Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Baseboard heaters were at one point installed in some homes as primary heating but almost all of that has been scrapped by now because of their expensive operating costs.
Definitely had baseboard heaters in the house I rented in WA and, I think, every apartment I've ever lived in. I doubt they've been replaced, because you'd have to rip out every wall and/or ceiling to run ducts for HVAC.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Even heat pumps are not all that prevalent around here. Winters get cold enough that heat pumps struggle to keep homes warm enough.
I'm guessing Air-Air heatpumps?
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@Rhywden said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I'm guessing Air-Air heatpumps?
Correct. Water source heat pumps are fairly common in commercial buildings and large office spaces. Geothermal (ground source) is catching on for large homes on large plots of land. But air source (that is what we call them here) heat pumps are the only common type of heat pump for most residential applications as far as I have seen.
Another interesting option that is becoming more common and something that we are looking into is a type of hybrid heat pump that ties into a swimming pool and sinks the heat removed from the home into the pool water so you get cheaper air conditioning and free heat for your pool when running the air conditioning. I am exploring the viability of that right now as installation would require trenching through our landscaping and some patio walks.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Water source heat pumps are fairly common in commercial buildings and large office spaces.
Something I always thought was interesting is that in a lot of these spaces, when the buildings are in use the heat pump works by moving the heat around the building and very little is sourced from other methods. The people in the building and the waste heat from things being used frequently provides enough heat, it just needs to be moved from areas that have excess heat to those that need it. In times of moderate outside temperatures and high building usage they might still be exhausting heat outside when homes have their heat turned on.
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@Polygeekery
My last apartment was forced air resistive heating.$200/mo addition to my electric bill 6 months a year for a 700 sq ft space.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So you get a lot of sloppy jobs, because "I can do that" and "seems to work, good enough."
Yesterday evening I was trying to get an additional lighting point in the basement kitchen, but the wires that came out of the existing wiring conduits where I wanted them turned out to be all used by other lighting points on motion detectors (in the stairs going up to the house), so I couldn't just plug a bulb in there.
There are two lamps on motion detectors. They used to be normal lamps (no motion detectors) on the same circuit, with originally a single switch for both (up the stairs). That's not very practical so when we bought the house we asked the electrician who did some stuff (very badly, proving the point about sloppy job even by professionals, but that's another story) to add a second switch at the bottom of the stairs. Then some years later we decided to put in motion detectors instead of switches and split the two lamps on two detectors (both for convenience and because the detectors didn't seem to like being two on the same circuit). Every step added or changed the wiring of this part of the basement.
So there's now a line that goes (IIRC) red wire from fuse box to a junction, then brown from that box to a motion detector, and back brown to the box. Except there is also another brown wire coming back from that detector, but it's unplugged in the box (and, uh, I hope there's no current in it?). That box also has another pair of brown wires that come from, umm, I think that's directly from the fuse box? and run to the other detector up the stairs. Yesterday I added a black wire connected to these two brown ones, running to another box about 50 cm further where it's connected to a white wire that happened to be already there, that goes further where I want the new light, where it is connected to a red wire that goes down to a new switch, then a black wire back up from the switch to the lamp itself. I'm also planning on adding another (probably red?) wire from the white-red connection to feed yet another lamp that'll be on the other end of the basement kitchen.
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
If you're talking about me, at least have the courtesy to @ me. 😜
So, uh, yeah, I may be talking about some TD
regulars, but, uh, perhaps not just you? 
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
They've existed for a while, but they sucked outside
I thought heat pumps were blowing outside, not sucking?
/ QooC
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
When you say "flat" you are referring to what we call "apartments", correct?
Yes (please let's not start yet another "debate" about flats vs. apartments vs. condominiums...). One multi-floor building (usually 3-10) with one or several habitation units per floor.
There are lots of ways to skin that particular cat. But I have no idea how they do it in France.
TBH, I haven't seen that many new buildings up close recently, and those that I've seen were all still using gas central heating. So I can't say I've actually seen up close any newly built heat pumped building.
I haven't seen any building with visible heat pump units sticking out, one per flat, like you see on South-East Asian high-rise buildings. But then again I expect a new design that incorporates them from scratch to make them a little bit less conspicuous, so they might still be there. I know that some buildings go for collective heat pump, so you only need a few large units that would typically be on the roof (so again not very visible by passers-by). Or maybe you can also do that with individual pumps and just route them to each flat (for a 4-5 stories high building, that's still manageable).
