Sensibo heat pump controller: Update

You may recall my dismay in my last post to discover that the Sensibo device does its thing via a cloud-based system. Turns out this was justified: the other morning, my modem decided to pack it in, and I no longer had control over the heat pump.

The pump remained at its previous setting, just as it would if the batteries in the remote control wore out; but I couldn't change the settings via the app. 

I assume that pre-programmed settings would also not work. However, I don't know whether programmed changes to settings would be reinstated once the modem was repaired, as I didn't have any programs set at the time the modem went offline. 

Of course the remote control still worked, as it is entirely local. 

So overall I remain convinced that something that works entirely locally, or that defaults to local when needed, would be preferable.

Peak power pricing: Sensibo heat pump controller

Last winter I was part of a pilot project with Hydro Quebec to manage my power consumption according to demand. (Details can be found by clicking here, and early results here.) Net result? About a $400 saving over the winter. 

So far so good. And last winter, much of it spent in some form of lockdown, meant I was always home at 05:55 to get up and pad around turning thermostats down. Next step is to automate the process so I can sleep in, or travel. Turns out Hydro is working on this, with their HiLo subsidiary offering smart thermostats for baseboard heaters. But there are a few problems with their approach so far. 

First, these are controlled through Hydro's servers talking to the thermostats via my router. Google Home will also do this; but I recall a server problem at Google a while back that left people unable to even turn on a light. So keeping local control is a better idea in my view.

Second, at this point their equipment will only control baseboards. I've got one baseboard that needs controlling; otherwise, I've got a heat pump, two heated floors and two convection units with built-in thermostats. So that doesn't do me much good even if I were willing to accept Hydro reaching into my home network and fiddling with stuff. 

Separately I discovered a type of gizmo for controlling any heat pump or air conditioner that has a remote control. This is a bit like the universal remote you used to be able to buy to replace the remotes for the TV, set-top box, PCR, VCR, tape deck and DVD player (ask your Dad). Two looked interesting: the Sensibo and the Cielo (for reviews, click here). On the face of it the Cielo has more features (including a display), but ultimately I ordered the Sensibo from Home Depot, on the basis that I can just take it back to the store if there is a problem. At $129.99 Canadian before sales tax, it was a bit more than the US price, which did not include shipping to Canada. (It is interesting to note that the black one was $179.99. Not sure what that is about.)

 

Photos show what is in the box: the device, a 110V adapter and a USB cable. There is a second proprietary port on the underside of the device, but with no indication of what this might be for. 

The instructions in the box are terse, verging on non-existent. The manual is not easily found on the Sensibo website, but I found it on Lowe's site (click here). The main installation step, which was minor, was installing the app (available for iOS and Android, but not PC) and connecting it to my WiFi system. Then you point your existing heat pump remote at it and press On a couple of times. After that it is entirely run from my phone. 

The scheduling function has a seven-day calendar that repeats. I discovered that if you try to schedule stuff with the heat pump off, all you can do is turn it on or off; the heat pump will start up with the last settings active. But if the heat pump is on, you can program all the functions: mode, temperature, fan speed and vane orientation, etc. So far all very neat.

A couple of downsides. Unlike the remote, which takes a couple of AA batteries, it needs the 110V connection. This sort of limits where you can put it, which is further limited by the fact that, like the remote, it needs line of sight to the heat pump to work. Photos show a jury-rigged set up, with the gizmo plugged into the 110 outlet on the stove; I have since plugged it into the outlet for the microwave, which involved drilling some holes in the cabinetry.

 

Powering it off and back on seems to bring it back to where you set it, so that is fine. 

Finally I didn't think I could control it from beyond the range of my WiFi system. But initial tests made by walking up the street until my phone was no longer connected to my WiFi imply that I can control it at a distance; this means that my phone talks to my router over cell networks. (I turned the phone off before coming back home, to be sure it really was talking over the cell network). It turns out that the app and the device talk to one another through a cloud-based server of some sort, and do not communicate directly. The Cielo system is apparently similar. Oh well. Hopefully this system will still be live in a year or a decade. I still have the remote and a stash of AA batteries, so there is a backup plan. But the lack of clarity around this in the Sensibo advertising material and installation manuals is disappointing.

