I ran multiple businesses in Germany and it's possible to set up an UG way cheaper and way faster via Musterprotokoll. You can do the majority of filings yourself. There's tutorials (fuer-gruender.de is great). If you get a lawyer and tax advisor for every step, it's also expensive on other countries. And doing company accounts is also work elsewhere. Not saying that it couldn't be way better in Germany, but this blog post is more a rant than anything else.
In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes. Heat pumps are by now cheaper, more efficient, more versatile and definitely greener than other means of heating.
If you get one, just make sure to get the dimensioning right. They are WAY more complex to plan, install and maintain than traditional heating.
Because this consortium seemingly has nothing to do with receiving license plate assignments. And the acronym seems to derive from your general vernacular, lending its name to many other things.
>[heatpump waterheaters are] WAY more complex to plan, install
Only if you place them within <700sqft (for a typical indoor residential location). Only in areas smaller will you need to duct them, somewhat similarly to:
<https://i.imgur.com/4wCez9u.jpeg> this specific design draws from both bath and bedroom [dual 6" inlets], exhausts into kitchen [single 8" outlet] | utility closet is only 5ft x 4ft (~20sqft)
As an added bonus it'll passively dehumidify/cool whereever it drafts to/from.
> They are WAY more complex to plan, install and maintain than traditional heating.
I'm curious what about them would be more difficult to plan, install, and maintain. Obviously there are many things to consider when retrofitting a building with a central gas furnace... but otherwise why would they be much more complicated than an air conditioning system?
I've had a lot of mold problems with mine. Because they have to be strong enough to handle the coldest winter days, which makes them way overpowered when running air-conditioning in the summer, which means that when you run them in energy efficient mode, they are actively cooling only a small fraction of the time and all of the condensed water just sits there growing mold all day long. It also leaves the home far more humid than usual because it's not removing nearly as much humidity from the air as a less powerful unit running constantly would.
This isn't a problem with regular air-conditioning that is provisioned correctly for the size of your home, because it winds up actively running a lot of the time so the water is draining as new humidity condenses.
Sounds like you've got a single stage/speed heat pump, the good ones nowadays are variable speed, with pretty significant turndown ratios, so oversizing is less of an issue. I've been idly hacking on this site for comparing heatpump stats, if you're curious to learn more: https://www.heatpushers.com/
>In DACH, there's not really an alternative for many homes.
And yet in Austria, most apartment buildings in big cities are still heated by burning heating oil, gas or even firewood. Worst of the worst for air quality.
Walk through Graz in sub-zero winters and it's like you're breathing in a barbeque bonfire. Even your clothes smell like soot when you get home if you've been out too long. Which is bizarre to me, considering how much posturing and chest thumping Austria is doing about how green and anti-Nuclear they are yet they love burring wood and oil. Male this make sense please.
Sure, rich people in the bacon belt living in single family homes in the suburbs or rural areas, have heat pumps, solar panels on the roof and a Tesla in the garage, but that's a different story compared to those living in the city stuck in the fossil fuel stone age, where they have no choice over their rented building's heating method.
How do you convert the city's apartment buildings to heat pumps? Is it a technological limitation? Money limitation? Bureaucratic and political limitation? All of the above?
Austria has really good subsidies for households. The "subsidy stop" the article refers to was stopping 100% subsidies. Austria has an incredibly progressive and green environmental and energy policy.
>Austria has really good subsidies for households. Austria has an incredibly progressive and green environmental and energy policy.
Then why are most Austrian apartment buildings in cities still burning oil and gas for heating and not all switched to heat pumps if it's so green and progressive? Why is Graz air quality getting worse and worse?
> The "subsidy stop" the article refers to was stopping 100% subsidies.
Which article? What subsidies? What are you talking about? I never mentioned anything like this.
Firewood and heating oil isn't cheaper, it merely has lower upfront cost in exchange for a higher total cost. An efficient governance system (whether that's capitalism and banks with loans or renting out the hearpumps or a centrally planned replacement program or anything else) would figure out the financing and save the system money by updating.
Technology can make the incentives even larger. Excess money can make it easier for the governance system to reach the solution. But it's at the point where without any improvement to either an ideal system would figure out how to make the switch happen.
There is also a minor incentive problem here, mainly that a landlord can/will often offload the running costs, Nebenkosten, to the renters indefinitely.
That means they are sometimes economically incentivized to choose an option with lower initial cost but a higher running cost. Governments can/do bend these incentives via taxes but it can be hard/expensive to renovate old complexes (and that part cannot directly be offloaded by the landlord).
That's not true. A heat pump produces 1.5 to kwH of heat per kwH of electricity consumed, so it's already much more efficient than a diesel generator.
Even in winter, electricity from the grid is greener than burning diesel. I didn't find specific numbers for winter, but wind is about 30% of Germany's (just picking the biggest country out of DACH to support the point, not trying to come up with exact numbers) electricity production year-round, and wind doesn't tank in winter like solar does.
So, in short. Installing a heat pump and just taking electricity from the grid is still better for the environment. Of course, having your own solar is great if you live in a house, but you don't need it.
I'm sure you already made up your mind about heat pumps and that I can't convince you otherwise. But for other readers, let me add some thoughts to your points.
1) well, there's a grid. So as long as someone somewhere on your continent produces green energy it is viable and green.
2) arguable. Depends on your legislation.
3) Again, there's a grid. And even considering the worst case of no renewable sources at all: A heat pump (which uses 1kWh of electricity to provide 3-6kWh of heat) powered by a diesel generator is still more efficient than burning the diesel directly. Now add efficient combined cycle power plants, wind, biomass, hydro and battery storage systems...
We are 40 years in back when it comes to grid infrastructure investmets. Grid is not some magical thing that has infinite capacity and transfer speed and costs.
The reason why powerplants have to be strategically distributed around the country and have to consist of multiple different power geration sources.
Cyting Germany’s cancelor „Going full green was a strategic mistake”
Ps. Heat pump is as effective as the heat source it can use..
Not only is this a contrived non-comparison, but the statement itself is readily disproven by the limitations basically _everyone_ using single instance ClickHouse often run into if they actually have a large dataset.
Spark and Hadoop have their place, maybe not in rinky dink startup land, but definitely in the world of petabyte and exabyte data processing.
Well, at my old company we had some datasets in the 6-8 PB range, so tell me how we would run analytics on that dataset on an Intel NUC.
Just because you don't have experience of these situations, it doesn't mean they don't exist. There's a reason Hadoop and Spark became synonymous with "big data."
Well yeah, but that's a _very_ different engineering decision with different constraints, it's not fully apples to apples.
Having materialised views increases insert load for every view, so if you want to slice your data in a way that wasn't predicted, or that would have increased ingress load beyond what you've got to spare, say, find all devices with a specific model and year+month because there's a dodgy lot, you'll really wish you were on a DB that can actually run that query instead of only being able to return your _precalculated_ results.
I dislike the example of sharing personal information in the article. It's sometimes not only about your own comfort and boundaries, but also how much you want to put on another person.
I struggle sometimes with that, probably because I don't understand the 'put on another person' part. Would you (or anyone else reading this) care to give a recognizable example?
The "weight on one's 'shoulders'/'chest'" is a figure of speech from the psychosomatical relief one may feel when sharing troubles.
Inversely, the "burden" to respond, whether gravitas is implied or not, can be socially-exhausting to some, and not even conjured by others.
People with low self-esteem or self-worth / depressed / self-described "burdensome" people often assume the pity they may solicit costs the other party part of their own emotional well-being - they've burdened them further with expectations of a response or acknowledgement.
Also works great with agent assisted development.