Originally posted by bcroe
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I'm contemplating switching from gas furnace to heat pump. My house is twice as big as yours,
and LA has ~1200 heating degree days + 1200 cooling degree days / year
vs. Chicago's 6500 hdd's and 850 cdd's, so if our houses are similarly leaky/uninsulated,
I'll be using 2400/7400 x 2 = 1.5 times as much energy as you = 45,000 KWH/year.
I think I can fit a 10KW array that should generate about 15,000 KWH/year, about half yours...
which suggests it'll only cover about a third of my energy needs
[ EDIT: 1/3 x 2 = 2/3, not 1.5. I was asleep when I wrote that.
So this crude measure gives 20,000 KWH/year as my needs, so my array
should generate 75% of my needs, which isn't bad.]
I hope that's a pessimistic estimate, and my nice Craftsman deep eaves plus opening
windows for breeze at night will cut the cooling bills (and that blindly estimating with
hdd's and cdd's like that is wrong).
Still, I'd better get busy insulating and plugging leaks!
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