So I am getting ready for next winter, hoping that I will be able to go away for a while and just leave a program running that will dial back twice a day, even if Hydro isn't asking for it. The only real issue is a I have a single convection heater with integrated thermostat and a second baseboard heater that really need to be adjusted manually, especially if the temperatures are low enough that the heat pump is no longer effective. (The coldest it got at the beginning of Hydro events last winter was -17C, which, as we all know, is relatively balmy for this part of the world.) I can set these to a low temperature before going away, but will still have to get up at the crack of dawn to adjust them if I am home. So while not a complete solution, progress is being made. Stay tuned for updates.

The era of the Internal Combustion Engine draws to a close

The internal combustion engine, in all its various incarnations, has enabled huge societal change. But its environmental footprint is leading to its demise. (It should be pointed out that the mode of transportation it replaced, namely the horse, also had a significant environmental impact, in the shape of huge amounts of farmland devoted to "biofuels" in the form of oats, which inevitably led to huge amounts of pollution in the form of manure that had to be cleared from city streets.)

Having spent my teenage years reading voraciously about cars, and my twenties employed in repairing them, I have watched this technology grow from a 1950's suburban utopia to today's choked, grid-locked and smog-filled cities.

The convenience of a liquid fuel should not to be underestimated: it takes 5 minutes to fill an onboard energy storage system with a volume of 50 litres and a weight, when full, of 50 kg, containing enough energy to cover 500 km. Electric batteries and other alternatives, such as LNG or hydrogen, have major challenges meeting this 5-50-50-500 benchmark.

From the first crude devices leaving the workshops of Henry Ford or Carl Benz, to today's computer-controlled, turbocharged corporate platforms, there has been a steady improvement in ICE efficiency. Overall more power from a smaller, more compact engine has led to reduced fuel consumption and more flexible performance.

This is still not enough, though, if we are to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently for a Net Zero by 2050 scenario. Better efficiency has always led to people driving more, rather than pocketing the reduced cost per mile, whether due to opportunity or urban sprawl. And even if it were, the electric car merely shifts the combustion elsewhere, unless the power source is non-carbon (hydro, wind, solar, nuclear). Plus the issues around congestion and livability of cities where we need to allocate huge amounts of space to driving and parking cars point to a need for massively reduced private car ownership and similarly increased public transit. But that is not a technology shift, but a societal one; it is a problem with which automotive engineers are not well equipped to deal. 

Fond as I am of the automobile era, its time has come. We may need lots of electric cars to fight climate change; but we will need a lot fewer cars, regardless of energy type, to make our cities livable. This is not yet obvious on the ground in Canada where I live, except maybe in the Greater Toronto Area; but the great cities of the world, those with populations over 10 million, are all dealing with this issue daily.

Following on the IEA report on Net Zero by 2050, The IEA has released a new report discusses making cities livable (click here) in a Net Zero context. I have mentioned before that the IEA, as a subsidiary of the OECD, is inevitably going to provide business-as-usual solutions to politicians that worry about getting re-elected; but as Mark Jaccard has pointed out, the best climate policy is the one that gets implemented, and providing politicians with pathways they can sell to voters is one way forward. Otherwise the small-government, tax-cutting, neo-liberal free-marketeers will get elected and no progress will be made on the existential threat that is climate change. And the IEA has the added strength of not leaning on radical new pie-in-the-sky technologies that may or may not work; the tools are all available, at a cost which, while high, must be compared to the cost of doing nothing.

 I will leave you with a paragraph from the IEA report on cities:

"Cities account for more than 50% of the global population, 80% of global GDP, two-thirds of global energy consumption and more than 70% of annual global carbon emissions. These factors are expected to grow significantly in the coming decades: it is anticipated that by 2050 more than 70% of the world’s population will live in cities, resulting in massive growth in demand for urban energy infrastructure."

Big Oil pushback on climate change

Not unexpectedly, the Big Oil propagandists are out in force. Money is being spent defending the indefensible, instead of fixing things. 

