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Zero energy ready homes are coming

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Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#441

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

londons_explore wrote: post #396
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do like the dynamic pricing idea. If you're not well situated for panels you can invest in batteries and sell at night what you bought during the day. I don't have your faith in markets though. The invisible hand is a potent force indeed, but it's just as likely to flip you the bird as it is to solve a problem that you have. There's nothing about a market, for instance, that knows to keep prices high enough to prev…

Oh there is... Imagine you see all the power being used up ahead of winter, and you predict this problem... Yet it seems like nobody else has noticed... So you swoop in and, with profits in mind, you buy up some electricity futures contracts for December. They're quite cheap right now, and you suspect that when the blizzard hits they'll be really valuable. By doing so, you push the price of them up a bit. Meanwhile,…

If everyone has perfect information and my speculative advantage has only to do with some insight that I had, then yeah it all works out.

But once I've bought those futures, I have an incentive to spread misinformation about just how bad the shortage is going to be, and to make it difficult for others to have the same kind of insight in the future so that I can have the same advantage next year.

If I'm successful, I'll have created a situation where actors that can store energy hoard it, only parting with it at prices that leave people struggling to survive the winter. We end up losing that energy to inefficiencies in the storage media, and we end up losing people to warmer climes--people who would have otherwise contributed to energy projects that increase supply.

Markets work out in the abstract, but unless they're watched closely they sabotage the conditions that made them initially useful.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#442

Post by westurner »

londons_explore wrote: post #433
westurner wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walipini passive solar green houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walipini Earthship passive solar homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship Underground living: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_living Root cellar passive refrigeration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_cellar Ground source heat pump (Geothermal heat pump) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump Solar-assisted heat pump:…

This is a pile of vaguely relevant facts... I think in my HN comments I'd prefer a couple of facts and a conclusion, with citations for more detail.

What do you have for low energy, zero energy, passive solar homes?

Buy-all-sell-all says you can't use your solar to power your duct fans even when the grid is down?

Write me a ScholarlyArticle.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#443

Post by AdrianB1 »

Syonyk wrote: post #105
AdrianB1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No welding is needed, you can use metal clamps to hold the pipes together. I have my panels on metal structure with no welding, I used bolts for joins.

Yes, but the clamps I've found designed for that sort of use are quite expensive, and add a substantial margin to the project cost - and they're not needed if you can weld it up, or have someone else weld it up. As I understand NEC from talking to various people and reading quite a bit of it myself, someone else can do the frames for a homeowner installed solar project, but "rails and up" has to either be the homeown…

In think in my country I can do all the work myself and I need a certified electrician to connect it to the grid, nothing else. The law is very different from country to country, for me the labor was extremely cheap while the panels and MPPT are more expensive than in US.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#444

Post by IncRnd »

rootusrootus wrote: post #431
zamnos wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really a city though? Wouldn't that more accurately described as a big collection of suburban sprawl? I don't have a particular people/sq mile/meter figure in mind, but if it's not dense enough to justify public transportation and for it to be comfortable to live without a car (ie a single train/bus/tram per hour doesn't count), I say we don't actually call it a city because it really isn't.

Is Portland a city? Because it is almost 100% made up of what would otherwise be considered suburban neighborhoods. Single family homes with yards. There is a tiny core nestled between the river and the hills with a few blocks of urban city. The city does have public transportation. Though you'd mostly find that living without a car would require sacrifices that people aren't willing to make. And what about out west…

Whether an area is a suburb has nothing to do with whether people live in single family homes with yards. A suburb is an outlying part of a city or town or a smaller community adjacent to or within commuting distance of a city. [1]

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suburb

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#446

Post by rovolo »

yurishimo wrote: post #397
pmontra wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design There are many small towns in Europe surrounded by networks of even smaller towns and one or two house farms. There is nothing to claim back there: they've been like that since well before any European moved to the Americas. That was a way to be close to fields, when economy was mostly farmers and herders and people mostly…

I live in one of these small European towns. It is honestly mind boggling how far some people drive to go to work here. I'm in The Netherlands around Eindhoven. We have colleagues in Den Bosch, Utrecht and Maastricht driving to work every week. Eindhoven is full of commuters. Some people take the train, but that isn't always convenient, especially with strikes! Your boss doesn't care that you were 3 hours late due to…

> Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem

This isn't a uniquely Dutch problem. The longest commute you mentioned:

Utrecht -> Eindhoven: 1 hr 4 min (92.2 km)

isn't unheard of in the US. These are the commutes for a cousin, and a friend's uncle:

Colorado Springs, CO -> Denver, CO: 1 hr 19 min (113.5 km)

New Britain, CT -> New York, NY: 2 hr 4 min (177.1 km)

These are memorable though because they are so long. Many of the people I know have far shorter commutes. For example, my mom would drive 30 min (21km). But, these long commutes definitely exist.

In 2019, 10% of US workers had a 1-way commute of over 1hr. (The average times for transit are quite high in the US, but 90% of commutes are by car so a large portion of that 10% are by car).

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

In 2003, 8% of 1-way commutes were over 56 km.

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1006/ML100621425.pdf

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#447

Post by mrjh »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #410
xyst wrote: post #64

I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…

s/sticks/Styx Fwiw, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx

“'In the sticks' is just a reference to an area where there are lots of twigs, that is, the countryside.”

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/in-the-sticks.html

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#448

Post by westurner »

cwkoss wrote: post #367
westurner wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walipini passive solar green houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walipini Earthship passive solar homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship Underground living: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_living Root cellar passive refrigeration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_cellar Ground source heat pump (Geothermal heat pump) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump Solar-assisted heat pump:…

'Pain mound' low tech compost driven water heaters are neat too

For which types of compost is there risk of spontaneous combustion?

What design safety features are necessary for a heat pump to efficiently extract the heat of a wood boiler or a compost pile? Is it safe to locate them next to a heat pump or a dwelling or a thermoelectric boiler?

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#449

Post by Symbiote »

makomk wrote: post #241
Symbiote wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few industrial users can weather changes in supply, with notice of the expected price in advance. The aluminium smelter can heat to x+250°, let things cool to x° while people cook their evening meal, then heat up again afterwards. A large supermarket chain can set their refrigerators to 5°, but by allowing the range to move between 3° and 7° can save significant power. (One of the big British supermarkets already d…

That only works on short timescales, which isn't the main problem because there are so many ways of solving that (for example batteries or thermal storage for home heating).

The large, industrial users are an example of thermal storage, but at a different scale than home heating.

Tesco's fridges are apparently worth about 25-50MW, so like a small grid-scale battery: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/23/cool-runnin...

An aluminium smelter is gigawatts, the one in Scotland is 1.2GW, which is a medium-size power plant by itself.

They're easy projects, compared to installing thousands or hundreds of thousands of batteries or new heating systems in homes.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#450

Post by anonkogudhyfhhf »

twblalock wrote: post #314
kitsunesoba wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert in this field, but I think that changing zoning in current suburbs to mixed use would go a long way towards fixing them. The central wards of Tokyo are surrounded by such mixed use residential areas and it works extremely well, with most necessities being within walking distance or at worst biking distance. It wouldn't fix the suburbs' lack of density, but it'd still be a marked improvement. It'd theore…

People keep bringing up Tokyo but it's not really relevant. Yes, Tokyo has mixed zoning. But it was developed the way it is because the people who live there want it to be that way. It's also only livable because the people there have a culture that makes it possible to live in high density without high levels of crime, noise, and filth. Americans in the same situation would not have built something like Tokyo. If yo…

Hard to make this claim when govt bureaucrats enforced this type of city design with zoning laws a road/highway subsidies
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