But my point is mostly that this isn't (yet) part of our habits, so even though there are indeed many ways to achieve it, people (and probably architects and builders) aren't yet very familiar, and probably still fumble around finding "correct" designs.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Even heat pumps are not all that prevalent around here. Winters get cold enough that heat pumps struggle to keep homes warm enough.
Which reminds me of our current worries about our heating. We're currently using an oil furnace, which works, but is getting old (2000 or so, I think) and is having issues. And isn't very efficient (it's not a "condensation" one), plus of course have you seen diesel prices recently? But you won't be surprised to hear that new oil burners have now been banned, so we can't just replace it by a new one when it fails (well there are still a few cases where it's allowed, and our house could fit in those, but the market for those burners will collapse and it will be very hard to get them anyway).
If you listen to the energy companies, the "obvious" replacement would be a heat pump, but given the size of the house and the winter climate (it's not that cold, but still), several installers have told us that it's unlikely we would be able to heat to more than 17-18 C, and would thus need to add some additional heating (e.g. electrical radiators). Bleh.
We could convert the furnace to wood pellets but then we need to find some place to put the storage tank (the current oil tank is buried outside in front of the house, we can't reuse that). Feasible, but annoying (and more work).
Another option is that apparently there are some bio-oil furnaces which are still allowed and would thus be an easy replacement. But while many website hype those, I can't find a single provider that actually sells the stuff, despite it having been officially launched a couple of years ago. So maybe it just needs a bit of time for the network to grow but that's not very encouraging...
So we're hoping the furnace won't terminally break down in the middle of winter, though of course it will break down in the middle of winter, why would it break in summer when we don't use it...?
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Something I always thought was interesting is that in a lot of these spaces, when the buildings are in use the heat pump works by moving the heat around the building and very little is sourced from other methods. The people in the building and the waste heat from things being used frequently provides enough heat, it just needs to be moved from areas that have excess heat to those that need it. In times of moderate outside temperatures and high building usage they might still be exhausting heat outside when homes have their heat turned on.
My company's office is heated/cooled in this way. It has a fancy name because
(and it was done more than 10 years ago so that was "cutting edge" (meh...) at the time) but basically, that's it. And it works pretty well overall, no complaints.Tangentially related, my company spent a lot of time (and money, I guess) properly redoing the HVAC in our computing centres, about 15 years ago, at a time where the idea of reusing heat from one part of the building (computer rooms) to heat another part (offices) was unusual.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Another option is that apparently there are some bio-oil furnaces which are still allowed and would thus be an easy replacement. But while many website hype those, I can't find a single provider that actually sells the stuff, despite it having been officially launched a couple of years ago. So maybe it just needs a bit of time for the network to grow but that's not very encouraging...
I was under the impression bio-diesel is pretty similar to traditional diesel. Car diesel has a certain amount of bio diesel mixed in nowadays - the B7 tag means 7% bio diesel. Of course it may be different in practice and I do not know if the 7% is based on availability or on technical compatibility.
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@PleegWat what I read about it is that any furnace can take diesel mixed with a low amount of bio diesel (could be 7%, I don't remember). But what was talked about is a much higher mix, and you need a different burner for that. Apparently all recent burners can go up to... another threshold that I forgot, probably a bit like regular petrol engines from post-2000 or so can use E10, but not older engines. But to go up to "full" bio diesel you need yet another type of burner, again like with cars where using E85 requires a change in the engine.
So yeah, a tiny bit doesn't require any change, recent devices can handle a bit more (but not old ones!), but to go the full monty you need a different thing.
Anyway, until I see at least some providers selling it, I'm not going to consider that as a serious option.
(ETA: besides, bio diesel doesn't really look like a viable large-scale alternative to me, so
ifwhen I change, my preferred option will likely be wood pellets, provided price + installation space isn't too much of an issue)
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
isn't very efficient (it's not a "condensation" one)
Everything I've seen indicates that condensation furnaces break down sooner than normal ones (at least when gas fuelled, but I don't see why oil would be different there). Can't remember why.
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@dkf could be, but I guess it all depends on what "sooner" means, compared to the energy savings, since those are far from small (random search says 15-20%, up to 30% compared to older furnaces). On a furnace that can be expected to live 15 years (or more), 20% is 3 years (or more), large enough to be noticeable in stats, but yet not large enough to make the condensation ones not worth it.