A friend forwarded a short video from an outfit called Prager U (see here). I haven't bothered to dig through the website for the video, but the title was "Unobtainium", and a quick Google search brings up a range of web pages discussing it. From the website: “Prager University is the world's leading conservative nonprofit that is focused on changing minds through the creative use of digital media.” Their Annual Report is a thinly disguised advertising brochure but falls well short of SEC standards when it comes to itemising where their $28M in revenue came from in 2020; but given the content of the video, I can guess.

Specifically I had the following issues with this:

The speaker mentions the fact that batteries are nowhere as energy-dense as oil, which is, additionally, much cheaper and available in larger volumes. This is true but ignores the fact we've had 100+ years of research and investment into making oil more accessible and easier to use, and less than 20 years into vehicle batteries. 

Furthermore, while solar and wind may indeed be getting close to maximum theoretical efficiencies as the technologies mature, I believe better and cheaper batteries are on the way – the learning curve is still steep. In only a few years we have gone from 150 km range to 500+ without increasing battery size or weight; and recharging times are dropping fast. When the rate of improvement in battery performance starts to slow, we’ll know we are hitting some limits.

And he’s right about mining and waste as problems if we need to source lots of materials like lithium. 

But he ignores the cost of burning those fossil fuels, in terms of heat, dried up reservoirs that stop producing hydro-electricity, whole towns incinerated, molluscs literally cooking in their shells on the seabed, etc. Then there were the mind-boggling floods in Germany and China.

Either way we have to accept that we are going to have to pay a lot: we can keep burning fossil, which is cheap to produce, refine and distribute, but which generates huge global heating costs that aren’t factored into the price at the pumps; or we can pay up front to develop and roll out the necessary technologies to stop CO₂ emissions, using a circular economy approach where product end-of-life is dealt with at the design stage. Neither approach is going to be "cheap". Governments (i.e. taxpayers) will need to get out their chequebooks, to clean up the mess, or to prevent the mess as best we can at this late stage.

And he doesn’t offer any alternative solutions to continued use of oil. Nuclear is one, as is using less energy in the first place. The best selling personal vehicle in the US is the Ford F150, followed in the #2 and #3 spots by the equally large Chevrolet Silverado and Ram 1500. The first car on the list, the Toyota Camry, clocks in at #6. No hybrids or electrics make the top 20. There is no way these folks with full-sized pickup trucks are all hauling trailers full of hay bales or manure with them. No, they are hauling groceries from Costco back to their McMansions, which are characterised by staggering square footage per person, and which cost a pile to heat or cool. I’m not saying everyone should be happy with 1000 square feet, as I am; but my floor space, small as it is, is still four times the world average floor space per capita. Energy efficiency has a long way to go. 

Basically our toolbox of reasonably well-developed technologies has a range of tools in it, and we need to use all of them. If we say no to nuclear, then we need more wind, solar and efficiency (as well as bio-energy, which arguably is on somewhat shaky ground as far as carbon neutrality is concerned); more nuclear means less need for other approaches. It’s a zero-sum game. But it must be clear that we can only emit at most an additional 500 gigatonnes of CO₂. That’s it. No more after that, ever.

And as for his concern for the poor child workers that would be exploited in Third World lithium mines: Big Oil’s record in the Third World in this context is far from stellar. Witness the mess in Nigeria, just to start with. Oil sands tailing ponds are another. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!  

We can’t afford to let oil and gas propagandists and apologists drive the agenda anymore. We have been very lucky in Eastern Canada so far this summer, but we too are at risk of either extended, extreme heat leading to catastrophic drying up of Hydro-Québec reservoirs, or massive floods that wash away topsoil leaving farming and our food supply at risk. There is a very real probability that our grandchildren will be shivering (or baking) and starving in the dark. This is an existential crisis and we need to respond with a complete ban on CO₂ emissions. End of story.

Yes, this touched a sore spot. End of rant.

I will remind my Faithful Readers that the IEA report (224 pages) is available by clicking here, and while it is a green approach, it is still a business as usual approach where efficiency doesn’t play a big role. My 18-page review of the IEA report can be found by clicking here. And my quick summary of my 18-page review can be found by scrolling back to my previous post on this blog.

