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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Good to know about the refrigerant, I haven’t even begun to consider different types of systems.

    I didn’t think about the descaling, that’s definitely something to consider. My prime consideration with them was a) save on the extra piping, b) not have to wait for hot water to arrive, wasting water in the process (mountains, it gets a bit nippy up here), c) not have to operate a circ pump. I wouldn’t necessarily mind an electric tank WH, I just thought it’d be nifty having instant hot water in each room and not worrying about the tank running empty.

    And yeah since we’re building from scratch, I intend on designing the roof with to accommodate as many panels as necessary (I haven’t even begun to do the load calcs for anything yet. In a perfect world, I’d want the front of the house facing north, leaving the entire south side of the house available for solar without cluttering up the curb appeal. Since we don’t have net metering where I’m at, I also have my eye on a battery system primarily for night operation and outages (they’re frequent up here), and as essentially a whole house UPS.









  • Same here, probably around 2015. My wife has one due to being in real estate and not understanding the finer points of data privacy (read: doesn’t care at all), so I just use hers to browse marketplace on the rare occasion I’m looking for something. You best believe all of her devices have their own network segment at our house isolated from the rest of our gear lol.




  • It depends honestly. Here in the states, we GFCI kitchens, bathrooms, laundries, garages, crawl spaces underneath houses, and exteriors, basically anywhere it could be reasonably expected to come in contact with water or an unexpected grounding/earth source. From there, you can either do a GFCI breaker or receptacle. Both will protect everything downstream from the device, but the choice comes down to convenience of operation. I’ll generally do GFCI breakers for dishwasher, disposals, refrigerators, etc, just so that if the GFCI trips you can reset it in the panel so you don’t have to pull the equipment out to get to it, but I’ll do kitchen and bathroom counter convenience plugs as a GFCI receptacle (and daisychain all downstream kitchen receptacles from the GFCI receptacle) to be able to reset it right there at the point of use.

    You could in theory GFCI protect an entire house/flat, but it likely comes down to cost saving and avoiding nuisance trips. Motors as they age tend to leak current and trip GFCIs, and any number of delicate electronics can be finicky, so that’s typically why we only use them in wet locations.