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.
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.
Even still, I have to make sure my KVM switch is connected to the correct laptop. (Work on one side, personal on the other, and shared keyboard / trackball)
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'm in Canada at a similar latitude with ground source, resistance heating normally kicks in at about -25C (-13F) or so, just a few hours on the coldest nights, doesn't cost much. I could probably leave the breaker off too, I wouldn't mind it a degree or two colder.
Ground source is often the only choice here. While air source can technically work well down to these temperatures, much of the available equipment doesn't suit some homes.
Ground source is largely going to maintain capacity independent of the outside temps, so the resistive would turn on when the heat pump isn't keeping up with the heat loss.
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.
Would you mind elaborating? Generally speaking what is the project? What does the AI enable you to do solo that you would have had to dedicate a team to before? Is the quality of the software the same, worse, or better? What does your day-to-day job look like and how is it different from before? What tools are you using?
I had a friend tell me about how ChatGPT makes his work so much faster. When I asked about it he told me that he works tech support and after the problem is resolved customers often ask for a root cause analysis. He uses ChatGPT to generate a fake but plausible looking analysis and this seems to satisfy the customers, letting him get tickets done faster and play games in the freed time.
Yeah, this is always my skepticism when I say "I get more work done". What about more good work?
We had such a pushback last decade about "bullshit jobs" among the tech sphere, but we seemed to have fallen right into it. At least while the money is flowing to enable it.
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.
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.
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