in the 80s, so most landlords did that and haven't changed anything since. If we combined this with solar power it could be something, but that's still rare around here.
Wood fireplaces may seem nice, but in most houses most heat generated not only goes up the flue, it takes any residual heat from a gas or electric furnace with it. My house has a fireplace that I have used in the past during power outages and it really didn’t help that much unless I sat right in front of it. Also, once I upgraded the insulation in my house to modern standards, I found out two things: the residual heat kept the house from losing heat. It took days, instead of hours to drop into an uncomfortable range and when I used kerosene lamps for light, our smoke/CO detector went off after an hour. The house was so much tighter it was no longer a good idea to use fire for light or heat. In the past, I looked into getting an fireplace insert, but our chimney wouldn’t accommodate it. In retrospect, I’m glad I ended up putting money towards insulation instead. That said, if you want to use firewood to heat your home, even as just a backup, invest in a good wooden stove with proper ventilation. I grew up with snowy winters and my childhood home had a Jøtul wood stove and it kept the large front of the house warm and was much safer to leave burning round the clock than an open fireplace.
I live in an all-electric home. Not by choice. We just don’t have any natural gas to our home. I grew up in an all-electric home in the 1970s and didn’t much like it; the electric water heater took FOREVER to heat up after someone took a shower, and the 1970s-era heat pumps didn’t heat the house very well when it got really cold out. Granted, we were in Houston where it rarely dropped below freezing, but it still didn’t keep the house very warm when it was 35° out. While things are much better today, we were screwed here in Austin in February when the power went out for four days in below-freezing temperatures. No working fireplace, no stove or oven, no hot water. We plan to buy a propane generator at some point because we know ERCOT will fail us again, but that won’t exactly keep us warm and comfortable. It’ll allow us to run the refrigerator, charge our phones, run the microwave, and maybe run a fan or space heater (depending on the time of year), but not much more. It would be great to at least have a gas stove.
The thing is it was cleaner. Even if the carbon produced was exactly the same from the power station (which it wouldn't) it would still dramatically improve air quality in residential areas.
Solar panels for light and entertainment, woodstove for heating and cooking. All bundled into a tiny home to conserve resources. I don't think I lived in a medallion home, but I have lived in several all electric homes and did not enjoy the power outages that usually occurred in the winter.
We built a net-zero passive solar house 5 years ago in MN. We generate about 50% more electricity than we use, our utility buys our excess. Our goal was to be able to heat and cool without fossil fuelsWe have a super efficient wood burner, a well for water, and a small generator just in case, that we have not needed yet. I feel we are ready for anything nature can throw at us. Thanks for your thoughts, they were right on. I would never rely on a single energy source.
I have an all electric home and have sat through multi-day blackouts due to storm damage. The only thing I get concerned about is food in the fridge going bad. Worse case scenario, I'll cook it all. Being prepared is key. I have stoves that run off of propane, butane and white gas so no cooking issues. I'm also a backpacker so washing out of a basin is nothing new to me in order to save on hot water and if the water gets cold in the tank I make some more with the aforementioned stoves that I have. I may get a small generator, one day but in the last 30 years I have not had a need for one. I also have battery and propane powered lights. It's just like camping in your home.
As a resident of the frozen wasteland Hoth (aka Ontario, Canada) I enjoy having multiple energy sources. My furnace is forced-air high-efficiency natural gas - which is very cheap to operate and 96% efficient, but the furnace also relies on electricity to run. I have a wood-burning stove as backup heat - also lovely on a cold winter's evening, along with a kerosene heater for extra heat in emergencies; to keep the refrigerator and freezer going in a power outage I have a 'portable' (lifting it is a backbreaker) gasolene generator. I understand these are not renewable and rely on fossil fuels, but we have very expensive electricity here (peak prices of 17.6 cents CDN per kWh). Our grid is stable but we have still had several long outages in the last decade, and as Texans have unfortunately discovered, it doesn't take long with freezing temperatures and no power to cause extensive damage to a home. I am looking forward to a day when electrical storage (and possible feedback generation) in the home is ubiquitous, but I don't see that happening for many years. As an aside, my stove is natural gas, and when it needs replacing I will most likely go with an electric model. The flame temperature of natural gas is quite low and I find the stove's performance disappointing. Great videos, Belinda. I am grateful for your research and summarization of these topics.
Currently in the build process of a new home in the Midwest. Gas stove, furnace, hot water tank, and clothes dryer. Have backup generator for all of my electrical needs as well if the grid goes down. Call me old school but NG is far more efficient when temperatures reach sub zero.
I’m currently building a 1500 sqft ICF house that’s all electric. I already have solar, wind and hydro power on my property that produces 180% of estimated needs. I have a 3 day battery backup system that has worked flawlessly. My total out of pocket expenses for 20 acre property, new house, renewable energy with battery backup is $298k. I bought my place 6yr ago so if I didn’t have the land already I would pay over $600k
I absolutely love watching your videos, they're very informative, and not hard on the eyes :) I really enjoyed watching the one on the insulation types.
You can still have an all electric home or a balance power home. Since you already know that you have natural gas running in black out . You best bet is to run the backup generator on tri-fuel. Also, to your fireplace. You can also look into wind energy. By running your home this way will help you weather the storm . Also, look into a Generac batter system with switching panel. That will help manager solar, genator and line power.
I agree with your concerns about all-electric homes. I have a semi-remote cabin that is connected to the electric grid. My heat pump can take care of the place in all seasons but I still installed a wood-burning stove to be used on really cold days or back up if no electricity was available. For cooking my back up to the electric range is an outdoor propane-powered BBQ grill. This grill also has side burners which I normally don't use but would come in handy in emergency situations. I will be adding a dual fuel generator in the future. Also considering having some solar power abilities eventually. I hate relying on one source for my energy.
My in put- the way solar panels have got cheaper and the IMMENSE fall in the price of LiFePo4 cells build your solar first. Will Prowse YT channel and his community website will see you save massive amounts of money
I am looking at building a new all electric home in a few years. I totally agree that you need to think about what happens when the utility power goes down. I am planning on solar and battery backup, but have also thought about a wood burning stove as an additional backup. I just need to figure out how to make that work in a high efficiency home. One nice thing about well insulated homes is that they don't take that much power to just keep warm. Heating water and food become the big power users.
My house design for building in TX has solar and battery back up as its sole source of power. I plan to be one of those houses glowing with light when the power grid shuts down.
In the 1950's, when they were talking "clean", it's not the kind of "clean" we're talking about today. Clean for them is that you didn't have to deal with coal dust or fuel oil in the home.
Not to mention potential of gas leaks
Anyone who has ever heated with coal or wood knows what a mess they can make. Still miss my gas top stove.
Arguably however, GE was also building nuclear at the time, (As was westinghouse), and those are "Clean" in the sense they were (And are) carbon neutral. But yeah considering the early half of the 20th century was dominated by coal soot and other smog related soiling, electric was definitely cleaner.
All above have great points.
In those days "clean" would have referred to the lack of coal dust and smoke in and around your home.
I do want to point out that large power plants are also significantly cleaner than many small coal powered furnaces. You can look at pics of London from the early part of the last century for examples.
and fuel oil.
Exactly. "Spring Cleaning" was coined largely for the coal dust after everyone burned it for heat all winter.
Yes, anyone who can remember a house with a coal bin in the basement would know that for the consumer it was VERY dirty. The electric companies were using marketing but marketing isn't necessarily a lie.
