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.
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'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'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.