Price of electricity in Finland peaks at 2.35€/kWh today. Keeping my tiny granny cottage warm costs me over 50 euros for a single day. It's negative 25C (-13F) outside.

It would literally not matter since it all ends up as heat in the end which is what you're looking for anyway

Minus 5 watts on the three fans or something

But running the 4090 would keep your cottage warm.

I got an RX 6800 yesterday, can't wait to test out its heating capabilities lol

Get a space heater.

Mine was $15 at Walmart, heats my room like it's Spring, and only adds $5 per month to my electricity bill.

Come Summer, I'm going to get a dehumidifier and see if I can use it in place of my A/C.

hey, whats the price for gas per cubic meter in Poland?

wow! i paid 220euros for gas heating and warm water in 78m2 flat in poland for all last year.

Mainly the reason is that many countries do not have hourly capable meters, so calculating the price for each hour is not possible. Flat rate is needed when you just have the cumulative read once a month.

In Finland the meters communicate automatically once a day, and send the 24h values to grid company. The next generation meters which are now installed can communicate once a hour.

30% of Finns are on spot.

Spot is quite normal in the Nordics. Over all it's the cheapest, but some days suck obviously.

This summer we had days with negative prices. My bill for July was 78 NOK (about $8). Might have been August when I think about it...

Yeah about 30% of Finns have a plan lile that. It's bit of an gamble, but on average it'll be cheaper on the long run.

Interesting.

At these temperatures, I can't imagine air source heat pumps being very efficient.

I would probably have a spare gas, oil or wood based heater and use that for days like this, or for if the power goes off on days like this.

I’m surprised that those 30% don’t have batteries to shift load times

It's the first time I hear about final consumers paying spot prices. What's the reason for it? Ecological activism?

Time to install a wood stove.

Scheduling power plant maintenance during winter in a country where it gets that cold seems a tad, uhm, insane?

In a place where it's regularly cold? Whose brilliant idea was that?!

At 50 bucks a day it would pay for itself pretty quickly. Not sure what prices are by you but here you can get a brand new stove with auto-temp and a catalytic converter and everything installed for 10k to 12k, or get a decent used stove and have someone install it for 5k +-

How about a small propane heater, like a Mr Buddy type unit? Those can be connected to a extension hose and a 20lb propane tank, and are safe to use indoors with adequate ventilation.

I got one for emergency heat, and it can take 2 of the 1lb propane cylinders directly, or the 20lb tank with a hose. The 20lb tank could provide heat for over 24 hours but IDK how expensive propane is there. It cost me $18 for a 4-pack of the 1lb cylinders, and I think the 20lb ones are about $50 range.

No no, it's for insolention. Fuck them HOAs.

I remember walking to school at -29C when I was young thinking it's really bloody cold only to find out school is closed and walking back. Checked the temperature only when I got home.

Miserable is a huge understatement. It's fatal when not properly clothed. As a kid I recall going to check our mail at the communal mailbox and it was -66C (-86F) with the windchill and every TV channel had a banner saying you WILL get frostbite with 30 SECONDS if skin is exposed. I know people who have lots fingers/toes in warmer temperatures than that so it's straight up fatally cold.

I got to -20f with very strong winds last year. Froze half the pipes under the house, even through insulating layers. We had to tape up plastic sheets in some parts of the house like one of those walk-in freezers to try and keep the important places warm..

This house is a cheap ass 70s prefab. It was not made for 0F, let alone -20 and blizzard conditions.

in the upper US Midwest, we set our record for around -45°F (-42.7°C) but that was with wind chill, the base temp. was something like -30°F (-34.4°C).

I really can't imagine how cold that is. I'm from Australia and currently live in California, so 10C (50F) is cold to me lol. I've never lived somewhere where it snows and have never had to winterize anything.

I've been to New York City during winter and felt extremely cold but I think it was 'only' -5C (23F) at the time.

Why are you measuring natural gas in kWh? How do you even measure that as such?

Space heaters are the way to go.

It's the difference between paying $70 and $5 more per month.

