Heat up hot water by Gas or Electricity?

markin

Raxiel said:

As well as the immersion being more efficient as others have said, all other things being equal its greener too, if you care about such things.

Grid electricity will always have a proportion of low carbon energy even on a still night, but it's frequently 50% or more.

Unless someone comes up with a way of synthesising 'green gas' using renewable energy, or at least blending it in, the boiler will always be 100% fossil fuel of course.

armith said:

On a slightly related theme - is it better/cheaper/worse/horribly-expensive to boil a kettle using hot water or cold? It takes about 3 minutes to boil the kettle from the cold tap - but only a minute to boil it from the hot, with the water having run from the tap for about 30 seconds. This is with a combi boiler - I wouldn't do it from an immersion heater tank.

If the water in the pipe is already hot from doing something else like running a basin, filling the kettle with hot and then boiling it may well be cheaper, but running it from cold means pouring away some water, then heating up the boilers heat exchanger, the pipe work, and the water that remains in the pipe between the boiler and the tap after you turn it off and is unlikely to be cheaper in terms of raw cost.

Of course, if you put a price on your time too, you might consider saving a couple of minutes to be worth it, since heating a cups worth of water from 4-5°C to 100°C will cost a trivial amount whether you split the job at ~50°c between gas and electric or not.

The
 are solar panels that make hydrogen, if you have 150k

oldagetraveller1

"Due to recently getting an electric car,"

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/15/22933022/cobalt-mining-ev-electriv-vehicle-working-conditions-congo

Enjoy.

macman

The only thing I do know about this topic is that vastly more energy has been consumed by debating it than is ever going to be saved by adopting the cheaper method, whichever it is...

born_again

macman said:

The only thing I do know about this topic is that vastly more energy has been consumed by debating it than is ever going to be saved by adopting the cheaper method, whichever it is...

If only we could use it to heat our rooms 🤣

Tis the norm on many threads.