twothamendment

Yeah, not worth it in most cases, but when things line up, it is the best.

I've built 3 houses and got a bid on ground source heat for each one. I finally pulled the trigger on the 3rd house because we:

1) Moved where it was quite a bit colder, -20F for a week is common. 2) We have enough land to trench only 6'/2m deep to bury the loops instead of drilling like we would have needed to do on the first 2 houses. 3) There was a tax credit on it 4) No equipment exposed outside

Absolutely love it and it will make it difficult to move away when we want to down size b/c we'll pay more in utilities for half the space.

We also have some air-source on an addition I built, I'd use it anywhere that was slightly warmer than where I'm at.

I drive by an old Scout that just sits there and wish I had time to update it. It could be a fin project.

Multi region AWS is the flavor of the quarter or half - for projects that were not terra formed.

Another copy/paste reason - I can't count the number of times I've written up something for work on my own google account by mistake, then paste it into a new doc on the work account so I can share it.

I'm in Northwest Montana. My ground source heat pump doesn't struggle until the highs outside are -20F (actual, not wind-chill). I have the backup heat strip, but the breaker is off. I don't know when it would turn on, I just wanted to know it wouldn't without me knowing it.

I feel lucky. Rather than cut workers because AI is making our jobs easier and faster, we are just doing more work, more projects that we wouldn't have had the bandwidth to do. I'm solo on something we we would have assigned a small team to.

I'm sick of Cloudflare making me prove I'm not a bot - just because I run Ubuntu. I have a static IP. I visit my bank website regularly, can they not figure out that I'm legit? No, they can not.

Can't wait for them to get involved in email... looks like I don't have to!

Exactly this. Is my Awair Element perfectly accurate? No, but VOC at 200 or less when the windows have been open (on a good air day) looks very different than 3,000 when we finish cooking something on the stove.

Maybe my numbers should be 100 and 10,000, but it doesn't matter, I know when I need to turn the air exchanger on turbo and when we are back to "normal".

I've been using the Awair Element for years. It helped me decide to install an air exchanger an to swap the gas range with induction. Bonus, it has a local API for pulling data.

I have a purple air sensor outside. One day I'll get around to making the air exchanger smart enough to turn off when the smoke from fires makes the air outside worse than inside, it turn off the air exchanger when inside air is good enough, etc.

Jury is still out on my new lightweight tent vs my 34 year old Eureka that still gets used when weight doesn't matter.

My Big Agnes is treated as if it is tissue paper where the Eureka somehow survived containing teens wrestling inside. I hope my BA lasts the rest of my life.

I will agree with the advances in materials, they are amazing - I just think we've made some amount of trade-off in durability.

When I was in school I had to do some stuff with prolog. I got my wife interested enough that she added some rooms and items to a game like this. Good times!

When traveling by vehicle (pickup truck for me) I've thrown in a 5 gallon cooler of water from home. It was so nice to want to drink water because it was my own good well water that tastes like I'm used to.

When I had to fly to NY for work I felt like I couldn't get water anywhere that was worth drinking.

I haven't used TCL in a few decades and I don't miss it, but that is likely due to running it on storyserver. Worst web platform ever.

It might be awhile before I can touch grass. There is quite a bit of snow on the ground!

Any excavator beats a shovel!

I'm just a homeowner with a decent size piece of land and lots of trees. The ground is glacial till/drumlin, so rocks vary from gravel, to bowling balls and table size boulders.

I have a 7,000 lb excavator and couldn't imagine using smaller for my needs, but there is a right size for everyone!

I'd love it if mine were electric. I don't use it all of the time or all day, but the smoking old diesel is not the part of it that I enjoy.

Yes, insulation works both ways. My garage is unheated and insulated. If I go out there to work on something in the winter I always compare the temperature outside. On a sunny day it might be pleasant outside and freezing in my garage - so I'll open the door and let it warm up.

Insulation makes the house more resistance to temperature change (relative to the inside and outside).

One thing people forget is the delta is very different in the summer and winter. Lets say your thermostat is on 70 year round. If it is 100 degrees out you only have to cool 30 degrees. When it is 0 F out you have a delta of 70 degrees. So for this scenario, expect to use more energy in the winter.

I've built three houses in the USA. I don't use conduit everywhere, but have always installed some in places where I think I might want something in the future. I've never regretted it.

Most useful was from my attic (not livable space) up in the trusses to my basement utility room. When I convinced a local WISP to use my roof for a back haul and access for the neighborhood it saved them (and me) from running wires all over the outside of my house and was a quick, clean install.

Conduit is common in commercial work here, but almost never in residential.

"It's also why houses typically don't have attics anymore."