@@silvertube52 lol my parents still have a coal bin in the basement. How I hated all the shoveling in the fall when the coal was delivered.
I live in the province of Quebec, Canada, where 99% of the houses are all electric but we have state-run hydro electricity that has been powering the province since the late 1800s. We have much more severe winter conditions for four + months of the year but we have the infrastructure in place to take care of our electric network in the worst wintery conditions... Except for the 1998 ice storm. But that was a once in a 100 years situation.
@@snarkylive In Canada we call all electric home service "hydro". Not sure why, but we do.
@@snarkylive That's alittle generalizing "into a land of not much".
It's hard to say hydro-electric is destroying significant natural area ... look at what humans have done so far
Lol. Once in a hundred years. That's what they always say.
The linemen of HydroQuebec are TOP NOTCH!! Many times when I lived in NH and we had big storms, the crews from Quebec would come down to assist. 100% the best crews I've come across in terms of equipment and professionalism.
@@wylantern A lot of places use hydroelectric generating stations, abr. hydro.
Nice thing about having 10,000 lakes in a province.
running wires to a house, allows the method of generating electricity to change over time without changing an;ything in the home.
I'm not sure this is that simply, technically yes, but the infrastructure has an ownership complication. I live in a state where the power utility has been spending millions to lobby the government to strip rights of home owners in terms of electricity. Once you centralize something heavily, others issues show up.
The problem is that most electricity in the US is from coal powered plants. Much better to go with something like LNG till that changes. Not much good if your house is green but the energy provided is not.
19% of electricity is generated from coal.
@@hamsterbrigade What state is that?
@@huejanus5505 LNG is methane. It's worse than coal for climate change (not smog) because of the leakage during capture. Better to stay with coal until non-fossil fuels arrive.
Having survived several week-long power outages here in the upper midwest, I can tell you that not all your fossil fuel appliances will work without electricity. If your gas water heater is power vented, it won't turn on unless the vent is operable. Neither will your gas furnace, nor your oven. You basically have your cooktop that you can light manually and that's it. So in terms of surviving another freeze, state of the art gas appliances might not be the help you are looking for. Your issues with the marketing of electricity as "green" is warranted, but to my eye it doesn't compare with the greenwashing marketing of natural gas. I do enjoy your channel. Thank you for the work you put into it!
A couple of 1500 VA UPS will power a midsized furnace blower for 24-48 hours. A 550 VA UPS will take care of the water heater vent (or you can just install it differently). A regular gas oven will work, but a convection gas oven won't.
@@wisenber newer ovens have electronic ignitions and can't be lit manually. Only ovens that have pilot lights will remain operable. The only point I am hoping to make is that in electrical outages your gas appliances don't really provide back up. Virtually everything has a circuit board and if it does it won't operate without some form of electric backup.
@@markohand6430 Electronic or piezo ignition?
Gas appliances that will work off grid can be had, but you have to make a deliberate effort to find them.
It's a shame that most seem to be designed where redundant energy sources are rendered moot.
That being said, many part of TX lost their gas as well when the pipelines didn't keep up.
Green washing? I’ve never heard, nor seen fictional information on natural gas from an actual fossil fuel company or trade organization. OTOH, I’ve seen plenty of complete falsehoods from the green movement. Most of the early predictions from actual client scientists have now been proven false. I believe we have a carbon problem. I believe the rhetoric from the anti property, anti science, anti freedom LEFT has become the problem with progress. Peak oil was a myth, that was used to get policies
All sides need to double down on the truth while reducing the snark and hate. You can’t convince the other side while insulting them. If you truly believe in a need for change, the place to start is on your own side.
Natural gas central heating here - which won't work *at all* without electricity to operate the air handler.
Belinda: Thank you for bring back memories!!! My parents build a new home in 1965 and it was a "Medallion Home", 100% electric. In our case even water as we had a rural well. So if we lost power we lost ALL services. The trouble came when electric rates skyrocketed in the mid 1970s. I can remember the Blizzard of 1978 with an Artic blast. Our electric bill was over $500 which would be like $2000 in 2021 dollars. In the summer of 1979 we added a brick chimney for a wood stove in the basement and a propane furnace for whole house heating.
That system was changed in 2005 when my Father died. My Mother could not continue using the wood stove by herself. So we installed a heat pump system with a propane backup for severe cold weather. Her electric bills now average less than $250 a month year round.
I will encourage your thoughts on wanting a multi-fuel home. Heat pumps for heating and cooling with propane or wood backup. Then an electric generator for backup during outages.
My current house is a 150 year old farm house. We completely remodeled it in 2010. Maximum insulation and thermal systems. I have a high efficient heat pump system for the normal heating and cooling. My system does have propane backup for extreme cold periods. I have a backup generator that runs on propane. I also have a propane non-vented wall heater in the central part of the main floor. This heater does not use electric or electronics to operate. So it is set at 50 degrees as a doomsday backup. I have a 1000 gallon propane tank. That supply will run the generator for three weeks at full capacity. The wall heater will only use 250 gallons a month in sub-zero weather, keeping the house above freezing so all the plumbing is safe.
P.S. Three years ago we went to our daughter's house in Florida over the Christmas holidays. We had an electric outage. When the backup generator fired it popped the breaker. So no heat system. That $250 wall heater kept our house from freezing. Cheap insurance. Low tech too for reliability.
Definitely a good combination.
A solid back up plan is always good to have. We have a wood burner and a years supply of firewood at all times.
@@jakobrosenqvist4691 Exactly. Reliance upon others is a Big downfall.
I live in southern France in an all-electric home, which I think works great. I was very surprised by how few all-electric homes there are in the US, I feel like they’re way more common here in France. The only difference is that I have personally never experienced a blackout in my entire life, the electric grid here is very reliable, and since 90%+ of our electricity comes from non-fossil fuels, it is actually very “climate friendly” to live in one.
Yep. Blackouts very rare even in rural areas in Europe in general. I do wish that other European countries would also do like France and heavily use nuclear energy. For some idiotic reason e.g. Germany has done excactly the opposite.
@@ukrytykrytyk8477 hardly embracing unfortunately, France is set to retire loads of their nuclear with overly optimistic claims about replacing them with renewables. France may well get less reliable and more expensive electricity if they have their way. Again though it is a good point that you don't need wasteful and environmentally destructive battery backups if you simply have a functioning government.
It's also true that your entire country is the size of some of our individual states. Put differently, on a localized level, it's perhaps more feasible to get to a higher percentage of all-electric homes...assuming that's a goal worth achieving. Also, the reliability of the electric grid can depend on location...rural, where power transfer lines run mostly above ground (and therefore subject to weather-related disruption), versus urban, where power transfer lines run mostly below ground. I've lived in all-electric homes, and those with mixed fuels...natural gas for heating (both air and water) and cooking. I prefer the mixed fuels approach, personally.
@@ScottHammet It's so insane when Americans use the idea that their country is large to excuse obvious faults. Large grids are more reliable! That's why the EU trades power between it's countries! America has a lot of reliable nuclear, lots of great hydro. The failures of the US are in it's politics not it's geography.
@@Alex-nl5cy I think you misunderstood my point. My point is that at a state level, there may be some in the US that approach a higher percentage of all-electric homes, and that would be a more appropriate comparison. It's just not an apples-to-apples comparison at a country level. And "obvious faults" is a subjective characterization unworthy of debate. Perhaps one day we'll get to nirvana where everything is powered by "green energy". That would be fine. In the mean time, I suspect the world will keep doing what it's doing, and making the best use of what resources are available.