 

The IEA Roadmap to Net Zero: A critical review

As promised I read the IEA report carefully and listed some comments, questions and suggestions. The objective was to condense the 224-page document for a broader public and flag some concerns. A worthy objective... but the result, at this stage, is still 13 pages (excluding an Appendix for the layperson outlining energy units and some basic combustion chemistry). And while I am sure my readers are always fascinated by what I write, 13 pages is still a long read. So I have attempted to summarise my summary in a one-page Executive Summary. This is posted below; and the full document is available in PDF format by clicking here. 

The Executive Summary follows; I hope you enjoy reading, whichever version you choose, and I look forward to your comments and discussion. 

The IEA report “Net Zero by 2050, A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector” made headlines for stating that no new oil or gas exploration is needed if we hope to keep to +1.5°C by 2050. Essentially this saw the OECD agree with environmentalist’s calls to “leave it in the ground”. Other policies will upset environmentalists as much this has upset Big Oil. The world economy is assumed 40% larger in 2050 while using 7% less energy; the question is whether energy savings could be 10% or more?

Energy production and use emitted 33.9 Gt CO₂ in 2020, about 75% of the total. The IEA predicts cumulative savings to 2050 of 460 Gt CO₂, consistent with IPCC guidelines that we emit no more than another 500 Gt CO₂.

Solar PV and wind power are commercial today and provide close to half these savings. But challenges remain with several other technologies needed. 

Biomass power allows stranded coal assets to continue running; it also displaces liquid transportation fuels and natural gas in pipelines. But carbon neutrality of biomass is under threat from unknown levels of new climate-driven emissions from forest fires, insect infestations, floods and desertification. Biomass for power generation contributes to grid stability, but other options could be reviewed. 

Carbon capture (CCUS) is essential for cement kilns, where emissions are not fuel-related, and for thermally-generated power; when the fuel is carbon-neutral biomass, CCUS generates a double-counting benefit. But CCUS requires pipelines to store CO₂. Reduced hydrogen from natural gas and more rapid decommissioning of coal-fired plants would reduce the need for CCUS. (Direct air capture located next to CO₂ storage would not need pipelines.) 

Nuclear power, which is expected to double, is needed to offload other technologies and to stabilise the grid. But stranded coal assets along with smarter grids and more interconnections will also contribute to grid stability

Energy efficiency increases as world energy use per capita declines from 80 GJ to 56 GJ. The IEA posits a rapid improvement to 2030, with smaller gains to 2050. Increasing efficiencies will be challenging, but small changes early in the process will have a large compounded impact later on.

Hydrogen is needed for industrial combustion, but distribution networks for road transport will be fraught with safety problems. Ideally hydrogen should only be used where it produced, not distributed.

Electric vehicles are more efficient than internal combustion by a factor of about 3, and contribute to transportation use dropping 22% to 80 EJ. A more aggressive approach to urban transportation solutions, driven by gridlock and not climate change, could reduce this through fewer private vehicles. Furthermore, the need for lithium and battery recycling technologies are huge challenges.

Housing space per capita needs to grow, especially in poor countries. But new floor space in urban settings may increase sprawl. Societal changes to reduce sprawl could reduce the average space per capita and the need for cars in suburbs in a synergistic fashion, especially in the developed world.

Overall, it is not surprising that the IEA, as an arm of the OECD, has not put a lot of stock in societal changes that might prove a difficult political sell. This is critical: as the best vaccine is the one in your arm, the best climate change policy is the one that gets implemented, even if it is not technically the best or fastest one, because it is better than no policy. A new publication (Mark Jaccard, The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success: Overcoming myths that hinder progress. Cambridge University press, 2020) describes this well, and is very highly recommended, whether the reader tackles the Roadmap or not.

 

The IEA roadmap to Net Zero: No additional oil or gas exploration needed

Wow, what a bombshell! The environmentalist community has been saying "leave it in the ground" for years now, but getting the same message from the policy wonks, economists and modellers at IEA makes it harder for governments to ignore it. 

I've been reading it carefully and making some notes, and I'll be posting a summary here soon. Stay tuned! 

Peak pricing: Lessons learned so far

With 49 hours of peak pricing so far this winter (out of a maximum of 100), I've learned a few things. 

First, my basic consumption runs between 4 and 5 kW, as shown in the first two screen grabs from my account on Hydro's web page. The little bump every evening is likely hot water for the shower.