This is such an outdated information. Modern heatpumps work just fine even in temperatures of -20C and below. Ofcourse the efficiency gets worse the colder it is but even at worst it's still 100% efficient. On a typical year there's only a handful of really cold days. It doesn't make sense not to get a heatpump just because it's inefficient for few days. It's not like it stops heating or something. It just effectively turns into electric radiator which is what my house was heated with before I got the heatpump anyways.

There are heat pumps that exchange heat with the ground. Those can function well in more extreme temperatures. Also you could/should have alternative heating methods for extreme situations even if they are much more inneficient

In colder areas like that the heat pumps are usually ground source so the ambient air temperature doesn't change the performance much.

We have price caps in the UK. They're not perfect but they have stopped us from paying a lot more than we would have this past year. And the UK is definitely no (did you mean to say?) utopia. Or do you think a price cap to protect consumers is something from a distopia?

I guess with my knowledge of energy markets, a situation like that would result in higher prices just by the way the market functions, responding to supply and demand. The graph here appears to be a market clearing price rather than a price after adjustments, where a lot of incentives would be brought in like an intentional price hike.

We were in the opposite situation though where we were running into surplus overnight during a period of energy transition. You'd see these stupid misinformed articles being like, "the government is giving away YOUR electricity to the US!" Was like during the 2003 blackout where we needed to bring large loads online carefully alongside generation, people were freaking out how casinos and industry got power before them. The need for dispatchable loads connected to the high voltage transmission grid in that situation wasn't as headline worthy.

Geothermal is expensive and not worth it financially in many countries but when you are looking at 2.35€/kWh it seems like a great investment.

When you say it's common, are you talking about heat pumps or old-fashioned resistive heating? I'm not very familiar with heat pumps since they weren't common at all when and where I bought a house, but at least where I lived it was normal to have either an oil or a gas furnace for heating. Resistive electric heating cost a lot more to operate and so it was generally used only where it would be too difficult or expensive to install a furnace and hot water pipes or hot air ducts. For example, some friends of mine lived in a 19th century house which was meant to be heated by a wood fireplace and they also had electric heaters in the bedrooms, whereas my own house was built in 1980 so it had an oil tank, a furnace in the basement, and hot-water radiators.

(My own house also had a modern wood stove in the living room and buying firewood was even cheaper than buying heating oil, but the problem was that the wood stove took a lot of work and it only heated the living room since it wasn't connected to any mechanism for spreading the heat to the rest of the house.)

found one whose never felt the heat of a coal stove

it's handy to have backup heat source when the power goes out so pipes don't freeze

This is Québec only. Other provinces that have more water and hills still have less hydro.

I don't think the fact that Finland is north and cold and icy is a factor either. A lot of Québec's power generating stations are in the desolate north, with some of the biggest ones on rivers flowing into the Hudson's Bay, and they were built in the 70s.

However looking at the relief and hydro and topo maps of Finland, while there's plenty of lakes, there's no strong rivers. Couple this with an apparent ban on new hydro, and we got the answer.

I wonder how they'd fare with geothermal.

That is really nice.

That's extremely cheap, compared to 0,35€ in Germany.

Saves a pretty penny on refrigerating stuff but makes for a hard time to have a decent night of sleep.

And your remark on styrofoam hits hard with me.

I have an old house, nearly 100 years old, with a very poor score in thermal efficiency, that really needs some improvement but the idea of glueing highly combustible materials to the walls does not go well with me.

Well after lighting the styrofoam you won't feel cold anymore

It's crazy. I've been doing all my insulation calculations based on a delta of 20 (20 inside, 0 outside).

To hit the same heating requirement, I'd need to triple the amount of insulation for -40.

That's a lot. And being a log cabin I wouldn't add anything on the outside that would hide the wood. That is really harsh weather to endure.

In winter yeah but we have long ass days in the summer and even in early spring they work surprisingly well as solar panels are more efficient in cold temperatures.

In the winter, yes.

I'm summer Finland gets same amount of solar radiation as German

Since it's a cold area, they're likely using a geothermal heat pump, which isn't affected by air temperature. It uses the ground for heat exchange rather than the air.

No, I'm talking from experience.

It's the difference between an additional $5 and $70 in my electric bill every month.

And with what money? It's all going to electricity at the moment!