Having a well insulated building is probably the most important objective and then the energy sources you choose are secondrary.
So true!
Negawatts
Ja isolering är det bästa
As a Canadian living in Ontario, I've had a very different experience when it comes to living in an all electric home/apartment, even during times of total blackout... a few have occurred. Prolonged, major outages have only occurred twice that I can remember: once during the ice storm of 97, and again in 2003 when the entire north eastern grid tripped. Don't take those dates as accurate, I might be off, but the events are well known. During the ice storm, massive sections of infrastructure... just fell down... lines, pylons, transformer stations... it was a literal mess. My Aunt's house in the middle of no where, took almost a month to be restored, major cities and town, a few days to weeks. Life returned to normal relatively quickly, but we have robust regulations and mandatory emergency response protocols. Houses with no electric and no alternative heating sources, were lent generator, and in some cases, those generators were fueled by the utility. Most buildings over a certain height, have mandatory backup generators to provide power to elevators... It's just never been an issue up here like it seems in Texas, and frankly, I'm not sure most Canadians really understand what's going on down there, we've never experienced a failure on the magnitude as you all seem to, even when we did have a crisis. Even much more northern communities, whom have frequent electrical interruptions, have provisions, backups, alternatives... and experience relatively brief outages... If any community went more than a few consecutive hours without electricity up here, heads would roll, we just do not tolerate ill prepared or ineffectual suppliers.
here, most electric companies are private companies. this means that they don’t want to “waste” money on updating equipment that’s old/ in bad shape but isn’t broken yet. in texas, for example, they’d been warned about potential issues with the grid for decades, but the power company just never did anything about it. and state governments - especially southern state governments - are loathe to “restrict” businesses, even if it’s hurting citizens.
In my old neighborhood (small neighborhood with only 12 small house) have diesel generator. We lived outside of Minneapolis, we used this for emergency situation during blackout.
All the house there use electric appliances and stuff, except for 2 of the house who have gas stove (one of them change to electric after a few years).
I think this would be a good alternative for emergency use during blackout for all electric houses.
Poor example as hydro electric is not really available on the World stage.
As another Ontarian I only have a power outage for more than an hour maybe once or twice a year on average. Only had a multi day power outage when a huge chunk of North America went out in 2003. Even during storms it is unlikely that power will go out.
I have never had a gas stove but have had gas water heater and furnace as well as fireplace. Personally I don't think having any gas appliance is necessary and if you need to on an all electric house you can use a backup generator. We have a generator but I doubt it works because we haven't used it since 2003.
Same for me living in QC. I just don't get this whole power outage regularly in US... I come from France, with a relatively isolated village, and we got maximum 2-3 blackout that never went longer than 2-3h I think. In QC, there was some power outage. The worst I got was from like 2 days because some guy burned the lines. And the there is that storm of 97-98 as you said but i was not there yet.
I just don't get why you have such poor service. Why is it acceptable.
Verry interesting topic. I live here in the Netherlands in a tiny house with no gas or oil. Everything runs on electric power such as heating IR and induction cooking. An electric boiler that is supported during the summer with heat-pipes. It is not off-grid but nearly. Greeting from the Netherlands!
I moved from US to The Netherlands 6 years ago. We use both gas and electric. The houses are much smaller but can be quite leaky too. We want to build a passive house 🏡 but it will be very expensive here because of high building costs + extremely limited plots for new homes. May have to go to Spain or Italy to make it happen.
Lithium iron phosphate batteries are available for $100 kwh... even if you don't put solar panels on your roof , you can buy as much energy independence as you want. Whole house inverters start at $2500
Thanks for the info. I’m building a house in Texas, was wondering alternatives to generators and panels
@@ukrytykrytyk8477 this is a correct response. Our highly insulated house in the countryside can lose power for days and the pipes will not freeze, all it takes is a person running a heat source for an hour to reset; we have a portable word stove to do that.
A Sol Ark inverter with a fortress power battery is about 10k and could give you days of power for critical circuits. 🙂 But the key is having an efficient house and redundancy plan as everyone has pointed out.
@@ukrytykrytyk8477 the house is almost completed, R values are at least double code.
@@azwildfire thanks for the tip, looks like a better alternative to Tesla. Now I’m deciding between that or a NG generator.
I'm in favour of an all-electric home for several reasons:
1) efficiency, even if your power comes from coal or gas - having a heat pump more than compensates for it:
A good coal or gas powerplant converts 60%+ of energy into electricity. Let's take 7% loss on the grid. That leaves 55.8% of power. However, a heatpump properly buried in the ground always has a 180%+ efficiency, and so you get at the end more than 100% of the heat energy of that gas that was burned at the power plant. Same efficiency or even better on most days in the American south!
2) significantly increased fire safety and lack of risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, if there isn't a single gas pipe in your home.
3) you can power it in lots of ways, diversifying your sources of power can be done all by yourself, and every addition you buy over time is improving everything else. For example: you can buy solar panels to reduce your daytime electric bill and a chance of your neighbourhood blackout. Later you can buy a house battery and hook it up - now you got more stable power that extends into the night if the battery is big enough. Later you can buy a gas generator hooked up to gas mains - you still got no gas mains in your house, so you don't increase fire or poisoning risks, while still taking advantage of gas. Now you have a way to charge the house battery at night! And later you buy a small household wind turbine, if it's allowed - and you might be able to operate completely off the grid, with all previously purchased power methods working together! Just gotta make sure their fluctuating input power lines don't feed directly into your house, going through a big beefy stabilizer instead :D
I think it is important to point out that during the winter storm in Texas, natural gas prices went to the moon and many people were settled with insurmountable utility bills. Currently the wife and I are targeting an all electric home, with wood burning fireplace and a battery back up.
I live off the grid. I'm changing my kitchen over to all electric and getting rid of my LPG stove and oven and replacing them with induction and a small electric oven. My hot water is a hybrid solar and wood fired system. The wood fire that's just outside my lounge in the workshop that heats my hot water also heats water for my hydronic underfloor and radiator heating in my house. I've designed my house to need very minimal heating and cooling anyway. If I run out of power for my kitchen there's always a gas bbq.
You do what a lot of big corporations hate and fail to do. Educate people. Thank you.
I have an all electric home built in 1982. Enjoyed it all along. I also have 14 solar panels by Sunpower, with one Tesla Powerwall which covers about 50% of the yearly energy cost. I live in a Dallas suburb, and this house was bought right after it was built. We enjoyed it for 42 years. Then came the blizzard and the black out which lasted for 56 hours. Our power failed. The battery kicked on, and in two hours the battery cut off at 54% of the capacity. We had to move in with our relatives for almost 3 days. When we returned I noticed that the panels were covered with 4” of snow. They were not producing at all. Also, when the sky is gray production drops. I still believe we made a wise decision in in having the solar system. Thank you, I enjoy your vlogs.
The home I grew up in was a typical low-cost 70s ranch style home. Everything was electric because we don't have natural gas in the area. But, we always had a wood stove with a couple cords of firewood ready to go. There were only a few times during my childhood that we lost power, and never during something like the texas freeze, but we were very grateful to have that stove. If I have the option, I'm definitely having one in any of my future homes.