Second, I have been preheating the house prior to a peak event, possibly more than necessary. But the real cost is turning everything back up all at once, with peaks as high as 11 kW. This next screenshot illustrates an extreme example, where the average during the day was about 5.5 kW, but 8 kW in the evening. The 11 kW load right after the evening peak event was due to the house being quite cold, and I will probably not turn everything down so low in the future.

Third, the 2 kW impact of running an oven at 450F for 45 minutes at 18:00 is obvious in this next screenshot. 

Finally I have discovered that several of my thermostats and their associated baseboard heaters never really come into play, at least in the range of outside temperatures encountered so far this year. These are in rooms connected to my large open living area where the doors tend to be open. So rather than 10 thermostats, I really only need to worry about 5. These are the ductless heat pump; a convection unit in the living area; the heated floors in the kitchen and bathroom; and the study, which is in what was originally an unheated coal storage shed and which has two walls exposed to the outside. Leaving the others at 14C does not seem to impact the final temperature in those rooms; and furthermore I can simply shut the doors during a peak event and let the heat pump do it's job on re-opening. 

In other news I have been informed by a colleague of the existence of Hydro-Québec's Hilo program. This offers programmable thermostats that are controllable at a distance via an app on my smart phone. While not relying on Google or Amazon, I would be relying on Hydro's web services remaining functional. As well, it seems they do not yet have remote controllers for heat pumps or for convection units with built-in thermostats; and their system may not be able to control heated floors. So I may only be able to benefit for the single thermostat with baseboard, in the study area. I will dig and report. Stay tuned!

Stop the presses! Hydro-Québec starts thinking about peak pricing

Last fall, Hydro-Québec offered me the opportunity to participate in a pilot project to alter domestic power pricing depending on demand.  

Background

For readers outside Québec: Québecers rely to a very large degree on electricity for home heating and domestic hot water. Modern construction frequently has ducted, forced-air heating systems that can run on a range of energy sources; but my 100-year old row house is typical of older urban neighbourhoods or farmhouses, with no ductwork in the walls or floors: there are baseboard electric heaters in every room. In my case these replaced the pot-bellied coal stove installed when the place was built in about 1920; and I have supplemented it with a ductless heat pump that also serves as an air conditioner in summer.  

Peak power consumption in Quebec therefore arises in the middle of cold snaps in mid-winter, and demand can approach capacity when temperatures are very low. Building new hydro-electric capacity is expensive and increasingly challenging as all the best spots for dams already have dams. (I'm thinking of Site C in BC...) And demand can only increase as reliance on electric vehicles continues to grow. In spite of this, domestic rates have been fixed year round.

New rates for peak hours

The traditional domestic rate, known as Tariff D, is 6.08¢/kWh for the first 40 kWh per day (averaged over a typical billing period), and 9.38¢ for additional kilowatt-hours. In summer, my typical consumption, excluding air conditioning, is well below 40 kWh/d, so my daily demand charge is usually less than $2.43. (There is also a flat fee for connection to the network). 

The new Flex D tariff offers significantly reduced rates from December 1 to March 31, at 4.28¢ and 7.36¢ respectively. But the tradeoff is that Hydro may ask me, in an e-mail prior to 17:00, to cut consumption the following day from 06:00 to 09:00, from 16:00 to 20:00, or both; my demand charge during those periods becomes 50¢/kWh. (The total hours of reduced consumption will not exceed 100 hours, so this won't be more than 14 days, if both periods are requested, over the 4-month winter period.)

Specifics of my home

Having now been through 35 hours of reduced consumption, I can provide some comments. 

First, my 1100 square foot flat in an urban row house is on the ground floor, with an unheated crawl space below and two flats above. So heat loss through the ceiling is low, but the floors tend to be cool. As well, the presence of other row houses on both sides means there are not too many outside walls open to the elements compared to, say, a farmhouse or suburban bungalow. Finally when I renovated a few years ago, I took the opportunity to insulate outside walls (there was nothing but several layers of wood structure and outside brickwork in the past). Post-renovation, the place is a single large open area, with a couple of bedrooms and an office behind doors. Outside doors and windows are 25 years old and were state-of-the-art at the time; one door needs new seals but otherwise it all works well. So the heat losses should be reasonably low. The photo shows the indoor portion of the ductless heat pump on the wall high above a doorway, next to the kitchen cabinets and facing the large open area. 