Then again, and to re-rail the thread, it's likely that new ones are choke-full of random IoT crap so you can watch your pilot light from your car (or whatever other bullshit "functionality" is there), or get your furnace hacked and used to mine NFTs, which would explain the dramatically shorter life span.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So we're hoping the furnace won't terminally break down in the middle of winter, though of course it will break down in the middle of winter
Christmas Eve. My experience with a broken furnace was about 23:00 on Christmas Eve.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So we're hoping the furnace won't terminally break down in the middle of winter, though of course it will break down in the middle of winter
Christmas Eve. My experience with a broken furnace was about 23:00 on Christmas Eve.
Santa's hardly going to come down a little chimney?
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@dkf said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
isn't very efficient (it's not a "condensation" one)
Everything I've seen indicates that condensation furnaces break down sooner than normal ones (at least when gas fuelled, but I don't see why oil would be different there). Can't remember why.
There are a few reasons I think of.
First of all is that condensation furnaces obviously extract heat from the exhaust gasses until they start to condense (it's in the name), but apart from water vapor the combustion + condensation also introduces nitric acid, carbonic acid, and trace amounts of sulfuric acid. This acidic condensate will attack the materials in the heat exchanger more than when the combustion gasses were simply blown out of the chimney and produce acidic rain elsewhere.
Second thing is that the condensate is luke-warm because most of the heat has been extracted, and since boilers are mostly used in the winter there might be the problem that the condensate freezes in the evacuation tubes. This one is mostly solved by being careful where the boiler is installed, but just like electrician patchwork you can have trouble with heating
specialists.
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So there's now a line that goes (IIRC) red wire from fuse box to a junction, then brown from that box to a motion detector, and back brown to the box. Except there is also another brown wire coming back from that detector, but it's unplugged in the box (and, uh, I hope there's no current in it?). That box also has another pair of brown wires that come from, umm, I think that's directly from the fuse box? and run to the other detector up the stairs. Yesterday I added a black wire connected to these two brown ones, running to another box about 50 cm further where it's connected to a white wire that happened to be already there, that goes further where I want the new light, where it is connected to a red wire that goes down to a new switch, then a black wire back up from the switch to the lamp itself. I'm also planning on adding another (probably red?) wire from the white-red connection to feed yet another lamp that'll be on the other end of the basement kitchen.
Looks like your electrical installation really needs some refactoring
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So we're hoping the furnace won't terminally break down in the middle of winter, though of course it will break down in the middle of winter
Christmas Eve. My experience with a broken furnace was about 23:00 on Christmas Eve.
Similarly (but reversed) for broken AC--it always happened at 22:00 on a Saturday night in August in Florida. Usually after school started so I'd have to take time off when the repair guy could come (after a few sweltering days).
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@Zerosquare said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Looks like your electrical installation really needs some refactoring
You're not wrong, but solving it would mean turning technical debt into, well, debt, so...
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So we're hoping the furnace won't terminally break down in the middle of winter, though of course it will break down in the middle of winter
Christmas Eve. My experience with a broken furnace was about 23:00 on Christmas Eve.
Mine was Jan 12 (2007). Don't remember what time... Oh, wait, actually it was the 10th or 11th. The 12th was when they arrived, replaced, I paid.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
So we're hoping the furnace won't terminally break down in the middle of winter, though of course it will break down in the middle of winter
Christmas Eve. My experience with a broken furnace was about 23:00 on Christmas Eve.
I've mentioned before how we were on a roll for a while having major appliance breakages every Xmas break. Furnace, water heater, furnace again, etc. You could set your
watchcalendar by it. First day of the kid's Xmas break something would break.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
First day of the kid's Xmas break something would break.
Those damn kids!
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Water source heat pumps are fairly common in commercial buildings and large office spaces.
Something I always thought was interesting is that in a lot of these spaces, when the buildings are in use the heat pump works by moving the heat around the building and very little is sourced from other methods. The people in the building and the waste heat from things being used frequently provides enough heat, it just needs to be moved from areas that have excess heat to those that need it. In times of moderate outside temperatures and high building usage they might still be exhausting heat outside when homes have their heat turned on.
One place I worked had sold excess heat to the next door college buildings, and had been doing so for a decade of two. They also had a decently sized server room, so a lot of excess heat to go around.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Something else that is super handy that I discovered when I refit the last house with smart switches and stuff, old work boxes that attach via screws.
