Infrastructure Requirements for all types of heating systems - part of the heat Infographic project

Some thoughts on infrastructure requirements:


Electric Baseboard
Access to electricity.



Mini Splits
Same as above



In Ground Heat Pump

For the pond version, obviously one needs a pond.

For the horizontal installation, one needs a big yard or some acreage.





Natural Gas
Access to natural gas.



Propane
All one needs is a tank, which can be purchased or rented, I think.



Wood Stove
A chimney?



Modern wood stove




Pellet Stove




Masonry Heater

A good support under the floor the heater is on.


Rocket Mass Heater
Same as above?

Being a systems engineer, my thought is that the question of infrastructure requirements is quite complex.

The first layer of breaking it down would be to divide things up into embodied infrastructure and operational infrastructure.

Embodied infrastructure is the technological base required to produce, ship, install, and commission the system in the first place. A mini-split, for instance, requires a civilization to maintain the infrastructure to extract all of the raw materials, ship them to factories, produce the power to run those factories, produce complex chemicals such as refrigerants, test the finished assembly, have transportation infrastructure to move it to the point of installation, maintain businesses that can handle the details of selling and installing the unit, train people to install it, etc. You also need a functioning economic system (banks, etc.) to be able to support the economic transactions required to facilitate all of these transactions.

Operational infrastructure is the infrastructure required to operate and maintain the system once it is installed. Any system that requires grid electricity to operate is operationally dependent on power generation plants, power transmission and distribution systems, and the infrastructure required to extract and transport the fuels used to power those generation facilities. Complex technologies require replacement parts to maintain them over their operational lifetime, so you have to maintain the infrastructure to manufacture and distribute those parts.

I suppose you could break off a sub-category of "on-site infrastructure" to list only the things required on-site to allow installation and the resources that need to be either delivered or generated on-site to maintain operation (electricity, natural gas, wood, etc.). But that fails to capture the vast differences in actual global infrastructure required to allow the existence of something like a geothermal heat pump vs a rocket mass heater.