Baseload

Being retired, and living alone, I have been able to push this as hard as possible. In the fall I established that the baseload in the absence of heating or cooling, which consists of refrigerator, laptop and screen, and lights (all LED since the renovations), is well under 1 kW. (The digital meter increases in 1 kWh increments, so it can take well over an hour for it to increment in this case.) This is illustrated below in an early attempt, where you can see the power use creeping up towards 20h00 as the place cooled down. (I didn't record the thermostat setpoints or temperatures on this occasion).

Maximum savings

By shutting all power to heat and hot water, and by eating prepared meals reheated in the microwave, I've established that I can drop my power level from about 5 kW to about 0.8 kW. Indoor temperature, keeping all doors closed, drops at about 1 degree C per hour. Essentially, starting at 21C, the temperature inside reaches 18C after 3 hours and 17C after 4 hours. This is with a temperature difference between inside and out of about 25C; with a difference of 35 degrees the rate of cooling is closer to 1.6C/h. Some rooms are cooler than others, and dropped faster; the small laundry room, with a large vent pipe connecting the dryer to outside, is a case in point. 

Realistic savings

This level of reduction, from 5 kW to 0.8 kW, is a bit extreme because the house is quite chilly at the end of it, and might not be acceptable to all family members. It also requires foregoing cooking using an electric range during the cold period. But it maximises potential savings which could be as high as $200 over the entire winter if Hydro-Québec wants the full 100 hours. A more realistic scenario is reducing to 1.1 kW, saving closer to $130 for the season, by maintaining some heating; I am also evaluating heating the house to 23C prior to reducing, which will increase my consumption in the cheaper period. I don't have data yet on this option but will evaluate and report the next time we get a really cold period.

Conclusions and recommendations

Overall some thoughts:

• This works if you are at home to adjust thermostats. In particular, as a retiree, getting up at 05:55 to shut everything down was a bit of a pain, to be frank. 
  
• Given the existence of individually controlled baseboard heaters in every room, I have a large number of thermostats (10, to be exact). So this involves running around setting each one; and given the relative thermal capacities and demands of each room, there is not a single setting that works for each. Being an engineer, I've worked up a spreadsheet for this...
  
• Some kind of programmable thermostat would be highly advisable for a family where people are in and out. In fact, being able to slave all the thermostats to a single input would be really nice.
• Using internet-connected thermostats would be helpful, but I recall reading recently that when Google went offline for a couple of hours, some folks with the Google Home app were unable to even turn on a light. How much control do you want to give to Google?
  
• Frequent opening of outside doors will throw all this out. I had workers coming through to install a new garage door, and while the garage is a separate building, I still had to go in and out to let them in, supervise and so on. The temperature decline hit 1.2C/h even though the day was relatively mild. 
• Hot water is potentially a hidden issue. If you take a shower at 05:45, then cut the heat at 06:00, the hot water tank may well be running for sometime after 06:00. Avoid large hot water uses at least an hour prior to the cut-off time, or kill power to it at the circuit breaker.
  
• Of course a dual-heat system, with the ability to switch from electricity to natural gas, will help out. It won't help greenhouse gas emissions if the power supply is all hydro-electric, as it is in Québec.
  
• As illustrated below, using the oven and a couple of stove-top elements for about 45 minutes to make dinner drove the power usage over that hour up to about 3 kW, for an average over the 4-hour period of about 1.35 kW. This turns out to be enough to just about eliminate any savings arising from the lower rate for the rest of the day; but there will continue to be savings from lower rates on other non-event days. 

The current cold snap being over, I'll have more data only once further cold events arise. 

In closing...

Like other provinces, Hydro-Québec will likely be putting some sort of pricing mechanism for residential customers in place at some time in the near future. Let's hope the pilot program teaches them something about the issues, and how to make it more consumer-friendly. At this point, it seems to me that the biggest issue for most people without a dual-heat system will be installing programmable and possibly remote controlled systems so you don't have to be home baby-sitting your system, even if the objective is merely to break even and avoid excessive use during high cost periods.

Stay tuned!