Hope you are all keeping warm in North America!

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-25 here

With the wind chill it's -25.... took my furnace apart this fall cleaned everything..... working fine, having a Humidifier putting moisture in the air helps with the comfort level... house is around 71-72, added more foam insulation in the walls this summer, 3/4 of the house has it the other 1/4 is fiberglass....That's made a HUGE difference on my heating bill, as well as the warmth of the house, with the wind just need to make sure the power does not go out... if so I'll have to fire up the Generator otherwise doing fine here, supposed to be back in the 40's this weekend......I make sure the birds have food and the squirrels have plenty of unsalted peanuts....
 
ductless split...

is the trend, we had one installed 2 yrs ago in our Vermont place, which is basically a summer house and not well insulated, as in none in the ceiling/roof, R-19 in the walls. The roof is galvanized steel Fabral, eventually we plan to insulate it. Our son has been living there last 2 winters while building a new house on his acreage outside Burlington. The Mitsubishi Ductless Split works amazingly well, he told us last night that it's been -10 to -12 at night and the Mitsu has been keeping it at 60F, even with the lousy insulation. Unlike the old heat pumps these will put out heat at minus 15, they'e come a long way!
 
-23c last night and got up to -15c. during the day but very sunny so it wasn't all that bad.. I'm about 60 mi north of Detroit on the Canadian side. Our house still has its original 1958 boiler and baseboards, nice and cozy and quiet. I have it set at 72f. . I don't think the circulation pump has stopped though in the last 24 hrs.
 
I set my thermostat to 68F and left it there during the cold snap to protect against pipes freezing.  It's never happened before (frozen pipes) but I'm not into taking chances.

 

Way too warm for my liking, especially at night when I usually set it back to 57F.  Glad not to have to worry about it now.
 
Temps

Last night -8 wind chill -40 talk of many buss. and school cancelled, and talk of no mail delivery. A lot of advertising new animal cruelty laws and threats about police coming to your house if they get a report you left animals out in it, along with horrifying pictures of frost bit dogs and cats with their ears breaking off and their paws black with frost bite.
 
Jim (arris)...

<span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #008000;">Very cool for you to feed the birds and squirrels during this cold snap. When you do good for someone or something it comes back to you, in this case probably more substantial than unsalted peanuts. Buy a lottery ticket.</span>
 
All the news stations were predicting snow and ice for us, there wasn't a loaf of bread or carton of milk left in Kroger or Walmart since we get snowed in for such extreme lengths of time here (insert sarcasm).  It dropped to 19F overnight and we had one or two snow flakes.  I drove the 4x4 to work for nothing.  Oh well, I'm not going to complain.  I hate driving in the slush on Nashville roadways!  Here's what a typical Tennessee snow day is like...here in the morning and gone by noon.
 
I was watching some news on the cold snap from over here in Ireland and wow! I hope you're all keeping safely warm. It looks like the kind of weather that you'd need to evacuate I'd you had a heating system failure.

We're probably a lot more like the Bay Area of SF in terms of heating and cooling. It's mostly natural gas fired systems, although almost always water filled radiators and it's just not hot or humid enough to ever require air conditioning. Our summer weather doesn't go much beyond 25ºC (77F) and is typically closer to 20ºC (68F) and winter really only very occasionally dips below freezing. It's typically about 7ºC 44ºF on a mid winter day although you could get the odd day around 0ºC 32ºF. You can get the odd plunge down to fee degrees colder than that but it's exceptional.

SF is probably a bit warmer and colder than here. We more like the Pacific Northwest, but without any continental effect at all.

Heatpumps are becoming a bit more widespread but mostly in new build with near passive house levels of insulation and heat capture ventilation and so on.

Anything I've heard about retrofitting heatpumps to older homes here has been pretty negative. You'd usually only do it with a massive retrofit of insulation and windows.

What's looking promising here is high temp heat pumps that use multiple cycles to get the water output up beyond 60ºC so they're suitable as direct replacement for gas boilers heating traditional radiators that ran at about 70 to 80 Celsius.

If you combine those with geothermal wells or shallow geothermal and solar panels they can really dramatically cut bills.

Running simple air to water or air to air heatpumps here seems to generally end up as more expensive than natural gas and gets lousy reviews. The cost per unit of electricity is relatively high and natural gas remains fairly competitive. I'd guess as more and more wind and other renewal electricity comes on stream, heatpumps will become more incentivised.

If you're outside an area with access to natural gas (and most smallish towns seem to be hooked up to it) you'd typically see pressure jet condensing oil (kerosine/gas oil - heavier heating oils aren't used) boiler in newer systems or just traditional non condensing systems in older.

There's some use of LPG bulk storage tanks too and renewables like wood pellets and also rural heat pump systems usually combined with geothermal sources as it's relatively easy to drill a big bore well if your house is in the middle or nowhere.
 
I've a friend who's out in your neck of the woods right now. He thought he'd escaped the ravages of the typical NYC winter, but somehow managed to get bronchitis despite your weather and is recovering while fielding calls from panicked* clients on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

*Apparently there're some real emergencies but there's also a good bit of freak-out with backup systems coming on and making noises some clients aren't used to,
 
It was 51º and rainy/misty yesterday with low fog rolling across the ground from the snow melting. Today it's 38º and cloudy with possible freezing rain this evening. 
 
<span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #008000;">60 degrees outside @4:00 PM...about 10 degrees below normal</span>

 

<span style="font-size: 14pt; color: #008000;">Taken from my backyard. The palm trees and me prefer the snow to keep it's distance. Nice to look at.</span>

twintubdexter-2019020517520108353_1.jpg
 
a little cool here...

last couple days lows around -10,highs about 5-10 :) Little Rinnai wall furnace is keeping interior temps decent so far,but if it falls behind,original to house 1951 Payne floor furnace can be lit off.1998 chevy K1500 commuter truck is nearly unstoppable in deep snow with it's "gov-lock"diffs front and rear :)
 

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