 Hi, I'm Nate Adams, often known as Nate the House Whisperer, and welcome to the fourth part of the Electrify Everything course, where we're going to be talking about how to electrify everything but HVAC. So this is your cars, this is the stove, water heaters, dryers, and fireplaces, which I get asked about quite a bit, and there actually is a nice solution for that's actually nice year-round, not just when it's cold out. So here we are, this is the syllabus, so we are now on the fourth part. The fifth part has a lot to it, and hopefully you're enjoying the course thus far. Alright, so key thing about everything but HVAC is they are all self-contained systems. So like your car, you don't have to go take parts out of the car and put it into your next one. There's nothing to transfer, as you go, you trade one in, you buy another one, you bring it home. Complete systems, stove, same things, you change them out, water heaters, you change them out, dryers, you change them out, fireplaces, you could argue that, but if you're talking an insert or something like that, that gets changed out. So these are all self-contained systems, which means you can do them any time. So that HVAC requires a lot of planning and thought, but these other ones really are not that hard. And the curse of HVAC is that it's a system, in a system of systems, otherwise known as your house. So that's part of what makes it so stinking challenging, particularly if you live in a climate that has any kind of winter at all. Alright, so let's start with cars. So when you're thinking about charging a car, the easiest way to think about how fast you can charge it is in miles per hour. So if you are looking at a 110 charger, which is what every EV comes with, it'll come with a little on-board charger for that, so you can plug it in anywhere. Those will charge somewhere between two and four miles per hour. So if you leave it plugged in all day, you're looking at something like 50 to 100 miles of charge per day. That might be okay, but in general you're going to want to look at a 220 charger. And by the way, if you go to a Tesla supercharger, they are up into the 1,000 miles per hour range, which means basically you can get an 80% charge in a matter of 10 or 20 minutes. So that's nice when you're on the road, because it's not that much longer than a gas station stop is now. In fact, my partner took a trip down to Florida and back in his Model 3, and he said never once did he wait on the car. By the time he went to take a pee and get some food, the car was ready by the time he got back. Fast chargers can be good. At home, you're not going to get anything that's that fast, but you might be able to get to the 20 or 30 miles per hour range. And at that point, that's pretty quick. You should be home long enough to get a charge, particularly overnight. So as far as infrastructure goes, these are the two main options. You can do just a 50 amp outlet and plug into that. Or you can do a 100 amp subpanel. My recommendation, if there's any reason at all, like if you're already running the wire, do the subpanel. They aren't that expensive. You're only talking another $100 or $150 in parts. So if you do a subpanel, you're set for the future. If you want to put more chargers in, you've got all the capacity you need there. So 100 amps will easily charge three cars. No problem at all. It'll charge them fairly fast. So 100 amp subpanels, the best way to go, if you have a 100 amp service right now, you may be able to reuse it. So it's worth asking about, although, again, they're not that expensive. It's more about the labor cost and the wire cost to do it. Now, once you have your infrastructure in place, you have to decide on your charger. So on the left, you have portable chargers. You probably got a 110 charger with your car. The 220 chargers can be nice to have. They're not super expensive. They're in the couple $100 range. This is what I have for my Chevy Volt 12 before I sold it. But that can be nice, and you can take it with you. So if you bring a couple of pigtails, if you need to charge at a friend's house, if you've got enough wire and you have a couple of pigtails, meaning different ends that you can plug in, you can plug it into a dryer outlet at a friend's house and you can charge up. So that's one option. The other one is a permanent charger. And so I have a number of clients that have done that. I personally just like to have the portable charger. And then if I need to take it with me, I just take it with me. All right, next up is stoves. The place to begin is an induction hot plate. And I chose this picture on purpose because this is for real. Induction does not work like traditional electric. So traditional electric stoves, it's just resistance heat, which is plain old, throw energy at it. And so the burners heat up and those in turn heat up the pans. Now induction works differently. It works on magnetism. So you have to have a pan that a magnet sticks to. So if you're wondering if your pans will work, find a magnet, stick it to it. If it sticks, you're good. And if it doesn't, you need new pans. But if you start with a hot plate, you're going to see just this. It only heats the pan. So you can actually put your fingers right next to a pot of boiling water and not burn them as long as it's happened quickly because the heat will eventually come through the surface, but it's not resistance strictly. But a hot plate is the place to start. Look for one that is well reviewed because there are cheap ones. I bought one. And the user experience was terrible. The technology is good, but the user experience makes or breaks it. So let's start with the hot plate and look for something that's well reviewed. And I already mentioned this, magnet's heat metal. Now, what to know about induction in general is it controls just like gas. So it turns up and down instantaneously. So where electric resistance, you turn it