Belinda, +1 for your videos; I am a regular follower. I live in a self-build (or at least self-designed and PMed) passive-class house in the UK. We do have a in-hob 2 ring propane ring backup (which we've never used), but I made a design decision to go all electric before finalising the build: induction hobs, electrically heated PCM-based storage DHW, a 3kW resistive heater for our water based UFH in our ground-floor slab, MHVR, and a heating profile planned by my own RPi-base home automation system The slab is the sole heat input source for our 3-storey dwelling (other than warm bodies and other waste heat). I designed in for the later addition of an ASHP, but after 3 years occupation I can't make an economic case for adding one. Our current system is truly zero maintenance. We have use a green Time of Use tariff; so switching to an ASHP for slab input and a CoP of 4 rather than 1 will only save us perhaps $400-500 p.a. at an upfront installation cost of 10× that.
I did have a heating outage 3 months back -- which was easy to fix, though the heating was off for 2 days before we noticed that the internal temperature had dropped and so realised something was wrong with the heating. We keep the whole house at 22½-23°C 24×7 year-round. When the house is this warm, you really don't miss an open fire. :-)
BTW, I kept a very close control of our build costs, and we did most of the design, PM, procurement, plumbing, interior woodwork, and HVAC ourselves. There were +/- on costs. but overall the costs were a wash; there really wasn't cost premium for building to this spec, but the devil was in the detail of execution.
I think that your reservations about an electric only solution are primarily a reaction to the uncertainties and lack of consumer orientation of the unregulated Texas energy supply market. IMO, this is a pretty much a uniquely US scenario that is quite alien to people living in the rest of the 1st world.
Terry Ellison, Europeans are well ahead of North Americans with energy conscious house design. I know I have a business helping people retrofit their houses to Net Zero in Ottawa Canada. I am interested in the DHW storage tank with PCM. Could you advise who is the manufacturer?
Greetings from Scotland. I’m gradually gearing up my house towards the “electrify almost everything” philosophy. Solar panels on the roof, induction cooker coming next. Batteries are being provisioned for in the future. But I say “almost”. While my propane boiler will eventually be replaced with a heat pump, there’s no way that I’ll be retiring the wood burning stove. I fully appreciate the value of having redundancy in terms of heating.
Heat pump is very wise and will pay for itself.
Build all electric for sure. Also build passive solar and super insulated with a lot of thermal mass. If this is done correctly, it will take days with no sunshine or power for the temperature to come down.
👏
I rely on Ms Carr to strip away misconceptions and misinformation surrounding her topics. I share her wariness towards all electric houses.
Thanks, Michael!
Reminded me of back in the 70s when my dad was building his dream home. Being an electrician naturally it was, other than a fire place built more for form than function, an all electric home. That is until the energy crisis hit in the late 70's and the electric bill sky rocketed. It did not take long before what was meant to be a store room became a room containing a wood furnace. So between that and mom's love of the fireplace my name was officially changed to "get wood". Oddly I still burn wood even though I have a modern propane furnace. We like the steady heat from the wood stove and my honey enjoys watching the glow of the fire. Anyway I think your on the right track. Experience has taught me that some redundancy is always a good idea.
I built in rural Colorado years ago and power outages were to be expected, so I used propane fueled water heat and had a gas fireplace as well. The only drawback was that the circulation pump on the heat system was electric. I've always cooked with gas when I had the choice. Induction is really being pushed here in Ecuador, but they are fragile, need specific cookware and still fall short of the specificity of temperature which gas allows. I would argue that Induction and Gas run shoulder to shoulder on paper, but in the real race, gas wins out - look at professional kitchens; they're gas. As always, I appreciate your balanced, reasonable, full-perspective approach - keep up the good videos.
Ms Carr,
You said it in your video: "Never put all your eggs in one basket." Your gas company continued to deliver their product even when the power company could not. Another point: my understanding regarding heat pumps is that they are very efficient in warm and hot climates, but go to straight resistive heat at temperatures near and below freezing. That's why you don't see many heat pumps in northern latitudes. If you insist on building an all electric home, I suggest you design a "living" core in the home that can be heated with a kerosene or gas heater. I also suggest you design the plumbing so you can gravity drain the system when the pipes are in danger of freezing. These small resilience factors will help you weather the emergency with minimal discomfort and may even enable you to help your neighbors who are not so well prepared.
All my life until early this year I had lived in all electric homes. I was honestly pretty nervous moving into a home with gas heating because I didn't know what to expect. It's a smaller change than expected, the cost difference is so subtle in my area. When the units eventually reach end of life and die I'll probably move to an electric heat pump with a gas emergency heater and a hybrid water heater. Having a natural gas fireplace and grill is really nice, though. I don't miss chopping wood, and I don't miss buying propane bottles.
I don't know why electric heat pumps took so long to catch up to air-conditioners in popularity. The difference between the two is literally a single valve.
Thank you for putting out this information, I have been in the construction industry for over 30 years and I have always wondered the requirements for the medallion on my parents home.
I wouldn't want to give up my gas stove, and we've had a gas water heater in the past, too. The way our gas furnace is set up, the basement never gets very warm; but we have a fantastic fireplace down there, and it can heat the entire 400 square foot room. It helps that I love splitting wood, stacking it, and playing with fire in general. You're so right about the fun of having a real fireplace! Diversification is an excellent hedge against power outages.
Belinda (if I may), i get where you're coming from but would still go all-electric including with a heat pump. (Disclosure: I live in Climate Zone 6, sub Arctic.) What I'd do first is insulate and seal to a PassivHaus standard, then choose the smallest and least complicated heat pump i could find. Then for backup, if concerned with cold, I'd get a small wood stove with good venting/flue technology to control particulate. You're right that energy is a paradoxical and complex field, which is why i love working in it. Natural gas has some great qualities, and some renewables some wasteful qualities. However, natural gas and coal have already killed many times more humans than any other energy source. We really do want and need to decarbonize and your concern is for an event which just happened and remains rare and short-lived where you are. I'd focus more on insulating and maybe re routing and redesigning your piping system. Maybe there are better backup plans but I'm more than fine with losing power because we've considered the scenarios in advance.
I learned the term "insulate to double the standard" lately. I can get behind that idea fully! That's the first step everybody shall take.
@@Sekir80 Quite right. Things clicked for me once I realized that building to code or to ‘the standard’, means that doing anything less than that is actually illegal. I’m amazed that some builders can advertise proudly that they ‘build to code’. That’s almost embarrassing for the real professional, I assume.
@@acchaladka Oh yes! Where I live the code (probably the term used code than standard) is strict, but as I learned more on american codes, like your Climate Zones I'm not that confident anymore. I can't even fit my country to your Zones, so I need to look it up.
@@acchaladka So, after some grind I figured out that our code transaltes to your R 24 for the main walls. The design we'll start to build soon is ~ R 44. It seems I've got a pretty good insulation planned. I'm excited to see how it will translate next winter. :)
@@Sekir80 , I recommend putting most of your insulation outside of the cladding (rock wool if you can afford it). many high-insulation homes can have problems with moisture because they can't breathe. any mistake in insulation or any roof/window leak in a modern high-spec house cannot escape and will generate mold rapidly.
I never brought house without mixed energy for this reason. The only thing I want to add to my place is battery and fire place just in case a Texas happens here. Also geo cool system
Just met someone a few days ago who had their power, water, and gas shut down during the Snowpocalypse. They had a natural gas generator. I had a gasoline generator - I had heat and a powered living room and they had to stay in a hotel - but stores around me started running out of gas - Wal-Mart only had 93 octane left... but, much to their credit, they dropped the price of 93 octane to match 86 octane, so I bought $20 worth of gas - which was about 14 hours of running time for my generator (6500W, about half loaded).
Multiple options are always nice to have, but you never know what's going to happen.
