What if you want to sell the house

I’ve not read the contract yet. Considering they include removal an reinstallation labor for free if someone renovates their roof, they theoretically might as well relocate them to another house when moving within their service area (which is constrained as well by the region of the green certificates).

What happens when you want to exit the contract within the 30 years?

Certainly you can buy the gear. And if you buy all the panels you are out of the contract. Price per panel as they age is something like this:

• years 0-5: €850
• years 5-10: €750
• years 10-15: €650
• …
• year 30: €0

If you want to exit the contract and return the panels, I have no idea. But since these prices seem to be heavily inflated to cover their labor, I imagine it’s quite uninteresting to return the panels because they likely factor in the labor.

When the sun is shining at peak brightness, what’s the guarantee that you get to use all of it?

All the boxes have LCDs. The 1st box shows the power generation. Then another box shows what of that you are consuming. I don’t recall what the 3rd box shows but I can only imagine it’s the energy fed to the grid. I assume the original electric meter is still installed, in which case it might be possible to check the math.

There could still be shenanigans because it’s probably hard to verify. I think as a low consumer I might be better off buying the panels and getting an i/o meter (not sure what the correct term is but something that compensates me for what is fed back to the grid).

Anyway, I appreciate the reply. I’ll have to mirror some of those questions to the supplier.

I can only guess. I don’t think that could even be in contract. My guess:

• another company buys it: the buyer takes over the contracts
• liquidation: normally assets go to the creditors. But every homeowner is a creditor for the property in the future. So I think a reasonable court would just turn ownership over to the homeowner. OTOH, the energy company is also a party to the deal because the energy supplier gets the unused power. Perhaps the panels would be taken over by the energy supplier until the 30 year mark.

The cost of installation, wiring and transformers is more than the cost of panels.

They likely factor all those costs into the panel costs. But would labor and parts overhead represent 9/10ths of €8500, for example? Looks like they install 3 boxes in the basement plus panels for around €7500.

That may be where the fat is. So I’m tempted to say this is only a good deal for someone who really wants hands-off on-grid solar power for 30 yrs. And perhaps a bad deal if someone foresees going off grid and doing their own labor.

After the 30 years of “borrowing” the panels, who pays for their removal and recycling?

I assume that’s the homeowner because the supplier simply makes it all the homeowner’s property after 30 years… likely so they don’t have to deal with it.

Great article. I think there are some flaws but it gives lots of good ideas.

Possible flaws:

• Insulating the underside of the work surface would prevent the work surface itself from getting warm. Hands have the most need for warmth. So I would be tempted to insulate the underside of the work surface as suggested but cut out a deliberate thermal bridge around the keyboard and mouse area – or maybe supplement a heating pad on top of the desk. But taking care not to add heat to the laptop.
• Space heaters are discouraged by the article because they output too much power (as they are intended for heating a small room). But space heaters often have thermostats. I have an a/c powered oil radiator on wheels. It may be high wattage but I think it will know when to quit. And it would save me the effort of rigging up a thermostat.
• IIUC, they rely on the blanket to mitigate heat loss around the sides of the desk. That’s where I would be tempted to use insulating radiator foil, perhaps in addition to a blanket.

Thick insulation foam for roofing is often thrown out, like when a neighbor re-roofs and buys too much. I will be on the look out for scrap pieces to use under the desk.

Some of the windows are leaky. The frames and window sills are old and irregular. Some window frames are painted unsmooth wood and the sills are ceramic tile (some textured) which would also be quite difficult to seal off. So I think attempting that would be in vain.

I stay mainly in a windowless room with the doors shut.

Yeah I do the hand sitting and some other tricks… but was looking for a slightly more productive level of comfort without heating the room or house.

It’s not insulated. The thermostat it has a floor of 5°C/40°F, at which point it heats even in the off state to protect the pipes.

That would help when my wrists rest on the cold desk (which is ergonomically bad anyway). It doesn’t seem like a solution for typing, though if I take frequent rests for hand warming maybe that’d be viable (which I do now by via many cups of hot tea).

About the eyes, I would not want to wear goggles. But I wonder if a good lamp shade could be sufficient. Or is the reflected light also retina deteriorating?

Yes, and in fact it’s worse than your linked page suggests. I was happy to receive email and not send. So that free trial would have been forever perfect for me. But after a few months my login creds mysteriously quit working. No warning and no msg after the fact to tell me why my #onionmail.org account was deleted.

It’s a dick move because people rely on email for important tasks. It’s fair enough to have limitations, but concealing the limitations is off.

I avoid all centralized Cloudflare nodes. The lemmy.ml is no longer centralized by CF, but some would say it’s still centralized by disproportionate size inequality. It’s kind of a borderline case but I try to favor the instances that are nowhere near being part of the centralization/network effect problem.

And btw: you don’t need to reach 60°C with a heat pump. That would be pretty inefficient.

Thanks for the feedback.

My boiler gives me control of the temp of the water running through the radiators which is independent of the room air temp thermostat. I set the water to ~55°C which seems to reasonably get the air to 17° without running continuously. I mentioned 60° because I figured that temp would enable someone to heat their room up quickly. I wonder why you say a heat pump would not need 60°. I would think the radiators need to reach a high temp like ~50—60° regardless of the kind of furnace. Maybe I’m doing something inefficient. Should I use a lower temp? I could lower the water temp but then there would be a point where the furnace has to run continuously which i would think is inefficient. I’m not sure how to find the efficiency sweet spot.

UPDATE

That pricetag is just the unit and standard installation probably. Pieces are crazy high Here in Germany because the demand is crazy high. Not many heating installers have made the additional qualifications, so those who did can demand practically anything.