up and you have to wait a while for it to actually come up. And I'm not the best cook in the world and I'm impatient. So I'll turn it all the way up. And the next thing I know, I'm burning something. Induction turns up and down instantly just like gas. There just isn't a flame to look at. But you can look at the display to see where it is. It's really easy to clean. So I already mentioned how it doesn't make surfaces hot. So this doesn't burn food on nearly as much as either gas or resistance electric stoves. You get that nice cool surface. And very importantly, these are very good for air quality compared to the other varieties, a couple of reasons. They don't cook as strongly as quickly. So if you have a range hood, it's called the effluent. It's the combusted food in gas form rising up towards your range hood. It moves more slowly, which means that it's more likely to get caught by the range hood and taken out. Plus, it generally burns food less. So it's better for that. So they're better for air quality. And particularly if you compare it versus gas, because gas, if you think about it, you wouldn't sit in your garage with the car running and you're face down by the tailpipe. But what do you do when you cook? You're standing right on top of that exhaust. There's all kinds of stuff in there you don't want to breathe. So induction is far better for gas than air quality. And it's somewhat better than electric resistance stoves. There's a wide range of these. So the one on the left is very similar to one that I have myself. That is down to about the $1,000 range now. I paid 1500 for mine a few years ago. In the middle is kind of a mid-range one. There's lots of stuff in the $3,000 to $4,000 range. And it's pretty comparable to gas now. The only thing being that there are no low-end induction stoves. They're all at least mid-range, which is why they started at grand. And you can go up to nine grand for something really fancy looking like the one on the right. So there's the full range at that point. But a basic stove is gonna be $500 ish for gas or electric resistance. But it's not gonna have a bunch of features. So it's a bump, but it's not a massive bump. All right, let's talk about water heaters. There are three primary types of electric water heaters. So the one on the left is tankless. The one in the middle is a standard resistance electric tank. And the one on the right is a heat pump water heater. So let's pro and con these. So let's look at electric tankless. So the pros are it's cheap-ish up front. They're not quite as cheap as the tanks, but they're not very expensive. You need very little space. So sometimes this is going to be the thing if you have a small house and there's just no place to put something. And the other thing they're good for is if you have one fixture that is way out there. So say you have like a sink in the garage or something like that. It might be good to put one of these at that sink. You could also do a small tank there too. They make tanks that run on 110. But anyway, those are the pros. The cons are they need a massive amount of power, which if you remember from the sizing your panel piece, these things can pull as much as 20,000 watts. And a 100 amp panel will only serve about 22,000 watts. So you use the whole panel up with just the water heater. You haven't done HVAC, you haven't done the stove, you haven't done the dryer, you haven't done the house, you haven't done a car. So they use a lot of electricity. And I mean it makes sense to think about how long it takes to boil water when you're going to make pasta. This is asking water to go from whatever the input temperature is 50 to 80 degrees up to 100 or 110 degrees. And it has to do it instantly as it's flowing across. It just takes a lot of energy. There's no way around it. This may necessitate a panel upgrade that you might not have to do otherwise. You may be able to get away with 100 amp. And then if you have time of use rates, this is a bad idea. So if this thing kicks on and it's burning 40 or 50 cents per kilowatt hour electricity, triple what the normal rate might be, it ain't cheap. But whenever you ask for hot water, that's when you have to pay to make it. So not great in anywhere that has time of use. They're not cheap to operate either. You look at it about 500 bucks a year. So that's those. Electric tanks, they are cheap up front. They're the least expensive generally. They are also very expensive to operate. In fact, random fact, there are two different things that you can buy that use as much electricity cost wise in a year as what the thing costs up front. One is the incandescent light bulb, which has largely gone away at this point. And the other one is an electric resistance water heater. That's it, those two. So this is not an efficient way to do things. And it's pretty expensive at 500 bucks a year on average for running it to heat your hot water. The last one is the heat pump water heater. And the pros here is they are really efficient now. They're 400% efficient, which is a four COP or coefficient of performance. These have the lowest operating costs of anything out there. They are cheaper than all the gas tanks now. If you look at the manufacturers that make different things, the lowest cost one will now be the heat pump water heater. So it depends on your energy cost, but national average is about 13 cents. And it's going to cost right about 100 bucks a year to run that water heater. And gas is usually going to be more like 150 or 200 somewhere in that range. Now the bad parts are they are expensive up front. So where the other two are oftentimes on the three to $800 range, all of the heat pump water heaters are going to be upwards of $1,000 for the unit. If you put them in a small room, they will cool the space a lot. So they have about the same output as a window unit air conditioner. So imagine putting a window unit air conditioner and