@@looncraz so true mate you can only do your best. At the moment I'm working on plans on how to retro fit this place without devalued to if
I disconnected my gravity gas heater in the 90’s.
My kids learned to dresss warm. We have small fires on cold mornings
Hello from PicoRivera
As much as I dislike fossil fuel powered grids, I have to admit that gas stoves are definitely the best. Plus the mini split with gas furnace combo seems to be a good heating mix for most climates right now.
The new electric Ford F150 has a battery large enough to power your home for 3 days. It's like having two or three Tesla Powerwalls that double as transportation.
I’m definitely still happy to have an electric only home, i want it to be net 0, but i will want a backup generator, and a fireplace, as well as a battery and solar.
The battery and solar will work most of the time, but having a generator for -25 weather just in case is just smart. And a fireplace is fine, i don’t really see why it would not be.
a traditional fireplace is a huge air leakage path. A gas fired sealed unit with outside combustion air and exhaust is fine.
@@jesterblackdog definitely want something that can be airsealed, 100%. although I wonder how airtight that really can get.
That said I don’t want gas because gas lines require maintenance and are their own pain and I don’t need gas for anything else so I want a wood fireplace for one ambience two back-up if all else fails.
@@jesterblackdog there are systems that solves this problem. We have a double airtight shunt in our chimney wich cuts the leakage to negligible levels.
I've been watching a few videos on this channel lately. Much respect.
Just a few random comments. I'm a big fan of induction cook tops and highly recommend them. Low energy use since almost all the heat goes into the pot and relatively little into the surrounding area, reducing load on the air conditional. I completely agree with not being dependent on one single energy source. I'm happy I have a natural gas fireplace that operates with out electricity. I rarely use it, but if the power goes out, I can keep my home comfortable. Regarding solar and grid tie, yes, if the grid goes out you can't extract energy from the solar. The system needs something to separate your internal electrical network from the grid. The Tesla power wall system will do this and you can keep lower consumption devices in your home operational indefinitely when combined with solar.
Belinda, I came across your channel a week ago. I’m a physicist, I have been teaching at the college level for over 10 years. and I am also training to be an power grid electrical engineer (my father was one for over 30 years).
You do a really great job reporting and stating facts, and being objective. You are very correct and accurate on your analysis. Please keep up the good work!
I also wanted to compliment you on this dress. The whites and blues are very beautiful.
I have an all electric home. A 5000 watt generator and two heavy duty extension cords keeps the refrigerator and pellet stove running. We use a little camp stove for cooking. No hot showers but even if the power is out for a week it’s good enough to carry on. The most important thing is to implement a simple back up that fits you and your home before you need it.
I agree that one should not limit ALL energy to a single source. I am buying a property in Arizona and wish to generate my own power via wind turbine, solar panels and with many redundancies built in to the system. For instance, an on-demand tankless water heater is a great idea, but in sunny Arizona it's silly not to take advantage of the sun to passively heat the home hot water and the swimming pool during the day. Once you've installed the pipe it's essentially free heat. The greatest challenge is to throttle it back since it is very easy to surpass 120 degrees (50 degrees celsius) safe operating temperature. With excellent design it is also possible to drastically reduce the NEED for power. By using Earthship style "cooling tubes", high venting transom windows, proper shade structures and landscaping, and taking advantage of the huge potential of adobe thermal mass, a well-designed home reduces demand by 90% even in building zone 5 cold high desert. Its a LOT easier to run on back-up batteries or a generator when you only need 10% of what the average household needs. I agree with you also about the fireplace. A house is not a home without a hearth. (Hominids have been using fire for over 2 million years, so it's pretty primal). Although, it is possible to get a Rumsford fireplace with make-up burn air drawn from outdoors, that is powerful enough to heat my (planned) 1,400 square foot house on it's own when every other source of power fails. Love your content, keep up the good work!
We live in an all electric 1,800sf house in Georgia and our average monthly power bill is $125. I too worry about power outages, so we are pricing a whole-house backup generator to run off propane. A 500 gallon LP tank can run the entire house for about a week. We've never been out of power that long, and I'm considering running a line for the stove and converting it to gas. I always enjoy your well-thought-out perspective.
It seems to me that a lot people confuse energy storage, energy transition, and energy usage. I actually think an all-electric home is substantially easier to keep powered during some kind of crisis because you only have to worry about providing it with one "type" of energy. I used to live in an off-grid house that was "powered" completely by propane. It had a 500 gallon propane tank that was filled a few times a year, a propane hot water heater, fridge, and stove. Plumbing was gravity fed from a spring. The one big thing missing was lighting. The house did actually have electrical lighting and outlets but we'd have to run a generator to power them and we rarely did, instead relying on gas lamps after dark. Honestly it was a really nice setup but it definitely left an impression on me about different "forms" of energy and I think it's clear in this day and age that electricity is the most complete and ubiquitous form of energy. So I'll always go with electric.
A side note about intermittent and sustained power outages: having a battery backup for a home is definitely more expensive but your house will never lose power even momentarily when the grid goes out for a short while. Which to me is very worth while. In a very long outage like Texas experienced, I see off-grid setups as the only real protection and, as I think you mentioned, that's only possible with all-electric houses.
I totally understand being independent from a powergrid especially in winter for heat. Having a wood fireolace saved us from freezing during the 1997 montreal ice storm. We were out of power for 2 weeks.
One of the most important things you do is encourage people to not "demonize" the process, the industry, the material, the trade, and ultimately the market and people. etc. Nice touch. from Texas
As the saying goes....DON'T Keep all your Eggs in 1 basket!
A mixed system allows you to be more versatile.
A wood burning fireplace is a must. It may have helped keep the house warm and prevented pipes from freezing, while keeping you warm, as well as provide a place to cook on...think chuckwagon kettle.
When I first began my electrical career in the late 80's, I worked with a gentleman and my primary job was removing the old electric "storage" heaters installed by the local power company back in the day. It came with an elaborate system that heated bricks inside the storage heating device during non-peak generation times and supposedly radiate that heat back to you during peak times. The water heaters were set up the same way. Completely off during peak times, and only on during non-peak times. It was a great concept, but we usually would remove them all and replace them with standard baseboard heat. They too had plaques, but I assume that was our electric company (PP&L) just hamming it up mimicking the 50's They also had the random odd thing like fully lit house numbers and fully lit door bells (24/7).
We live in an older duplex that suffered from the all-electric heat phase. Frankly, I turned off the electric heat breakers and we use space heating and electric blankets when it's super cold. We cut our electric bill in half over using baseboard. The key is keeping the RH up above 40% I prefer 48%.
Electric companies know how to generate $$$$ while keeping us in the cold.
Where I live you can setup your solar panels so you can use them when the power goes out, but they usually aren't because it costs more. So it might be worth investigating if it can be done where you live.
In my little Lithuanian wooden house we have a wood burning stove which heats the radiators and you can heat water too with it... the best thing about this is it needs zero electricity and there's a lot of burnable materials in the garden that are often used together with firewood we buy.
There’s a simple solution to your all electric home problem, get solar with a battery or buy a v2g car which can give you security during power outage.
I used my electric car to power my tiny house in TX during the winter storm and Wired did a writeup.
wow thanks for the memory. In the 1970s my parents purchased a new Centennial tract home in N. Dallas area and it was all electric complete with the Medallion emblem next to the front door! My father survived the blitz as a teen in London and witnessed countless natural gas explosions including the house next door (not to mention bombs and falling shrapnel). It is one thing to have the electricity fail when your being bombed to smithereens but gas lines are even more precarious. Hence he refused to have a natural gas furnace home.