How dare you! Even though you rotated that pic by 180°, I can immediately read that:
Made in China
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Most modern cookers nowadays are induction
True, my cooker is induction (and I had to buy a new set of pots and pans for it). That's available in Germany, but not at all standard here: "Ceran" heated plates are much more common.
is in many areas of technical development quite far behind the times...
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@Rhywden said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
a heating solution which leads to at least triple the operating costs
They do not have the crazy costs for electricity which are absofuckinglutely common in - just think of the laws on renewable energies, which tell that in the end, it is private consumers (households) to pay the price, not industry.
Thirty-something cents per kilowatt hour?
No, just
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@BernieTheBernie said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
ven though you rotated that pic by 180°
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@BernieTheBernie said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
They do not have the crazy costs for electricity which are absofuckinglutely common in Historically that's also largely linked to a huge investment in nuclear. But that's starting to cut both ways, as ageing power plants start to cost more and more to maintain, plus nobody truly knows what the decommissioning will cost (there has been some money provisioned for that since the start, but given the way "setting aside money" and "forecasting costs" usually (don't) work, there are probably some nasty surprises ahead).
There is also a much higher willingness of the state to step in, for example right now prices are capped to... not much more than what they were at the start of the year, I think, and far below what they should be without that cap.
Without stepping too much into the
, that one also IMO cuts both ways: obviously for energy bought from the private sector (or foreign sources) the state has to pay the difference, and we all know that "the state" means "our taxes." OTOH, because so much of our electricity is nuclear the actual production cost hasn't really changed (or at least way less than the price of gas), and since it's state-owned, by capping prices the state is just preventing itself from making more money out of the consumer, so not really a loss here.(the same goes for a subsidy on petrol of 0.15 EUR/L -- while it obviously comes out of the state's coffers, at the same time since petrol is hugely taxed, it mostly amounts to the state not collecting as much taxes as they could. Not "less," just "not as much as if they hadn't put in the subsidy.")
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
20,000+ sqft home, 8 garage bays all with rapid chargers for EVs and there is also shore power run to the dock for his boat (yacht).
Is this dude in the NBA, or is he successful because he made an actually positive contribution to society?
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
But still, looking at just the cooker is likely a bad indicator of the overall code from 50 years ago vs. now. For one thing, as I mentioned, 3 phases was very common, if not standard, at the time, and nowadays I don't think newly built residential homes ever use it (it's all 3 phases in the street but what matters is what comes out of your mains box, not how the supplier handles things on their side of the box).
Back in the day, middle of the 1970s and onwards, my uncle had (and used in substantial quantities) three-phase in his house. OK, it was an old farmhouse with oodles of rooms (he and his wife ran a bed&breakfast in the summer), but what he really needed the three-phase for was the small industrial pottery kiln behind the knick-knack store he had in the back. It drew about as much current when running as the rest of the (small) village put together, so it had to be three-phase to balance the load across the phases.
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@Steve_The_Cynic In France, 3 phases plugs are common in any 80's or older house. They were standard for washing machines. Nowadays I don't think you can even buy a (new, non-industrial) washing machine that's wired for that.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
pottery kiln
My mom is in this post. I'm not sure if hers would be considered a small industrial kiln or a very big hobby kiln, but my mom and dad had to get their electrical service upgraded from, IIRC, 100A 2-phase to 200A 3-phase when they bought the bigger kiln.
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@lolwhat said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
20,000+ sqft home, 8 garage bays all with rapid chargers for EVs and there is also shore power run to the dock for his boat (yacht).
Is this dude in the NBA, or is he successful because he made an actually positive contribution to society?
There is a very good chance that when you bought a car you bought it from one of his dealerships.
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When we bought our new home very nearly all of the light fixtures had either incandescent bulbs, CFLs or ~1st gen LED bulbs in them. Swapping out the bulbs in the carriage lights was part of the process of upgrading all of the lighting to better technology.
I knew this when we bought the house so right after taking possession I brought over my stash of bulbs from the old house and started swapping things out. There are ~40 can lights in the house and almost all of them had shitty incandescent bulbs in them. Not even PAR30 or BR30 bulbs. Just plain old vanilla incandescent bulbs. So probably 80% of the light they generate never even leaves the can, it just gets turned to heat.