running it somewhere between one and three hours per day. That is what you're looking at. So if you have a small mechanical room, it will cool that. It doesn't usually cool the rest of the house too much, but it will definitely cool the space that it's in. Now if you have a basement, like I'm used to in our climate here, so I had a heat pump water heater in my old house, it had a big basement 1400 square feet. And it only dropped the temperature of that maybe one or two degrees. It was barely noticeable when it was running. The last piece that is a con for those is they do make a little bit of noise. They used to be relatively noisy and now they're quite quiet, but they still make some noise and vibration. So I wouldn't recommend putting these right next to a bedroom if you can avoid it, either next to or underneath a bedroom. Try and put it somewhere else if you can. At least go check out a friend who has one so you get an idea of what you're in for. All right, so our strong preference here is the heat pump water heater by far. When these came out a few years ago, my partner and I are like, oh, we're done. This solves all kinds of problems. We're good. We're moving forward with life. So I put one of these in my old house DIYed it with my father-in-law. So this is a DIYable project if you are fairly advanced. It's not that hard, but if this makes you really nervous, find a handy buddy to help you and pay him and beer or food. Or if you're game for trying it, you can probably pull this off. They're not that hard. It's basically you place it and you plug it in. So what you need technically for these is a 30 amp breaker. It's a dual pole breaker and a 10-3 wire. So that is for the resistance electric backup. So if you see this right here and right here, these are the resistance coils in the unit. And on the top here is the heat pump. So it's a standard resistance electric water heater with a heat pump on top. So if the heat pump does ever fail, it's still an electric water heater. So it may not be cheap to operate, but you still have hot water. Same reason we like resistance backup for space heating. So anyway, this can be a little bit difficult to get contractors to install sometimes. They'll oftentimes be afraid of it and be really nervous. So you may hire an electrician and a plumber separately to do this. So you might buy the tank, hire an electrician to run the wire, hire a plumber to actually plumb the thing in. So that may be something worth considering. Now that will likely save you a good chunk of money, but you won't get a warranty, at least not a labor warranty. So be aware of that. When it comes to operating it, we recommend setting these all the way up to 140 degrees. 140-degree water, if you've got 50 gallons of it. I haven't run the exact math, but it's probably somewhere between 80 and 100 gallons of 105-degree water, which is about what you shower with. And then you want to use a mixing valve, which adds in a little bit of cold water as it goes into the line so that if you have little kids and they turn it all the way to hot, they don't burn themselves. And then so you don't burn yourself. Another nice thing about these is they don't need a flu because they don't burn anything. So if your water heater right now is on one side of the house, because it needs to be there to be able to catch a chimney or some other kind of flu, but your bathroom is on the other side of the house, you can move it. These are very movable. You can put them wherever you want. One note though that I didn't put on the slide, you need a drain for them. They do a little bit of dehumidification, not a lot, but you do want to have them someplace where there is a drain. If your mechanical room is small, like I said, it will drop the temperature of a space. Can you duct it elsewhere? So like my house, we have a strange little house that is right on a river and it's on stilts. I've never seen any other one like this in the area here. And so we spray foamed our roof. And so my original plan, if we'd used this, we used a sand and CO2 water heater instead, but they're a lot more expensive. But my original thought was I would duct the cold air from the water heater up to the attic and dump it into a place that I don't care if it gets a little bit cooler. So can you duct it? This is also really good for garages if you live in a warm climate. So if you already have a water heater in the garage that happens in a lot of the southern parts of the country, that's a good place for it. Or if you have a basement in a cold climate, that's a great place to put it too. But hands down heat pump water heaters and Reem, the one that's pictured here, they make a bunch of different sub models, but it's all basically the same product. They have by far the best specs right now. Other details, I want to just drive home mixing valve. This is what they look like. You can see sea, so cold water comes in here, the hot water from the water tank comes in here, and then they mix it down. So you aren't losing any heat, you're just, you're tempering the temperature for when it goes out, so you don't burn anybody. We also strongly recommend using an expansion tank. This is a rubber bladder inside here that you pressurize. So when you shut the water off hard, you hear the water hammer. This takes the pressure of the water hammer. Otherwise, that's a fairly common thing for taking life off of a water heater, so that pressure will end up in the water heater inside, and eventually the welds and whatnot inside will fail. All right, next up, dryers. Three different kinds here. Two were pretty obscure and the other super common. So condensing dryers are one variety. I have one of these in my house. To be frank, I don't understand 100% how they work, but they somehow pull the moisture out of the air of the dryer and cool that off, and then they actually, they run it into the drain along with the washer, where the