We had an all-electric home in the early 70s. We couldn't afford the electric bill so heated it with a wood stove instead. At that time, -40 degrees F wasn't all that uncommon in our area of the high mountains of Colorado. The wood was free for the gathering of dead trees in the area. That obviously affected how we compared the cost.
I grew up in a house that used gas stove and heating. It almost killed us several times LOL. Granted we had primitive heaters with open flames and an old stove without many safety mechanisms, but still.
I grew up and my parents still live in a medallion home. I've still haven't completely gotten used to gas especially on the stove as an adult. Yes, get a backup generator. It made all the difference in the world during that snowstorm. I have neighbors will over $100K damage. Ignoring landscape damage, we had ZERO.
My house is new and all electric, during one of our ice storms this last month we did lose power for a couple hours, temp dropped a degree or two. Ask the people around Boston how fun it is to have explosive levels of gas pumped into so many homes the fire dept stops coming for fire only. Electric is easy to replace source on, Sunbelt does deliver generators.
You broadened my understanding of heat pumps in one sentence.
Fantastic content.
Greetings Belinda from Cincinnati. We just built a production home, we are happy to be diversified. My teaching experience was being without power for 9 days after hurricane ike made it's way up this way (still as a cat 1). My neighbor across the street had power after just 3 days.
Thanks for sharing your personal experience, George! Hope all is well in Cincinnati.
For housing built off the grid, solar+battery bank+ all electric everything+ a wood stove that you can cook on seems to be a popular option. Those stoves don’t fire up often, but boy are they nice when they do.
Propane also can be used in place of wood.
My power went out for 5 days, but I have natural gas, so I was able to run my stove, furnace, and hot water heater of a invertor I have in my truck.. It was in the low 30s... But it wasn't that baf
Belinder, Agreed, several sources of energy for your home has many advantages. In Western Oregon we just had an ice storm that caused our power to be out for almost 3 days. We live in a rural area (5 houses on a 5 mile long road) and we are not top priority for restoration of power. Natural gas is not available in our area. We run an oil furnace but also have propane for the cook top and a fireplace insert. We also have a wood fireplace. During the outage we can keep warm and protect the pipes from freezing with the propane fireplace insert and the wood stove. The cook top has an electric valve that prevents it from running without power (dual fuel type cook top and oven). We cooked on a camp stove (the camp stove and small propane canisters are something to always have pre-staged and available). I also have several small generators (3K-5K) that are either gasoline or diesel. Not enough to run a whole house, but enough to keep the refrigerator and freezer cold and some lighting. Note that a diesel generator can run on the oil for the oil furnace. It is just #2 fuel oil that is dyed red and does not have the "road tax" applied. We have a 175 gallon tank so always plenty. We are on a community water service with gravity fed pressure so water was not an issue. If on a well, a decent size generator capable of running the well pump, freezer and refrigerator would be very nice.
This might be different and off topic , but I watch your videos not only because of how interesting and well informed they are, but there are those little bits of GENERAL ADVICE you give , that only an engineer can can give ( reminds me of my late father ) thank you
I agree with you about wood heat. It is much better than electric heat. We had a wood-burning stove when I was a kid. The heat was very comfortable, but it was a LOT of work.
Some great points.
Your woodburning fireplace may not be able to heat your home as well as you expect. Fireplaces are mostly for show, not function, and theyeare sources of air leakage. I'm a wood stove heat guy, been using wood heat for 50 years, currently using a high efficiency rocket stove. Backup heat is electric heat pumps. Once a decade we get ice storms that shut down the power for up to two weeks. In that case, we reconfigure things so an inverter runs the fridge and the internet/computers, toss a couple of potatoes in the coals, the propane stove doesn't care. We have a portable generator (not hard wired) , and a solar travel trailer that can provide independant solar power. We've planned carefully against the certainty that the power will be out for up to two weeks in bitter cold weather.
Wood heat isn't for everybody, but it can be a very sustainable backup and a way to reduce your bill. A rocket stove or a high efficiency woodburner can be a comfy backup.
Belinda, im learning here more than i learned from all my years of school
Thanks for sharing! Halfway through building my all electric home with solar power backup.
A properly designed grid isn't that sensitive to cold (the texas grid isn't winterized, but neither are their gas lines) but some sort of backup is always a good idea. On the other hand, gas stoves are simply better and ground source heat pumps are expensive to install so gas lines are not obsolete yet.
Co-generation is a much resisted concept that can add efficiency and robustness to our infrastructure. Many of the mechanisms that we use in our lives use processes that have multiple effects and we routinely only use one of them, and ignore the others as byproducts. Electrical generators not only produce electricity but heat as well, and the heat is normally a considered waste product and radiated (dumped) away. For example if a natural gas electrical power generator was used in/near a home it could provide useful electricity and heat for the home at the same time and saving a lot of energy. Combining a battery storage system with the co-generator/heater and you could have reliable heat and free backup electricity as well. It also can be considered free heating when generating electricity...
The good thing about all electric, is that if you design it right, you can have it run on a whole house backup generator. If getting a large enough generator is to much you can get a smaller unit and flip off the breakers for different circuits to moderate load on the generator. This is what I want to do for my custom build. That and have a solar system with battery backup when it gets cheap enough.
Modern all electric heating with a heat pump is very efficient but only works in a tight well insulated home. Make sure to spend some money on a high performance building shell first before trying it.
nah, heat pumps have improved a lot. I have a really poorly insulated house that is very drafty and mini-splits work super well.
In the northeast I diversified my house with 3 totally independent heating system. Pellet, oil and heatpump. Pellet and oil I can run on a 2000w generator or inverter and heatpump is my big gen. So 3 systems 3 different power sources. Zero worries about a multi week even
Born in 1961, but several of the homes around us were still heated with coal. Our house was heated with oil and we were far ahead of many.. lol... I remember to this day how horrible the smoke was coming out of chimneys when I was a kid. I also remember several chimney fires. I was born and raised in Western NY. Right on Lake Ontario. We had power outages and ice storms and water main freezes and along with those freezes they would shut off natural gas just incase.... Our fireplace had been converted to a natural gas fireplace, but in those days they were very sketchy, so ours was never used. I have lived in Tampa Bay, Florida since 1994' and have been through several power outages and yes, several freezes. I have a lot to say about solar and the BS POLITICS behind NOT being able to use our solar panels when the grid is down. It is all GREED!!!!!!! I would love to do a one on one with you on all of this one day, but for now, I will say this: Homes must be built FAR BETTER than they are today in most parts of this country. ALL HOMES should be built with a storm room or rooms that can stand up to any weather and provide security and comfort. A kitchen and master bedroom with bathroom that can be powered by batteries, generator (ON DEMAND). Solar powered homes with battery back-up, but maybe each home with solar that normally runs off from a single transformer shares a battery bank. Maybe also a generator. How about every high power line and power station now has it's own solar. We have thousands and thousands of miles of power line roads all over Florida and this country. Why aren't they lined with solar panels and battery banks to maintain each section they provide for now???? We deal with hurricanes, high winds, flooding, smoking hot temps and freezing temps here and the occurrence is more and more often, but instead of making real repairs to everything, politicians are blaming the other party... WHY???? Because those companies are the ones with the real paychecks for those same politicians... When we ALL understand that, we can ALL work at LOCKING THEM ALL UP!!!!!
You said everything I told my wife about our all electric home. Choosing the right energy provider make a world of difference. A new community here in red oak is providing gas and electric. I too will be getting a gasoline/propane generator and propane heaters. Stocking up on fire wood too. Good presentation.