For can lights I have come to really like the EcoSmart LED retrofit lamps. They are pretty inexpensive ($2.50/light), have stepless dimming and they have a long lifespan. I install the few that I had on hand, took a count of what I needed to do the rest of the house and order them from Home Depot. I went ahead and ordered 10 boxes of 4 so I would have replacements on hand.
The day those are delivered I grab a ladder and go to get to work. There are three can lights right off the entryway so I unscrew the bulb on one, remove the trim and........goddamnit. The previous owner had put 6" can light trims on 4" cans so they won't fit. I spot check a few more and same thing there also. I look at other fixtures and they all have that same trim so they are almost certainly 4" cans with the trims that make them look like 6" cans. So now I have 40 fucking lights and they will only work on 5-6 lights in the entire house. What's worse is that the can lights don't even have the proper brackets inside for me to install retrofits. I return all but one box and I have three lights in another.
Today I stop by a local Habitat for Humanity Restore and I don't know if they all do this but the ones in our area have LED bulbs for cheap. ~$0.50/bulb. So I grab a shitload of PAR30 LED bulbs, some candelabra bulbs, etc. I get home, get out the ladder and put them in the cans off the entryway and head upstairs. I remove the bulb from one of the hallway fixtures, remove the trim and........goddamnit. It is a fucking 6" can. I grab my seven "spares" and go swapping lights out. I then spot checks some other fixtures and essentially all of the can lights that I did not pull the trim off of the first time are all 6" cans.
So I just ordered more of my preferred retrofits to replace the ones that I previously returned and now I have a mountain of PAR30 bulbs that I will never use.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@lolwhat said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
20,000+ sqft home, 8 garage bays all with rapid chargers for EVs and there is also shore power run to the dock for his boat (yacht).
Is this dude in the NBA, or is he successful because he made an actually positive contribution to society?
There is a very good chance that when you bought a car you bought it from one of his dealerships.
So a retired professional athlete, then
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@izzion Ha!
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Have you learned your lesson now about guessing what the previous homeowner did or are you going to continue to make sweeping decisions based on limited sample sizes?
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@Dragoon said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Have you learned your lesson now about guessing what the previous homeowner did or are you going to continue to make sweeping decisions based on limited sample sizes?
In many ways lab rats learn more quickly than I do.
To be fair, the trims on the 6" cans are the type that are meant to make a 4" can look like a 6" can. There is no rational reason that anyone would install them on a 6" can.
That being said, the first rule of troubleshooting is to always assume that the person who worked on it before you was a fucking idiot. This rule is doubly true if the person who worked on it before you, was you.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@lolwhat said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
20,000+ sqft home, 8 garage bays all with rapid chargers for EVs and there is also shore power run to the dock for his boat (yacht).
Is this dude in the NBA, or is he successful because he made an actually positive contribution to society?
There is a very good chance that when you bought a car you bought it from one of his dealerships.
So neither, then...
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@remi said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@BernieTheBernie said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
They do not have the crazy costs for electricity which are absofuckinglutely common in Historically that's also largely linked to a huge investment in nuclear. But that's starting to cut both ways, as ageing power plants start to cost more and more to maintain, plus nobody truly knows what the decommissioning will cost (there has been some money provisioned for that since the start, but given the way "setting aside money" and "forecasting costs" usually (don't) work, there are probably some nasty surprises ahead).
The "Gestehungskosten" (i.e. the real cost when every cost factor is pulled into the price and subsidies are left out) for nuclear is about 13 kWh/Eurocent IIRC.
Solar and Wind nowadays come in at 4 to 8 kWh/Eurocent.Better to invest in some serious buffer capacity.
Replying late due to actually having spent a week in
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@Rhywden I feel like we are toeing the line on things devolving to
, sooooooo........
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@HardwareGeek
Probably reconning the Maginot ligne
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The wife and kids are at the MIL's house for the weekend. Time to replace some lights in the shop.
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@Polygeekery Am I correct in guessing that there were no wire nuts over those connections?
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@HardwareGeek there were. But we have an excess common.
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@HardwareGeek but to be fair, the wire nuts fell off without me touching them so I give you partial credit.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
nuts fell off without me touching them
Sounds like you’ve claimed the forum Blue Balls trophy.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The wife and kids are at the MIL's house for the weekend. Time to replace some lights in the shop.
The unequal number of splices and cables seems oddd, but could there be a wire coming in from a switch that you haven't spotted yet?
In any case, that's not how you twist solidcore wires. Seems like the "center" conductor can be pulled out.
