So, Alec over the Technology Connections channel made an hour long video explaining the difference with kW and kWh (obviously with other stuff around it).
I'm living in northern Europe in an old house, with pretty much only electric appliances for everything. We do have a wood stove and oven, but absolute majority of our energy consumption is electricity. Roughly 24 000 kWh per year.
And, while eveything he brings up makes absolute sense, it seems like a moot point. In here absolutely everyone knows this stuff and it's all just common knowledge. Today we went into sauna and just turned a knob to fire up the 6,5kW heaters inside the stove and doing that also triggered a contactor to disengage some of the floor heating so that the thing doesn't overload the circuit. And the old house we live in pulls 3-4kW from the grid during the winter just to keep inside nice and warm. And that's with heat pumps, we have a mini-split units both on the house and in the garage. And I also have 9kW pure electric construction heater around to provide excess heat in case the cheap minisiplit in garage freezes up and needs more heat to thaw the outside unit.
And kW and kWh are still commony used measurement if you don't use electricity. Diesel or propane heaters have labels on them on how many watts they can output right next to the fuel consumption per hour and so on. So I'm just wondering if this is really any new information for anyone.
I assume here's a lot of people from the US and other countries with gas grid (which we don't really have around here), is it really so that your Joe Average can't tell the difference between 1kWh of heat produced by gas compared to electricity? I get that pricing for different power sources may differ, but it's still watt-hours coming out of the grid. Optimizing their usage may obviously be worth the effort, but it's got nothing to do with power consumption.
So, please help me understand the situation a bit more in depth.
Yup.
I totally understand electricity because it's pretty intuitive. Everything is advertised in watts, my bill comes as kilowatt hours, so it's pretty easy to calculate how much energy something uses by plugging in a kill-a-watt and measuring it.
My gas is billed in therms. I don't really know what that is, nor do I know what the flow rate is for my furnace or gas stove, so I have no concept for how much energy I'm using. I don't have an electric one to compare with, so I that's not an option either. So how exactly would I get to the point where I would be able to compare the two without a lot of annoying testing? Even then it would be extremely imprecise.
And no, it's not "watt hours coming out of the grid," except in the pedantic sense that they can be converted. They come from very different sources, so it's like comparing an EV to a horse, and while you could, it's completely nonsensical.
But yes, at some base level your average American knows there's a connection between the two (after all, I can choose between electric heat/heat pump and a gas furnace), but they'd rely on an expert to estimate the monthly price difference between options, since that's ultimately what we care about. The problem is mentioned near the end of the video, HVAC experts don't seem that familiar w/ heat pumps, so you may not get a decent estimate, depending on who your technician is. And that adds to the misinformation.