It may be relevant to you, but they also make propane and natural gas-driven refrigeration for backup/off-grid purposes.
I also experienced last weeks blackouts in Dallas. I will never again be reliant on a single source for energy.
I lived through the "big freeze" in Texas in February. My water heater and stove are gas, and the water heater worked until the water was shut off. I had turned my master bathroom into a "sauna" of sorts to warm up a bit. However, my gas stove has an emergency shutoff valve that turns the gas off instantly if the electricity is cut off. So my gas stove is useless without electricity.
I'm in a condo, so I agree with the battery backup idea. That's really my only option in this scenario.
Interesting point! Keep in mind: a natural gas powered furnace is NOT diversification of heating your home if that furnace is relying on electronics! If our home cut off of electricity gas burner goes with it!
Good point! Wood is much better, arguing for fossil fuels like gas in 2021 is shameful.
@@tzenophile Right, and if the gas pipe freezes as this was the case in TX, you're f*ed, anyway.
The first morning of snow without power I was woken by the formerly Panamanian family I live with (a Dr, two nurses, and a lawyer, non of whom knew how to start a fire in our gas fireplace. When I was done laughing, I made a fire (no need for the gas here), and used the fire to boild water for the French press and for tea, and cooked four tosted ham, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwiches so they wouldn't starve. I miss the snow allready.
Electricity all the way! Having a Powerwall would make it a bit less risky (maybe even having an electric car with car-house power transfer). For comfort and redundancy, a fire stove is the best addition for a house. The only downside are the complications with the chimney in a modern, well insulated house. Takes a bit more effort and money to make it airtight, but electricity and fire are without a doubt the most resilient energent combination for homes. And wood fired stoves have become much more efficient and cleaner burning with the use of modern materials that can withstand high temperatures in the combustion chamber. Great video Belinda!
I think I'd lean towards something else for backup power, at least until batteries are definitely being recycled or use something other than lithium. They're not great (although not the worst thing, don't get me wrong).
I feel like if the backup is truly for emergencies, the better thing to do is something like a propane or gas generator. The impact of filling a few cylinders of propane during rare emergencies is likely much less than a powerwall (which you'd need a few of if you actually want to last more than a day or two in cold weather).
But, a wood stove is nice for aesthetic reasons and does have the side benefit of being a backup.
Back in the 1950s the main reason all electric houses were built was that the appliances were much less expensive and not having to plumb gas also reduced cost. I lived in an all electric apartment in the late 1970s. Cooking was a nightmare and winter heating was expensive. If you are a gourmet cook you never want an electric cook top. A few years ago we had a 4 day power outage and I could still cook and hear my house as well as get hot water because they all ran on gas. The main problem with all electric is power reliability.
Adding a backup generator is definitely a good idea no matter how you power your house. Here, in the northern states, burning oil or gas is still a good choice for heating your home. If your electricity goes out you won't be able to feed oil to the burner and you won't be able to circulate heat throughout the house.
Great vid - Thanks!
We live in a motorhome. We can:
A. Plug into the power grid
B. Use the backup generator
C. Run the coach motor for power and heat
D. Use propane for heat, water and cooking
So we were not inconvienced at all by the storm. We felt bad for those who were.
I lived in Baton Rouge, LA when hurricane Gustav hit and took out power to most of the city for several days. My home was duel fuel powered by gas and electricity. The water heater, and stove were gas, while everything else was electricity. I was very happy to have those gas devices. They allowed me to have a hot shower and cook food when others were forced to run generators for their basic needs. Fast forward to 2017 and I lived in the Tampa Bay area when Hurricane Irma hit. My home was all electric and I hated it. No hot shower, no cooking. I've since moved to another all electric house and plan to have a whole home generator installed. Other fuel options were not available for the house I live in and and the existing solar is tied to the grid.
I once lived in Houston and got caught in the 2000 flood. I've lived in Louisiana during many hurricanes, some that were mostly rain, and some that had the wind to make them very destructive. Having said that, an all electric home sounds fine and dandy on the surface, but when the bull muffins hit the fan, and the power goes out, It is best to have some kind of backup or alternative in place. A backup drinkable water supply, a fuel stove, Storm Lamps; anything that will get the job done when option "A" is no longer available.
I'm in the process of designing and building a house. I always planned on having three sources for heat, a wood burning fireplace, electric heat pump system, and a propane boiler for in floor radiant heating. As technology advances and I'm able to use solar and storage, I can always convert the radiant heat system to use solar/electric boiler.
If you're building new, wouldn't you seal and insulate more than enough to eliminate needing a radiant system? The fire would be more than an adequate backup.
@@ericscott3997 Yes, I don't plan on skimping on insulation or air sealing, but living at over 6,000 feet in the southern Rockies, there is nothing like having a warm floor in the winter. It isn't a necessity but more of a want. Burning wood will definitely offset the cost of propane and electric.
@@jackskellington6cs ground source heat pump might work a bit better, and systems also come with underfloor heating. Don't know about the costs in the us though.
Great VID! yes up in Grt North West lots of homes were all electric homes in 50's! Why not look at all hydro electric power at that time. My battery back ups came in real handy. I originally got them when my mother was still alive make sure everything could still run for a while.
I largely agree but it seems like having an all electric (or mostly electric) home seems like it has the most flexibility for having on site back up systems. Is it legal / safe to have a large cng reservoir in a traditional residential property?
Though as usual I found your video to be informative and interesting. Thanks.
more common is propane or diesel-powered generators. I personally prefer propane as it can sit in the tank for 20 years+ and still be good. Just fire up the generator a couple times a year to exercise it and your good. The problem with batteries and other forms of backup power is the stored energy will degrade over time whether used or not which is wasteful.
@@vegajf51 good to know and thanks for that information Jacob.
I grew up in the rural south. Everybody had a (liquid) propane tank which had to be refilled every few months by a tanker truck. The tank was about 3ft diameter and 8ft long. This ran stoves, central furnace, water heater. If you wanted a backup system, then propane tank + continuous duty generator would be your answer, or even a natural gas generator. Natural gas furnace, stove, and hot water heater. While I've had lots of power outages (storms, someone hit a power pole, etc) I have never had a natural gas outage. Having natural gas appliances/heat/hot water, you reduce the size generator you need.
I'm with you, Belinda. I rely on natural gas for heating, new solar panels for most of my electricity, battery backup on the offgrid solar (manual transfer switch) and an outside wood burning stove for backup heat (I hate smoke in the house). I may get a small 2.4ton split heat pump which can run off my solar panels during blackouts.
Forget selling electricity to the grid. They no longer want it and some places are penalizing people who install solar on their homes!
All electric home Northern California Coast with a pellet stove in the front room. Tesla Solar, 3x Powerwalls, split duct, heat pump water heater. 100% solar 8 months of the year with 30-60% savings from Oct/Nov-March (depends on cloud cover). 3x Powerwalls electricity 5-7 days during a power outage….although solar panels usually recover the deficient. Pellet stove creates great comfort at low cost during the winter…about 20 bags of pellets for 4 months at a cost of $6-7 a bag. Great channel, thanks for the information and your hard work! :-)
*We All love your videos, and thank you for having a big heart and being such a great humanitarian in educate people.*
The gas range top (stove) may not work without power. My range, a Thermador, would not allow the gas to turn on when the power was off.
A big key here is if the homeowner can control the means of production. A solar roof, or a wood fireplace, or a generator with an independent fuel tank (not just plumbed into the house natural gas pipeline) allows the flexibility and reliability to focus typical usage on all electric.
