There are many factors that make determining return on investment for something as complicated and unique as a home’s HVAC system difficult. I was looking forward to this video from Matt because I knew that he had opted for a Water Furnace ground-source (aka geothermal) heat pump setup. We’re opting for air-source for our passive house, probably a Mitsubishi Hyper-Heat […]
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I decided that leveraging the Thunderbolt 4 port on my LG laptop to add multi-monitor, a keyboard, mouse, and a wired network connection was a great idea. Turns out that all LG laptops do not properly support Thunderbolt docking stations, and the network connection will not work. It’s really disappointing that this issue exists. Hopefully LG will take it seriously […]
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I’ve received a few questions around the post I wrote comparing some of the popular all-in-one (AIO) inverter batteries to a hybrid inverter plus stand-alone batteries. Most notably from our architect, and the solar/storage company they usually work with. I was planning to write a post digging into that in more detail anyway, so here goes…
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I mentioned in a post that we started the process of building a passive house. Given the level of “smart” and gadgets going into the house I thought it might be interesting to document the steps involved. This is the “before” installment.
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I’m sure everyone here is going to be shocked to learn, clutch pearls, that cars don’t get their EPA rated mileage. We’re all probably even more shocked to discover that EV, also don’t get their rated EPA mileage. Sorry, I probably should have asked you all to sit down first. My bad.
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We recently purchased a tear-down with the goal of building a new passive house on the lot. Naturally, there will be will be a massive solar array on the house, and probably on the detached garage as well. Picking a panel fairly easy because the differences in PV (photovoltaic) products seems to mostly come down to warranty period. Energy storage […]
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Safety certification in the US is more complicated than it should be. A big part of this is that Underwriters Laboratory (UL) plays a dual role in the ecosystem. I recently got in an extended discussion with a UL Supremacist around this, after I said something was UL Certified when that wasn’t technically true, because UL is a Band-Aid®, and […]
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One of the things I wonder, and worry, about as a content-creator (ugh, I hate that term) is how much responsibility is there to set and communicate the limitations/considerations/disclaimers around the things we create. Is there a duty to set guardrails? If so, what are those limits and is the value in the effort or the durability?
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Vehicle-to-Load (V2L), as demonstrated in the video below, is seriously cool. If you have an EV that does it, there will be scenarios where it could be awesome; like saving your food during a power outage. I wanted to start with that, so that it doesn’t get lost in what I’m going to say next. As cool as V2L is, […]
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Smart panels are cool. I firmly believe this, but I also believe that they probably aren’t the right way to solve the limited electricity supply problem, at least not yet. The problem is cost. If a smart panel is $4,500+ just to buy it, ignoring installation costs, and moving from 100A to 200A service is around $2,500… We don’t need […]
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