As someone who framed houses as a job and designed and built three of my own I disagree with your take on attics.

It is common for houses not to have an attic because builders must build cheap to compete. Attic space can be cheap square footage, but it has to be part of the plan from the beginning and is difficult to make it an option to pick.

You can indeed have an attic with "attic trusses". They are still built out of dimensional lumber and stamped connectors - the bottom chord will be much larger. I've seen them span 36', not sure what the limit is.

On one house, to do a partial attic was only $2000 extra for the trusses. Attics present other problems/expenses too, like additional stairs. (Many plans didn't have a place where extra stairs can be added as an option AND work with the truss layout.

HVAC is another issue. You either end up with a second system for the attic or need to have space in the floor below to run ducts to the attic space. Again, most of your cookie cutter plans didn't leave a space for this. When walking my HVAC guy through my house to plan ducts he asked how much of this closet he could have for ducts. I told him "as much as you need to make it work correctly". From the look on his face you'd think he won the lottery. He replied "no one ever says that!".

Attic spaces require different insulation techniques, they aren't difficult, but cookie cutters don't like different.

I've used attic trusses on 2 of 3 houses. The one where I didn't was because stairs, HVAC and I didn't need more space (full extra height basement, daylight windows - that was enough).

I've been eyeing the R6 mark ii, which is u understand correctly will connect to a computer and present itself as a video device so you don't need any additional software. I only run Linux, so that sounds great!

I haven't pulled the trigger on it, can anyone who owns it confirm or deny this?

I'm in the USA, but run Linux. I am getting tired of proving I'm not a bot. I'm on a static IP and they still can't figure out that I'm not a bot.

That is kinda crazy to think about. I see the milky way and a lot of trees where I'm at. How big does the tree have to be to be counted as a tree? In spring we had a carpet of Douglas fir trees starting. I could put my hand down and cover 20 or so!

I spoke to the forester yesterday about the plans to thin. They are all marked out now and I'm the spring it goes to auction. And IF for some reason it isn't stopped by legal action, it will get cut in the next 1-5 years!

My property borders the public land in question and we'd love to see the fire risk reduced and stronger, healthier trees remain. I can't believe how long it takes and that people might want to stop this. We can thin it and take care of it or watch it all burn.

Only somewhat related, but I was just complaining about search in Gmail. I normally use Thunderbird and didn't have it, so I used the web. Basic searches on the subject were so bad! I even put quotes around it and tried all of my Google-foo.

It felt like I was fighting some AI that was sure it knew what I wanted despite my "exact phrase" search.

Yeah, location matters a ton. I have 2 Awair Elements and we ran them in different places until we knew what "normal" looked like, then move them on.

Because of what I saw in my house we switched from a gas stove/oven to electric induction, installed an air exchanger and set our central air/heat to recirculate more often (only important for us during spring and fall when we aren't heating or cooling much).

I don't like noise when sleeping, so I liked the bedroom door shut. CO2 gets way too high, so I switched to using an earplug and leaving the door open more.

It is so nice to have the data, make informed choices and see measurable results.

I was really hoping that this was about Claude remembering that it has already crawled every page we have and downloaded every image many times over!

We recently had a bot from Taiwan downloading all of our images, over and over and over - similar to the author. By the time we noticed they had downloaded them many times over and showed no signs of stopping!

Bots these days are our of control and have lost their mind!

Things have definitely gotten better. I remember the painful years. My most recent Ubuntu install on a new laptop was about 3 years ago. As someone who has used Linux as the daily driver for more than a decade (and dual booted as a second OS for another decade) I was pleasantly surprised that everything just worked! I think that was a first

It was an HP from Costco, not something special sold with Linux. My wireless worked, dual monitors just worked, even the fingerprint reader that I never use. I remember sitting there thinking "I didn't have to fight anything?" Hopefully that becomes the norm, maybe it is - I haven't needed a new laptop yet.

I really loved my Series 5. That keyboard was awesome! I still have it, but the ribbon cable is broken.

I'd take a computer with a color screen, Bluetooth, running Linux and that keyboard - it could be fun for ham radio stuff.

I used turtle in middle school. I think that was my first experience where I got to tell a computer what to do and make something. We had a very limited amount of time in the lab, but I loved every bit if it!

Yes, what is kinda fun is I can tell what time my kids are out of bed (really it if their room) just by the changes in co2.

Everyone was gone today at the same time (rare with WFH and home school). I can see within about a minute when we arrived home.

Ha, if only it were that sensitize. I have an air exchanger, so I don't think the plants will change it enough to matter. I expect that normal air infiltration would cycle more air than plants.