By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
Heat pumps are an amazing heating and cooling solution for the home, but let’s face it for everyone but us geeks they are not the sexiest topic.
Mike Fell is a social researcher at University College, London who wanted to change all that, so he created a website called pumpchic.com and then began tweeting photos of George Clooney juxtaposed with look-alike heat pumps. He found some surprising resemblances.
I spent too long working on @heatpumpchic this weekend looking for pictures of heat pumps. It turns out procrastination applies to side projects too.
— Mike Fell (@mikefsway) March 14, 2022
Anyway, here’s a 🧵 of heat pumps that look like George Clooney 1/ pic.twitter.com/MhxNgjmAgG
You’ve got a grey-suited Clooney with a smooth gray heat pump, a plaid-suited Clooney with a heat pump with plaid-like reflections and you’ve got a “jaunty” Clooney in a white shirt with a black leather jacket next to a matching heat pump.
Mike Fell is all about inspiring positive behaviours that help us solve climate change. But he got his inspiration from a not-so-cool website.
There was an old website where people would post photos of themselves and people would rate them as “hot” or “not”, says Mike.
“In some ways, it’s a terrible concept for a website, but it was one of the first kinds of viral things on the internet.”
So, what about heat pumps could they be “Hot or not?”
“I was Googling heat pumps…and thought these look shockingly bad. God, who’s going to want to put one of these in their garden and sit having a barbecue looking at it?”
Fell was trying to figure out to promote heat pumps in a different way, not the normal engineering, cost-saving way, but in a way that celebrates them as “beautiful.”
So, he took a completely different approach when he created pumpchic.com.
When you go to the site you can see, hear, feel, and hopefully get curious about installing heat pumps.
He even created an augmented reality tool so you can choose a heat pump and then see it superimposed in your home, or anywhere else using your phone or tablet.
You can hear the sound of a heat pump and you can even tweak your existing boiler to experience what it’s like to heat your home with a heat pump.
The method in the madness
Ok fun aside, there is a method to Mike’s approach.
“The point is by electrifying heat; it allows us to decarbonize it. We can use electricity to run heat pumps and they’re also a lot more efficient way to heat as well.”
“It’s seen as being a major part of the solution to climate change here,” says Fell. Heat pumps run on electricity instead of gas or oil and they are gosh darned efficient: up to 300-400 per cent efficient. For every unit of energy consumed “they are moving 3 or 4 units of heat into your home.”
About 80% of the homes in the UK are heated with natural gas, says Fell, and the electricity grid is getting cleaner all the time.
As of 2020, the UK was getting 43% of its electricity from renewable energy, another 16% from nuclear, and about 41% from gas, oil, and a small amount from coal.
This means 60% of the electricity supply is emissions-free. And thanks to a more moderate climate in much of Europe, heat pumps are a good way to get heating and cooling much more efficiently with much fewer emissions.
What about baking when the sun shines?
Baking became a big thing during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and this gave Fell another playful idea to help people manage their emissions.
“The actual amount of carbon being emitted to generate the electricity varies over time,” Fell says. When the sun doesn’t shine, or the wind doesn’t blow there is very little solar or wind generation and more fossil fuel generation.
Coincidentally the grid operator in the UK provides a live feed of the carbon intensity of the grid.
So, Fell tapped into the live feed and created shouldibake.com. “If you’re a baker, you can follow along and it will let you know when you can bake with low carbon power.”
When Britain is getting more than 33% of its electricity from solar, wind, or hydropower the rating turns green for go, when it’s below that mark it’s red.
Fell may be a social scientist, but he calls himself an artist and energy researcher. “During my Ph.D., which was around energy as well, I was making money on the side by kind of selling artworks made out of old cassette tapes, which was in some way a kind of a recycling exercise.”
There are air source heat pumps that pull heat out of the outside air as we have featured in our stories about Affordable net-zero homes and Renovating your homes to net-zero.
And there are heat pumps that work with geo-exchange (AKA geothermal) systems that extract heat from the Earth such as we have featured in Geothermal 201, Geothermal Revival, and our story on the Blatchford carbon neutral community.
One thing is sure, the world needs more Mike Fells if we are going to get serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and build the zero emissions economy of the future.