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.
I recently soldered a wire to my garage door opener on the wall and ran it to a relay and then to the pins on a raspberry pi. Knowing the state of the door is key because the opener is just a toggle. I also have my alarm system hooked up to the pi, so it checks the state before and after any request. Repeatedly asking it to open will open it, or return success of it already is. Same with close.
It took a bit of testing before I trusted it would all work the way I thought it would, but now I user it and don't even think about it, it just works and is handy to have.
Don't forget stairs that land on surface that is sloped from one side of the stairs to the other. What height should that bottom step be? Will the inspector measure both sides? Do you shoot for the middle being right on and each side being a bit too high and a bit too low?
Watch the height on the first and last steps. The middle ones are the "easy" ones.
In bigger cities there are companies that only frame stairs. It is amazing to watch them - they can do it in their sleep. I watched one crew finish up some complex stairs in less time than our framing crew would have spent making a game plan.
There is detail in everything and until you've done that job you really don't notice it.
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.