The Official Good Ideas Thread™
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Wikipedia: In an interview with The Guardian, [architect] Viñoly said that horizontal sun-louvers on the south side that had been intended to prevent this problem were removed at some point during the planning process. While he conceded that there had been "a lot of mistakes" with the building, he agreed with the building's developers that the sun was too high in the sky on that particular day. "[I] didn't realise it was going to be so hot," he said, suggesting that global warming was at fault. "When I first came to London years ago, it wasn't like this ... Now you have all these sunny days."
Filed under: fucking daylight, how does it work
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To be fair... we are kind of renowned for having shitty weather in this country. It's practically a British stereotype that it's clouds all the way down.
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something that can take ordinary sunlight and melt metal with it has to be doing something right
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Even so, some of them are really, really good, and when judiciously combined with light-absorbing thermal mass, can become the vital centrepiece of good passive solar design:
Combine that with products like Solar Window, and imagine how efficient such a building could be!
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Even so, some of them are really, really good, and when judiciously combined with light-absorbing thermal mass, can become the vital centrepiece of good passive solar design:
Hint: that R-20 can be achieved in practice (albeit not according to most building codes, for reasons that pervert thermodynamics) using 1" thick foamboard on the outside of the structural wall section (i.e. between the studs and cladding, without any longitudinally-continuous thermal paths through it). There's also the matter that without careful attention to the design of window frames and spandrels, you can easily negate the performance of even the best windows by creating thermal "short-circuit" paths around them (you need a thermally broken, insulated frame to go with the spectrally-selective, xenon-filled, low-e glazing). See http://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-005-a-bridge-too-far for details.
Finally, one of the main problems with solar heat gain is that it can come at the wrong time in some climates. In well-insulated offices and assembly spaces, the amount of activity-produced heat is often enough to fill a significant portion of the heating load already, and high solar heat gains atop that can make for a need to run air conditioning even on very cold days to keep the south exposure from overheating badly. In the mean time, mediocre glazing performance can leave you running the heat at night simply to keep the building at a tolerable temperature during cold night conditions.
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one of the main problems with solar heat gain is
dickhead "visionaries" who don't even care if the buildings they commission are designed to be death ray generators, as long as they look "iconic". Orientation? Eaves? Louvres? Pfffft. Solar gain? Fuck it, slap a few more chillers on the roof.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5ks_3lEmJg&t=9m23s
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10kWh of zero-maintenance 92% round-trip-efficient wall-mounted electric storage for $3500 including a 10 year warranty looks like a genuinely good idea to me
Too bad it won't work that way: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=230095
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To be fair, the battery that can't work that way is the imaginary lead-acid one in that writer's imagination.
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I know, you like to
, but it's like you didn't actually read his take... or the comments following.
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EMP in Seattle did that, melted some dude's apartment. They had to take steel wool to it and rough up the surface in spots.
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To be fair, the battery that can't work that way is the imaginary lead-acid one in that writer's imagination.
Even other battery types will wear out eventually.
He did have, however, a better point when mentioning that the quoted price doesn't include an inverter. That battery pack won't do much good without one in your average home. Although, again, I think his price estimates are probably quite inflated.
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his price estimates are probably quite inflated
Which ones, and what are your estimates for same? Not to mention that one commenter there said something like, "Hey, uh, so what does the warranty cover, exactly? Are the batteries part of it?"
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Which ones, and what are your estimates for same?
I intuited an estimate of $350/year for ten years for an inverter, but I'd have to go back and re-read the article to back that up, including both my guess of his reasoning, and my reasoning. You can debate whether that's what he meant. A very quick google suggests ~$1300 for a 3-5KW inverter, which would mean that he's off by a factor of 3.
A 10K inverter's about $2K, but I discounted that because you probably don't one that big for most homes. Don't expect a citation for that.
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FTFY. That ain't cheap.
How expensive could it actually be? Bear in mind the baseline cost, not some $40,000 system. I mean, it's not as if more or less every inverter for sale is already designed to be tie-able. It shouldn't be much more than an alternate run of wiring to bypass the thing, and a shut-off switch.
(Ten years ago I would have known all this because I used to pay attention and read shit like Home Power magazine, where they regularly profiled the cost of installing solar power systems.)
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How expensive could it actually be?