I live in an all electric house in the UK. It was built in the 70s. It's not uncommon in more rural places where the infrastructure for gas wasn't put in yet but huge numbers of new build estates were created. Gas arrived to our area around 2000 but only a handful of people have had it put in. We do get a lot of power cuts but we have become used to it. If it were practical I would love to have a wood burning stove but there's not really anywhere to put it in our house.
Love love love this video. Sooooo much truth behind it.
I live in an all electric home, and it's pretty common where I live, too. I think I've only experienced a single blackout in my entire life (and that lasted for less than 10 minutes) so that's not much of a concern for me.
What is a concern though is the cost. While I would never trade my electric stove for anything cause I'm so used to it, electric heating is so so expensive.
There was a huge bonus for electric heating installations in the 80s, so most landlords did that and haven't changed anything since. If we combined this with solar power it could be something, but that's still rare around here.
Wood fireplaces may seem nice, but in most houses most heat generated not only goes up the flue, it takes any residual heat from a gas or electric furnace with it. My house has a fireplace that I have used in the past during power outages and it really didn’t help that much unless I sat right in front of it. Also, once I upgraded the insulation in my house to modern standards, I found out two things: the residual heat kept the house from losing heat. It took days, instead of hours to drop into an uncomfortable range and when I used kerosene lamps for light, our smoke/CO detector went off after an hour. The house was so much tighter it was no longer a good idea to use fire for light or heat. In the past, I looked into getting an fireplace insert, but our chimney wouldn’t accommodate it. In retrospect, I’m glad I ended up putting money towards insulation instead. That said, if you want to use firewood to heat your home, even as just a backup, invest in a good wooden stove with proper ventilation. I grew up with snowy winters and my childhood home had a Jøtul wood stove and it kept the large front of the house warm and was much safer to leave burning round the clock than an open fireplace.
I live in an all-electric home. Not by choice. We just don’t have any natural gas to our home. I grew up in an all-electric home in the 1970s and didn’t much like it; the electric water heater took FOREVER to heat up after someone took a shower, and the 1970s-era heat pumps didn’t heat the house very well when it got really cold out. Granted, we were in Houston where it rarely dropped below freezing, but it still didn’t keep the house very warm when it was 35° out.
While things are much better today, we were screwed here in Austin in February when the power went out for four days in below-freezing temperatures. No working fireplace, no stove or oven, no hot water. We plan to buy a propane generator at some point because we know ERCOT will fail us again, but that won’t exactly keep us warm and comfortable. It’ll allow us to run the refrigerator, charge our phones, run the microwave, and maybe run a fan or space heater (depending on the time of year), but not much more. It would be great to at least have a gas stove.
The thing is it was cleaner. Even if the carbon produced was exactly the same from the power station (which it wouldn't) it would still dramatically improve air quality in residential areas.
Solar panels for light and entertainment, woodstove for heating and cooking. All bundled into a tiny home to conserve resources. I don't think I lived in a medallion home, but I have lived in several all electric homes and did not enjoy the power outages that usually occurred in the winter.
We built a net-zero passive solar house 5 years ago in MN. We generate about 50% more electricity than we use, our utility buys our excess. Our goal was to be able to heat and cool without fossil fuelsWe have a super efficient wood burner, a well for water, and a small generator just in case, that we have not needed yet. I feel we are ready for anything nature can throw at us. Thanks for your thoughts, they were right on. I would never rely on a single energy source.
I have an all electric home and have sat through multi-day blackouts due to storm damage. The only thing I get concerned about is food in the fridge going bad. Worse case scenario, I'll cook it all. Being prepared is key. I have stoves that run off of propane, butane and white gas so no cooking issues. I'm also a backpacker so washing out of a basin is nothing new to me in order to save on hot water and if the water gets cold in the tank I make some more with the aforementioned stoves that I have. I may get a small generator, one day but in the last 30 years I have not had a need for one. I also have battery and propane powered lights. It's just like camping in your home.
As a resident of the frozen wasteland Hoth (aka Ontario, Canada) I enjoy having multiple energy sources. My furnace is forced-air high-efficiency natural gas - which is very cheap to operate and 96% efficient, but the furnace also relies on electricity to run. I have a wood-burning stove as backup heat - also lovely on a cold winter's evening, along with a kerosene heater for extra heat in emergencies; to keep the refrigerator and freezer going in a power outage I have a 'portable' (lifting it is a backbreaker) gasolene generator. I understand these are not renewable and rely on fossil fuels, but we have very expensive electricity here (peak prices of 17.6 cents CDN per kWh). Our grid is stable but we have still had several long outages in the last decade, and as Texans have unfortunately discovered, it doesn't take long with freezing temperatures and no power to cause extensive damage to a home. I am looking forward to a day when electrical storage (and possible feedback generation) in the home is ubiquitous, but I don't see that happening for many years. As an aside, my stove is natural gas, and when it needs replacing I will most likely go with an electric model. The flame temperature of natural gas is quite low and I find the stove's performance disappointing.
Great videos, Belinda. I am grateful for your research and summarization of these topics.
Currently in the build process of a new home in the Midwest. Gas stove, furnace, hot water tank, and clothes dryer. Have backup generator for all of my electrical needs as well if the grid goes down. Call me old school but NG is far more efficient when temperatures reach sub zero.
I’m currently building a 1500 sqft ICF house that’s all electric. I already have solar, wind and hydro power on my property that produces 180% of estimated needs. I have a 3 day battery backup system that has worked flawlessly. My total out of pocket expenses for 20 acre property, new house, renewable energy with battery backup is $298k. I bought my place 6yr ago so if I didn’t have the land already I would pay over $600k
I absolutely love watching your videos, they're very informative, and not hard on the eyes :)
I really enjoyed watching the one on the insulation types.
Is that your way of saying she's a pretty lady?
@@gingernutpreacher yes,
Joel she is married, so please respect that.
@@jenniferrebere849 I do, have to let her husband know:)
jfc how creepy and totally unnecessary.
You can still have an all electric home or a balance power home. Since you already know that you have natural gas running in black out . You best bet is to run the backup generator on tri-fuel. Also, to your fireplace.
You can also look into wind energy. By running your home this way will help you weather the storm . Also, look into a Generac batter system with switching panel. That will help manager solar, genator and line power.
I agree with your concerns about all-electric homes. I have a semi-remote cabin that is connected to the electric grid. My heat pump can take care of the place in all seasons but I still installed a wood-burning stove to be used on really cold days or back up if no electricity was available. For cooking my back up to the electric range is an outdoor propane-powered BBQ grill. This grill also has side burners which I normally don't use but would come in handy in emergency situations. I will be adding a dual fuel generator in the future. Also considering having some solar power abilities eventually. I hate relying on one source for my energy.
My in put- the way solar panels have got cheaper and the IMMENSE fall in the price of LiFePo4 cells build your solar first. Will Prowse YT channel and his community website will see you save massive amounts of money
I am looking at building a new all electric home in a few years. I totally agree that you need to think about what happens when the utility power goes down. I am planning on solar and battery backup, but have also thought about a wood burning stove as an additional backup. I just need to figure out how to make that work in a high efficiency home. One nice thing about well insulated homes is that they don't take that much power to just keep warm. Heating water and food become the big power users.
My house design for building in TX has solar and battery back up as its sole source of power. I plan to be one of those houses glowing with light when the power grid shuts down.
Draw the curtains so you do not attract moths.