Around Vancouver our heat pump has performed adequately even down to -15C/5F. This may be related to it being a deep ground loop geothermal setup (vertical instead of horizontal), and the type of building (concrete). We do have a gas fireplace as backup, but have not needed it at the temperatures we see in this corner of the world.
It is definitely related to it being a deep ground loop geothermal setup. An air-to-air heat pump is trying to get heat out of air that has less heat as it gets colder. A ground loop heat pump is trying to get heat out of water that is not affected by the temperature of the outside air.
With an air-to-air heat pump, you need a backup system for when it gets too cold out for the heat pump to pull enough heat out of the air, and for power outages. With a ground loop heat pump, you only need a backup system for when the power goes out because the ground water will never be too cold for the heat pump to pull heat out of.
When I built my house, I called around and it didn't sound like geothermal works very well where I live. I suspect the reason why I was talked out of it is because my yard is very rocky.
I like the Serious Eats format, where they provide both a brief recipe and an optional backstory. Some of the research and reasoning is interesting for certain recipes (like pressure cooker French Onion soup), though when actually cooking the story makes finding the details a bit more work.
Agreed. I would even be ok with the SE format if they didn't split out the main recipe from the backstory, because with them the backstory is usually something of substance. They often go through multiple iterations, explaining what tweaks they introduced and what the effects were, so that you can understand not only the final recipe but also the principles that went into making it.
That they also give you a quick-and-easy "here's just the recipe" page is just an added bonus, for me.
Wow, I had forgotten how retro-industrial those Atari language cartridges were. I also forgot how rich the language was, given the constraints. Great memories!
Sure, but electric cars used to be insanely expensive too. And while still expensive, they’ve definitely become cheaper with more range. That is to say, lots of things start out being expensive, and then as they get scaled up and the process gets optimized, they become cheaper.
> "Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming." ~ Rob Pike
I used Markdown for recipes for more than a decade, where UL were ingredients, OL were steps, and you could use as many sets of both as needed. With some CSS and JS it worked pretty well, but wasn't super accessible for family members to add recipes to (but was great for me).
The price isn't even that bad, but it produces so much more packaging waste than cooking from scratch. We enjoyed the recipes, the price was good enough, but our recycling load doubled or more.