Does an electrician charge $20 an hour? Especially for heavy-duty, grid-tie wiring that carries a huge risk if there's a fuckup? Not to mention the rent-seeking that's encouraged by subsidies on this stuff in some places?
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Does an electrician charge $20 an hour? Especially for heavy-duty, grid-tie wiring that carries a huge risk if there's a fuckup?
Do I look like I know that? Don't you have better things to do than argue about this?
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Do I look like I know that? Don't you have better things to do than argue about this?
Why are we only speaking in questions now?
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Why are we only speaking in questions now?
Because I'm about done with this conversation. I can't even figure out why you're arguing with me.
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@FrostCat said:
How expensive could it actually be?
Does an electrician charge $20 an hour?
I've got a mate who's an electrician if that helps
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I'm about done with this conversation.
It is quite difficult to work up the motivation to keep talking to people who appear to believe that mobile phones are never going to take off because they cost too much and all the plans are really expensive so I guess we'll just be stuck with landlines forever.
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The rest of us really appreciate you early
overpayersadopters working out the kinks for us.
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Especially for heavy-duty, grid-tie wiring that carries a huge risk if there's a fuckup?
As I understand it, all the grid-tie safety's in the inverter -- it basically has to be, as otherwise you'd need a processor controlled shunt trip for the protective relaying, and that's not something that's really doable within the confines of a residential panelboard. (Shunt trips are, sure. But the control logic is the bigger problem here...)
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OK.
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That can happen to any car, mind you...
Filed under: been there, saw the burning (gasoline-IC-engine-powered) car
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Suggested caption: "If Discourse was installed to a car..."
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That can happen to any car, mind you...
Well, yes, but a lithium fire isn't much fun, esp. if it occurs in your house. By the way, it'll be interesting to see whether the ten-year warranty covers the batteries. Does anyone have a link to the wording of it?
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Well, yes, but a lithium fire isn't much fun, esp. if it occurs in your house.
Lithium-ion cells don't have any metallic lithium in them, just lithium salts dissolved in a polar, aprotic, combustible solvent -- it's that solvent that burns in a lithium-ion battery fire, with some extra help from the stored energy in the battery.
Besides, a gasoline fire (from say, a generator) is no fun, either.
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Or dying from CO poisoning. Because apparently people think it's a good idea to put generators in the garage
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Generator in the garage shouldn't be a problem, long as the air intake and exhaust are set up correctly to vent outside, and supply enough oxygen to minimize CO production to begin with?
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Well yeah, but clearly that's not what they did...
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What kind of person would drive around on a cloudy day?!
Filed under: [EDGECASE_MIGHTLOOKATTHISINTENYEARS](#tag)
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The rest of us really appreciate you early
overpayersadopters working out the kinks for us.I love the way so many of you demonstrate that appreciation by calling us morons and swearing up and down that whatever it is we're adopting is stupid and unnecessary and has no future.
Meanwhile, stuff just keeps getting better.
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I love the way so many of you demonstrate that appreciation by calling us morons and swearing up and down that whatever it is we're adopting is stupid and unnecessary and has no future.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
I don't generally criticize like that (though I won't say that I never have if something seemed especially stupid). I usually look at this sort of stuff (e.g.., the alternative power setups that were being discussed) and decide it doesn't make economic sense for me or at large scales with current technology.
I will say that I'm not a big fan of lots of decentralization of things like power generation, since it throws away a lot of the advantages of scale. But then, there may be situations where they make sense, too. Personally, there's no fucking way I'm buying this house battery thing. It's solving a problem I don't have.
But it might be necessary for some people to have uneconomical fun with this stuff before it makes sense for the rest of us. I have plenty of ways to spend my money on uneconomical fun already that are a lot cheaper.
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throws away a lot of the advantages of scale.
But there are lots of different kinds of scale. Mass-produced human-scale consumer-grade equipment has a long track record of becoming incredibly cheap over time. Tesla's new $3500 toy is not going to stay anywhere near that price once they ramp up enough production to meet the expected demand.
There's also the point that producing electricity close to point of use, and storing it with >90% efficiency, might actually work better than investing in the kind of heavy duty infrastructure required to transmit huge quantities of it over long distances. Decentralized systems also fail in a decentralized way; if the bulk of the energy distributed by any given grid were generated at its edges, I'd expect blackouts - especially rolling blackouts - to disappear entirely.
