A heat pump water heater seems like a no brainer way to improve efficiency.
They're not yet common, but there are many more options available over seas than in America.
This project seems emblematic of the challenges facing funding manufacturing initiatives in America.
What's funded are the projects that appeal to tech investors, more of a focus on flashy presentation, luxury design, AI, and cloud app features, than the baseline functionality.
We get innovation as a side effect of convincing investors that the idea will disrupt industries and create app ecosystems that lock in consumer attention.
Chasing the 100x unicorns and no longer training workhorses
Big problem in the US is that in many regions natural gas is cheaper than electricity, causing heat pump water heaters to be more expensive for the consumer. So everyone ends up burning more.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. A modern gas-fired plant is ~50% efficient and heat pumps typically have a COP of ~3 for hot water, so if you take natural gas, burn it to convert it to electricity, then feed that electricity to a heat pump, you'll get ~1.5x the energy you'd get if you just burned the natural gas.
How does the electricity get from the generating unit to the heat pump? What are the environmental conditions during heat pump operation?
These things sound so obvious when you don't factor in the annoying little details like transmission of energy. System complexity also matters. There's this thing called "total cost of ownership" that paints a more honest picture regarding how these economics interact.
Using heat pumps to solve a problem looks fantastic in operational efficiency terms, but what happens if the control board breaks and the vendor decided to move on? Dumb, slightly less efficient appliances might actually be cheaper and better for the environment in total. If I have to create a pile of e-waste every 3 years just to save 10% on my energy bill for something that is already incredibly cheap in absolute terms, I think it could be argued I've made everything worse.
Maybe the problem is shared deeper than that, that both industry and individuals are not interested, incentivized, or capable of investing into improving on good enough.
That’s the neat part, you can just ignore them. Any consequences for continuing to shutdown and decommission these generators would be cheaper than what ratepayers would be paying to continue to run them. “You can just do things.” By the time any legal actions are resolved, it’ll be years from now after this admin is over.
You cannot be forced to turn coal generators back on that cannot be turned back on, or no longer exist.
Not really, repo map only gives LLMs an overview of the codebase, but aider doesn't automatically bring files into the context - you have to explicitly add the files you wish for it to see in their entirety to the context. Claude Code/Codex and most other tools do this automatically, that's why they're much more autonomous.
Why are you blaming Sol-Ark when Deye is the one in breach of contract taking illegal actions the entire time? Seems very disingenuous. They also did not force Deye's hand in this action and seem surprised by it.
I can't really figure out what they did that was in breach of contract. As far as I understand it, they don't do business inside the areas affected, so there is no contract to speak of. Instead, their authorized resellers seem to be the ones installing for their hardware; I don't even think it's legal to sell their hardware if it doesn't comply with FCC/etc guidelines.
Is geo-blocking illegal? Am I entitled to a refund if I import American hardware that refuses to operate in my country?
I think people were risking a broken setup for a big discount, and now it's come back to bite them in the ass. If the units affected were official installations done by their American reseller, their reseller wouldn't be so ready to offer up free replacements.
Wait, what? So defending your rights under an exclusivity agreement through the courts is somehow now "forcing" their hand? The evil Sol-Ark by suing for compliance to their contract pushed the hapless Deye into bricking consumers hardware?
I like how you quoted forcing, but I very specifically did not use that term.
Had there been no exclusivity agreement, I think we can agree that the inverters would not of been bricked for being located in the wrong regions.
I think the malice from Sol-Ark here is that they are only offering a limited time deal, which may pressure people to pay up before the courts clear this up.
Regardless of who shares the majority of the blame, Sol-Ark, Deye or 3rd party vendors, this could of been handled better by all parties involved, and should not have harmed end consumers in this way.
It’s unclear who caused it exactly, but sol-ark does not seem to be at fault unless one thinks exclusivity contracts are illegal or wrong.
It seems deye either willfully or negligently ignore their contract they made with sol ark. Or their middle men in other countries did. Deye then punished the end users for deye’s lapses.
Where does solark get blame unless the exclusivity contract is what one objects to.
When the purpose of the exclusivity contract is to sell something at 5x the price it is sold for in other markets, I think most people would reasonably describe this as price gouging.
> I like how you quoted forcing, but I very specifically did not use that term.
I like that you substituted a similar word while paraphrasing a common phrase and then used the opportunity to say “I didn’t mean what you thought I did. I meant something else but will not describe what that is exactly”
Seeing as they are paying $5 a month, how do you expect buying a NUC to pay for itself in a few months? Where are you finding NUCs for $20 with free electricity?
Any decommissioned office PC from eBay will be faster than $5 linode. For example search for optiflex https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=optiplex+pc&_udhi=30 They're not too power hungry either if you make sure not to go for i7s
Based on your ebay link, the cheapest PCs are around $50 shipped. Including the electricity, that's $70/year. So you'd need more than a year to have this approach pay off, and additionally you will have saddled yourself with managing a physical machine rather than have someone else abstract it for you.
Doesn't seem to pass the "it'll pay for itself in a couple months" claim.
That link sets the max price to $30. (I see a few at $18) I'm not sure how you found a $50 item there. Ignore shipping if you're adding that in, there's lots of local ones you can find on Facebook market and similar sites.
...no? My NUC draws about 18 watts under load, which is about $24 per year at typical American energy rates. It cost me 30 bucks. So, it's paid for itself after about 10 months (5n = 2n + 30), and it's way faster than a $5 VPS.
What use cases are you imagining where you need arbitrary data output and processing at 100GHz speeds? It's my understanding that even 100GbE is running at a fraction of those frequencies.
To be able to spend multiple cycles for processing a bit. Or process multiple bits arriving at the same time. Also it might be necessary to measure signal multiple times. May be 100 GHz is too much... For example I wanted to bit-bang FM radio by measuring antenna signal, that's around 100 MHz, so I need to probe around 200-300M times per second and perform at least minimal processing, I guess.
I realize FM radio is strictly an example, but would you not rely on bandpass sampling? Where you sample at some multiple of your bandwidth and rely on the spectral replication effect to get your waveform.
You need a very stable clock for that, which was also called out as a thing. With some PLLs you could lower the needed frequency. I think you're really looking for a small FPGA though.
> The number of admissions has fluctuated between 1,500 and 1,700 since 2008.
And
> The number of discharges and disposals has fluctuated between 1,350 and 1,550 since 2011
One can extrapolate that up to a couple hundred new admissions each year are staying in essentially indefinitely, as the discharge rate is generally always lower than the admissions rate.
Any ideas what is being referenced with this quote?
> Do not leave consteatants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Squid game it cost us $500,000 and boys vs girls it got a lot of people out. Ask James to know more
"was unfortunately complicated by the CrowdStrike incident, extreme weather and other unexpected logistical and communications issues"
"extreme weather"
"communications issues"
Are you doing this on purpose? I'm not even a fan of the guy but this type of out-of-context taking just hurts discourse. It's the type of thing I came to HN to avoid.
This project seems emblematic of the challenges facing funding manufacturing initiatives in America. What's funded are the projects that appeal to tech investors, more of a focus on flashy presentation, luxury design, AI, and cloud app features, than the baseline functionality.
We get innovation as a side effect of convincing investors that the idea will disrupt industries and create app ecosystems that lock in consumer attention. Chasing the 100x unicorns and no longer training workhorses