Sounds reasonable. So if the demand has out-stripped supply on heat pumps, I wonder if geo-thermal would actually be cheaper than a heat pump ATM. IIRC the digging would be ~€10k (what I think is a typical price for digging a well… could be off). Though I don’t suppose you could use wall radiators with geothermal. Since geothermal water is only ~6° warmer in the winter, hydro-radiant flooring would have to be installed.

Thanks! It’s rarely used so trying to find back a post that used it would be hard. Knowing the terminology (spoiler) was half the battle.

Why?

1. It’s a big database. It would be a poor design to replicate a db of all links in every single client.
2. Synchronization of the db would not be cheap. When Bob says link X has anti-feature Y, that information must then be shared with 10s of thousands of other users.

Perhaps you have a more absolute idea of centralized. With Mastodon votes, they are centralized on each node but of course overall that’s actually decentralized. My bad. I probably shouldn’t have said centralized. I meant more centralized than a client-by-client basis. It’d be early to pin those details down at this point other than to say it’s crazy for each client to maintain a separate copy of that DB.

And how would guarantee the integrity of the ones holding the metrics?

The server is much better equipped than the user for that. The guarantee would be the same guarantee that you have with Mastodon votes. Good enough to be fit for purpose. For any given Mastodon poll everyone sees a subset of votes. But that’s fine. Perfection is not critical here. You wouldn’t want it to decide a general election, but you don’t need that level of integrity.

A lot less effort than having to deal with the different “features” that each website admin decides to run on their own.

That doesn’t make sense. Either one person upgrades their Lemmy server, or thousands of people have to install, configure, and maintain a dozen different browser plugins ported to a variety of different browsers (nearly impossible enough to call impossible). Then every Lemmy client also has to replicate that complexity.

I mean, does archive.org get away with it, though?

They get blocked by some sites, and some sites have pro-actively opt-out. archive.org respects the opt-outs. AFAICT, archive.org gets away w/archiving non-optout cases where their bot was permitted.

And do I really have to spell out how Google gets away with caching stuff?

You might need to explain why 12ft.io gets away with sharing google’s cache, as Lemmy could theoretically operate the same way.

I’m extremely skeptical fair use could be twisted to our defense in this particular case.

When you say “twisted”, do you mean commentary is not a standard accepted and well-known fair use scenario?

You don’t know what a logical fallacy is. Bob and Alice can disagree about whether the pizza tastes good or bad. There’s no fallacy there, just subjective disagreement.

The browser (more appropriately named: client) indeed needs some of the logic here, but it cannot do the full job I’ve outlined. The metrics need to be centralized. And specifically when you say browser, this imposes an inefficient amount of effort & expertise on the end-user. A dedicated client can make it easy on the user. But it’s an incomplete solution nonetheless.

You just identified the fallacy yourself.

You’re going to have to name this fallacy you keep talking about because so far you’re not making sense.

Sometimes a paywalled source is the first to report on something. Calling that link a bad link is nonsense.

One man’s bad link is another man’s good link. It’s nonsense to prescribe for everyone one definition of “bad”. What’s bad weather? Rain? I love rain. Stop trying to speak for everyone and impose your idea of “bad” on people.

Many people don’t know all the websites to redirect things through without that, so calling their contribution “bad” just because they posted that link isn’t the greatest.

So because someone might not know their link is bad, it ceases to be bad? Nonsense.

It’s not even like it’s that big an issue, because usually someone else comes along that provides an alt link in the replies,

(emphasis mine) Usually that does not happen.

so saying that this is a social failure is also ridiculous, because both were provided between two people.

This based on the false premise that usually bad links are supplemented by an alternate from someone else.

Also, the notion that you or anyone else is socially filtering non-misinformation news sources from the rest of us, because you don’t see the value in it, or cannot figure out how to bypass the paywall yourself, isn’t all that great either.

(emphasis mine) Every user can define an enshitified site how they want. If you like paywalls, why not have your user-side config give you a personalized favorable presentation of such links?

Just like Greenpeace paves the way for smaller activist groups that can’t stand up to challenges, archive.org would serve in the same way. When archive.org (with ALA backing) wins a case, that’s a win for everyone who would do the same. Lemmy would obviously stay behind on the path archive.org paves and not try to lead.

A link is not a bad link for going to the source. You’ve misunderstood the post and also failed to identify a logical fallacy (even had your understanding been correct).

Whether the link goes to the source or not is irrelevant. I’m calling it a bad link if it goes to a place that’s either enshitified and/or where the content is unreachable (source or not). This is more elaborate than what you’re used to. There’s more than a dozen variables that can make a link bad. Sometimes the mirror is worse than the source (e.g. archive*ph, which is a Cloudflared mirror site).

One man’s bug is another man’s feature. The hair-splitting you attempt here really serves no useful purpose. I’m calling it a bug because input data is overly trusted and inadequately processed. It could be framed as a bug or an enhancement and either way shouldn’t impact the treatment (beyond triage/priority).

if a tester posted something like this as a bug instead of a change request, it would get thrown right into the trash bin

Yikes. Your suggestion that it should impact whether it’s treated at all is absurd. Bug reports and enhancements are generally filed in the same place regardless. If you’re tossing out bugs/enhancements because you think they are mis-marked, instead of fixing the marking, I wouldn’t want you working on any project that affects me or that I work on. That’s terrible. Shame on you.

Side note, do the hash tags do anything on lemmy, or are they just posted here for emphasis?

They have search index relevance in the fediverse. People outside of Lemmy will find the Lemmy post if they search those hashtags (which are ignored by Lemmy itself).