There are so many swings and roundabouts in energy generation and distribution that it's really not possible to get a clear view of how the centralized vs. decentralized thing is going to play out. Early indications, though, show that wireless distribution of fusion-generated energy is already far more than a toy or a boondoggle, and if current price/performance trends are maintained it really won't be terribly long before it starts to eat coal's lunch purely on levelised cost.
Interesting to note that even at today's prices, Tesla's large-scale batteries are already cost-competitive per MWh with gas-fired peaking generation plant; they reportedly already have a pre-order from a utility company for a 250MWh installation.
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Interesting to note that even at today's prices, Tesla's large-scale batteries are already cost-competitive per MWh with gas-fired peaking generation plant; they reportedly already have a pre-order from a utility company for a 250MWh installation.
Yeah -- I'm interested to see if more utilities wind up adopting this; it sounds a fair pence less maintenance-intensive than your average blackstart diesel genset, for one.
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Decentralized systems also fail in a decentralized way; if the bulk of the energy distributed by any given grid were generated at its edges, I'd expect blackouts - especially rolling blackouts - to disappear entirely.
That's possibly true, but a lot of stuff that just gets taken care of out of my notice...isn't. when thousands of people are without power due to a point of failure, that point gets fixed and we're all back. When a few hundred failures happen all over the place, it's more time consuming to fix.
Are rolling blackouts something that are a big problem in advanced / developed countries? You're right that it might shake out with more decentralization. I'm not saying it has no advantages. I'm definitely saying that I don't want to have to deal with it, and I'm quite sure most other people don't, either, just like I don't want to, say, grind wheat into flour.
With energy generation, I wouldn't be surprised to find a happy medium between what we have now and everyone having their own generators. Maybe something like the small nuke plants the size of a tractor trailer.
wireless distribution of fusion-generated energy
Now...I'm going to agree with you that if we get to the point of economical fusion, a lot of things that are currently deal breakers become moot.
Interesting to note that even at today's prices, Tesla's large-scale batteries are already cost-competitive per MWh with gas-fired peaking generation plant; they reportedly already have a pre-order from a utility company for a 250MWh installation.
That's great. In general I agree with you that stuff keeps getting better. One of the benefits of living in a rich civilization is that we can (and really need to) specialize and not have to deal with each aspect of our lifestyle (though there are obvious advantages in knowing how to when the shit hits the fan). Shit like power generation is one thing I want to mainly just silently happen and not have to think about it.
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wireless distribution
Got any recent references on that? As in, any fresh long-distance tests or similar? I wonder how high of an efficiency they managed to get.
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It is quite difficult to work up the motivation to keep talking to people who appear to believe that mobile phones are never going to take off because they cost too much and all the plans are really expensive so I guess we'll just be stuck with landlines forever.
I'm not sure who you're talking to here but it's certainly not me.
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if we get to the point of economical fusion
I will say that I'm not a big fan of lots of decentralization of things like fusion reactors, since it throws away a lot of the advantages of scale.
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Whoosh aside, I stand by my statement.
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I wonder how high of an efficiency they managed to get.
Depends how you measure it. Thing is, though, that the main reactor is already sending us so much more energy than we could ever conceivably use that radiated watts in vs electric watts out efficiency is actually nowhere near as important as dollars in vs watts out efficiency, and that is getting better all the time.
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Thing is, though, that the main reactor is already producing so much more energy than we could ever conceivably use that radiated watts in vs electric watts out efficiency is actually nowhere near as important as dollars in vs watts out efficiency, and that is getting better all the time.
Funny thing is -- even though it's no energy panacea, photovoltaic solar's still quite a handy tech to have around, and worth investing in. It's pretty darn well hard to beat solar+a battery for running something out in the middle of utter nowhere...and that happens a fair bit these days. (Telemetry buoys and radio-controlled turnouts come to mind.)
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Oh, I understand the "we can afford the loss" argument. I'm just curious about what they managed to squeeze out of wireless transport is all.
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Wireless transport of terrestrial-generated energy is always going to be completely dwarfed by the sheer volume of energy supplied by our nearest off-planet wireless fusion energy distribution facility, which has been operating reliably for 4.5 billion years as of last Thursday.
The almost universal tendency amongst the technorati to ignore, discount and/or forget the potential of that facility is the single biggest example of Not Invented Here syndrome that I can think of. I eagerly look forward to the day where homes fitted with receivers for it outnumber those without.
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Ok, so I completely missed the point up there...
