Ask Slashdot: Shortcuts To a High Tech House 281
First time accepted submitter phaedrus9779 writes "I'm a recently married man about to take on the next big adventure: home ownership! I came across a great house in a great community but I need a little bit extra: a high tech house. The problem: money, I'm on a budget. I'd love to have home theaters, super high tech weather stations and iPads seamlessly installed in all the walls — but this just isn't possible. So my question to the Slashdot community is: how can I build a high tech house that will be the envy of my friends, provide lots of useful gadgets, and not break the bank? Also, as always, the cooler the better!"
Re:Nest & Tankless heater (Score:4, Interesting)
If the house is in a windy place, think about getting a small wind mill, something you can easily place on your property, (think something like this [homemadewindmill.org])
Add directly attached heating element to the water tank and add temperature control relay to switch off the current when the water temperature in tank reaches desired level.
Second grid-connected heating element could be low-level triggered, if you're using up water faster than your wind power can heat up, the more expensive heating method kicks in and keeps your reservoir going.
Re:Nest & Tankless heater (Score:4, Interesting)
What I've read about them says that tankless water heaters wear out faster than the traditional kind with a tank
LOL. I know its April 1st, but for those who don't get it, try to find a tank guaranteed by mfgr longer than 6 years or a tankless with a guarantee shorter than 20 years. The guy's humor is in stating the exact opposite of reality.
There is some truth that a decade or so ago when I got a tankless, tanks were for residential and were value engineered to fail rapidly to maximize profit via maximum lifetime cost, and tankless were for industrial apps (think laundromat or health club showers) so they were engineered to meet the business accounting goal of minimum lifetime cost. It may be that 2012 residential-grade tankless heaters are now value engineered and built in China such that they'll only operate for a couple years before requiring replacement... If they aren't, the retailers are missing out on a huge opportunity to screw their customers, and they never miss a chance to do that, at least not for long, so buyer beware. But at least in years past, tank = flood the basement twice per decade, and tankless = buy roughly once per human generation.
Another way I've heard it phrased is if you go tank, then you need to pick a basement floor covering that tolerates flooding multiple times before the floor material is replaced, but if you go tankless, then you will replace the basement floor covering a couple times before the heater is replaced. It has a big impact on decor... Pergo is legendary for being perhaps the least flooding tolerant floor covering, so you can really only go Pergo if you have a tankless, and/or if you have a tank you pretty much need tile to eliminate the water damage issue.
Re:Nest & Tankless heater (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A few easy things (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Debt is the most prized American possession. (Score:5, Interesting)
When an American says he "owns" a house, the house is secondary
Its a part of modern american doublespeak. For another housing related laugh, "I'm building a new house" means he watches "this old house" and some HGTV shows and he signed a contract for some illegals to build it for him. Confuses the shit out of me because my Grandfather actually built his own house... sears and roebuck dropped off a flatbed truck of lumber in a then new suburb and him and his coworkers swung hammers one summer in the 50s. Him and his coworkers all moved into the same subdivision at the same time and helped frame each others houses, then they contracted out for the technical stuff (electrical, plumbing) then my grandmother and friends painted the inside walls. Resulted in my dad growing up in a very tight knit neighborhood. I'm told this was not the norm, but also was not unusual, in that generation for "building a house" to mean physically swinging a hammer.
do some engineering analysis first!! (Score:5, Interesting)
You'll get plenty of suggestions as to what will ostensibly save money down the road. Carefully analyze it FOR YOUR SITUATION. Sometimes, the comparison in the literature is today's whiz-bang gadget against "the average widget" in the entire US. Look at your energy and resource costs and environmental conditions in your area (Im in SoCal is different than coastal Maine or Minnesota) Examples from a house built in 1997-1998
Cases in point:
Tankless hot water. - Right now, natural gas is *cheap* and it is likely to stay that way for at least 10 years. If you have (or are going to have) children, you consume a lot of hot water, all at one time (yes, 2 teenage daughters, etc.). Tankless is great for one person at a time showers, not so hot for laundry+2 showers+ dishwasher, unless you radically scale up. And conventional tanked hot water heaters these days (with insulating blanket and modern ignitors) don't burn that much gas "keeping the tank hot". (and you could always put a timer on the burner to shut down during the middle of the day). Ditto, solar panels. Today, gas is so cheap that the payback period for solar panels is decades And the maintenance for the panel system is bigger. If I had to make hot water with oil or coal or (god forbid) electricity... it would be different.
Electrical power - in my house, in the winter, the two big loads are: refrigerator, lighting. But lighting is only when people are home in the evening. I had all sorts of plans for automatic timers, etc. But a bit of measurement (Kill-A-Watt on the refrigerator, TV, etc.) showed that lighting was less than 20% of the total load, and fancy switching might reduce that to 15%. Summer, the big load is AC. But that's mostly determined by factors beyond my control (e.g. the outside temperature). A higher SEER AC might help, but running the statistics showed, not really, for our area.
Appliances - Front load washing machine is *a lot* better than top load in both water and electrical consumption. But, how long is the payback period on a $1000 purchase? Refrigerator.. same sort of thing. If your refrigerator was bought in the last 10 years, the new ones aren't *that* much more efficient. If you're using an avocado colored beast you got from your parents 30 years ago... yeah, a new refrigerator might not be a bad idea. But again, you're talking $1000
Insulation - i wanted to aircondition my garage to make it comfortable in the summer to work out there. So I immediately assumed I'd need to go on a insulation frenzy. But a big of calculation showed that running the airconditioner the few hours longer to make up for the poor insulation would cost something like $20-50/year (it's just not that big a space 20x20 ft, and the number of days/hours when the outside air temp is above 80 isn't all that many). Am I willing to invest several thousand dollars worth of time to go through the process of insulating.. nope.
Moral of the story.. don't take the "conventional wisdom" as the analysis. Your situation, and your power rates and climate, will be different.
So why did you get married? (Score:0, Interesting)
What's next? Kids? And you still think you are free to do what you want? You bought into society's little mold. Have fun playing a role while you wither inside.
Re:Tips for a New House (Score:4, Interesting)
Buy a programmable thermostat. This will pay for itself in a couple of months.
A note of caution on Programmable Tstats on tiered power plans: When you set it 'on' for 7PM(when off-peak pricing begins), plenty of 'smart' systems will anticipate and run the compressor full bore for a period(20/40/60 minutes) of on-peak usage to have the temp at the desired temp when that time comes. Getting into a diagnostics mode and disabling this 'feature' is recommended or you may be surprised to find the exact opposite of savings. Honeywell calls their service Adaptive Intelligent Recovery(AIR), must get into setup mode to disable. YMMV..
Re:Aren't you supposed to ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, married life differs of course. Infact I find being married I get "hit on" by more woman than when I was single and if you're a guy whose in a position of power and married in march the "girls with daddy issues" in herds.
Fact remains, you're married that spark in the relationship doesn't seem all that important anyway and as for the "sluts" not only am I open with me wife about their advances so both of us can have a little chuckle but they don't hold any interest for myself either. Likewise anybody hits on her she isn't afraid of sharing it with me.