washer drain comes out. The middle one is a miella heat pump dryer, and right now this is the only one that seems to be ready for primetime, and it's small. So if you look at the reviews on the big brands with the full size ones, the reviews are still not good. I keep asking this question. Hey, does anybody have a large heat pump dryer, and what's your experience? And A, people don't really have them, and B, every time I look at the reviews, they're still like three star average, so they're not there. But the miella is a nice little one, and that pulls heat from the space that it's in and pumps it into the clothes. There's enough extra heat from the motors and everything though. It ends up net net adding heat to a space, not taking away, where the heat pump water heater will drop the temperature. And the last option is just plain old old school electric resistance dryer, which has been common for years and years and years. So here are the pros and cons for each of them. So for condensing, the pros are you don't need a vent, so you can put it almost anywhere, as long as you have a drain and power. You can get a combined washer and dryer option for this, and I've known several people to have them and they really like it. So you put a load of laundry in at night, and you wake up in the morning and it's clean and dry. They take forever, it's like a three or four hour cycle, but you don't have to move it or anything. You put it in, it washes it, and it comes out dry, you're done. They don't use very much power, so that's nice, especially compared to electric resistance. But they're pretty expensive up front. Then there's the heat pump. There's no vent needed on those either. Nice thing about these is the miella in particular will run on 110, so regular plug. So one of my friends, he put this in his master bedroom oddly enough, so they're washer and dryer right in the bedroom. You can put this anywhere, like I mentioned, you can put it there. This has the lowest usage of anything, but we're not talking that much usage at the end of the day, usually somewhere between 50 and 100 bucks a year for running a dryer. A bad part is they're expensive up front, and like I mentioned, they are not reliable with the exception of the miella. And by the way, if you're on Twitter, you can tag at miellaUSA and they're super responsive. So I don't know who's on the account, but thank you. Last option is electric dryers, so just plain old, old school resistance. They are cheap up front. In fact, you can go get these used for 100 bucks in a lot of places. I know I can around here because I bought one that way. They're typically pretty reliable. They're old school, and if you're mechanical at all, the things that break, you can probably fix yourself. They do use more electricity than the other options, but again, for the most part, most families are looking at somewhere between 50 and 100 bucks a year worth of electricity, which is say 300 to 900 kilowatt hours a year. So you have to ask yourself, is it worth chasing? And in fact, our preference is, while we like higher end stuff and just about everything, this we still recommend just go with the resistance dryer. There's very few issues with them. They're cheap. They're available. They don't require a lot of maintenance. Take the $500 to $2,000 that you're not spending here and put it somewhere else. So use that to get the heat pump water heater. Use that to bump how much, like what kind of HVAC you're getting. So if you're going from two stage to variable speed, use the money there. There's other places to use that budget. And then the last one is fireplaces. So I just want to ask a question. Why do we use fireplaces? The biggest thing is usually for ambiance. When I ask this question, you just, you want a nice feel in a room. And the second one is heat. But that is somewhat questionable because you need to be in a cold climate and it needs to be cold outside before you want to use them. And when it comes to standard wood burning fireplaces, because they pull so much air out of the house when they burn, they actually remove four times as much heat from the house as they put into it. So if you're just talking an open wood burning fireplace, they're horrible from an efficiency perspective. So you have to ask yourself, are they actually helpful on the heat side? Now there's one specific product we like for this that's called the Optimist and that's how it's spelled with a Y in mist. So this looks like fire. Like it's shockingly realistic. You can begin to see that it's not fire when you are right on top of it. But even from a few feet away, it looks like fire. You can run this year round, regardless of your climate. So you get your nice ambiance all the time. And some models have heat. There's not a lot of them, but a few do. So that is how to electrify everything but HVAC. So just to review cars, put a 100 amp subpanel in your garage if you can. Stoves, start with an induction hot plate, then move to an induction stove. Water heaters, use the heat pump water heater. Dryer, we lean strongly towards the resistance. Electric dryer, just old school. And fireplaces, look at Optimist. And all of these things will give you a nice experience and they will be electric. So you can get rid of that gas meter. So that's part four of the electrify everything course. So if somebody happened to send you here and you have not signed up to take the rest of the course, I will put a link below where you can go sign up and you can get the rest of the electrify everything course. And thank you so much for watching. If you got value from this, I will also put a buy me a beer link underneath. You don't need to feel like you do, but if you got value, please send some to me. And good luck as you work on electrifying your house. And I'll see you in the next section where we will finally begin to talk about HVAC. Have a great day. I'm Nate Adams. Bye-bye.