It's not really correct to say that heat pumps don't work well on old, poorly insulated houses in cold climates. That it's a heat pump is not the issue, that it's cold is not the issue, the problem is only that with poor or no insulation in a cold climate you'll need a huge heater (say, 10-15kW just for the living room). And domestic heat pumps are not designed for that range. If you could get one that big then it would work very well indeed.
If you have a poorly insulated house then the fix is to insulate it, which is what a lot of people are doing around here, with very hold houses. My house is less than 60 years old and very well insulated for the time, and it holds up even today - it's always warm, with the heat pump not even close to its max power.
The issue with “just” insulating your home is that many homes weren’t designed with insulation in mind and thus it’s not a straightforward proposition.
For instance, masonry was a common building material and that is not easy to insulate. You need to add many inches of insulation on either the outside or the inside, both of which have complications.
Even in a basic stick framed house, you’re still talking about taking down all the exterior walls, likely involving removing plaster and replacing it with drywall. Plaster has a number of nice properties, so it’s sad to remove. And that’s not to mention the price of this work.
Finally, roofs need special consideration. Most roofs today need to be properly vented, which was not as much of a consideration when the houses naturally breathed. Venting today is often done with soffit vents. Yet on historic houses, soffits are typically one of the nicer details. It’s not trivial or cheap to install venting in such cases.
I had a heat pump installed in 2010. In a cold climate. Only used for heating. It paid for itself extremely quickly - less than three years. It's still going strong, in 2026. It's important to maintain it regularly, i.e. deep cleaning every two years or so. The first time I got a company to do it for me, and the technician taught me how to do it all by myself, so that's what I do. In any case having a professional doing it wasn't expensive either. And I clean the dust filters (very easy) every second week or so.
Installed mini-splits to replace the propane stove that heated my house, DIY job, so all it cost was the units themselves and some materials.
Propane bill (no natural gas, town of 500) from Oct 24 to Feb 25 (installed the mini splits that month) was $1200, for just heating.
My mini-splits are on a dedicated sub panel with an Emporia Vue 3 energy monitor. $604 in electricity consumption, and that includes air conditioning over the summer months.
For what it’s worth, our winter weather averages 25-35F with the occasional few days dipping to tens, single digits, and the occasional -10 freak; but these units just BARELY have a HSPF4 rating to classify as “cold climate” models. Still going to pay for themselves in 6 years without any tax credits, and 4 or so since I still installed them when they were available.
Electric resistive heating, which is the main power source here (all hydro, until recently). Plus a wood stove in case of power cuts. We used that one quite a bit during cold spells before the heatpump came along. Now not much at all.
Modern heat pumps are cheaper than oil for heating just about everywhere. They're cheaper than natural gas in most places, unless electricity prices where you live are particularly high.
Yes, and many places have high electricity costs. And btw, those are hard to foresee, so if you make a long term investment into a heat pump that is supposed to last 20-25 years, you have no idea how electricity prices will affect you. That's obviously true for gas and oil as well. I do concede that my original point was too blanket-y.
I have a heat pump btw., with COP 4.5 (below ground). Costs me EUR 2.5 - 3k per year to heat the house.
In western europe today, I spend €10+ per day to heat my home (17 degrees mind you) with a gas powered boiler for radiators. I can run my mini-split on 18 degrees all day for a couple of euros. I moved here from the US in 2022 right after the full scale invasion of Ukraine so natural gas prices skyrocketed overnight.
I don't really understand what the aversion is to forced air climate control here other than "it's not as comfortable" which from what I've gleaned from other people is taken to mean noise/moving air/humidity. Coming from the southern US, I find all of those points to be a non-issue for me. I've slept with a fan on my entire life, so if I can shave off 50% of my heating costs for a few decibels of fan noise, sign me up!
I don't buy your numbers. I'm in Western Europe myself, and have run those numbers multiple times. Kilowatt for kilowatt (COP adjusted) gas is always cheaper than a heat pump.
Hm? Around here oil was never been in the same (low) order of magnitude. Those who installed oil heaters many decades ago regretted it quickly. And it's been illegal to use them for a couple of decades as well now. Gas has never been an option in my region, there's no infrastructure for that. We have used gas in Japan until now, but even that we'll be phasing out (I live in two places)
> Those who installed oil heaters many decades ago regretted it quickly.
That really depends on the oil heater, no? You can't compare a heater from the 70s with a modern one. That's like saying I don't drive modern cars because cars in the 70s were unsafe and stank.
Needing an oil tank, smell, expensive (oil price typically increased drastically compared to the beginning), pollution, and, as I said, made illegal in cities for various reasons, pollution and expenses related to dig up and get rid of the oil thank, and more.
The model is not yet decided, we're in the finalizing stage with the building company. What we have been focusing on is a well insulated house, unlike the old one which has no insulation at all.. if we tried to heat that it would not only be extremely expensive, it's impossible to even heat the small bathroom with an electric heater. So instead you kind of get used to it. Took me a year to stop feeling like I was freezing, at 4C in the bathroom on February mornings.
We have been using a gas heater (plug in the floor) in certain places on the ground floor, but we limited that as well.
So, with an insulated, small house, we believe we will be able to keep the costs down, using heat pumps and heat exchangers, plus solar and battery (using the car battery).
>How's this any different than going around and filling out fake credit applications to stop "uninvited data collection" by banks/credit bureaus or whatever?
It's so different that it can't even be compared. There's nothing similar there.
>>The intent is convenience and privacy, not fraud.
> You're still harming the business, so my guess would be something like tortious interference.
No, you're not harming the business. You're simply not following the business idea of the "business". Anyone can have a business idea of some type. Not a single person on earth has any obligation to fulfill that business idea. But somehow some people believe the opposite.
Some years ago I was by chance listening to a radio program about advertising. They interviewed a marketing guy and he insisted that it was illegal for you to visit the bathroom or the kitchen while the ad was running (on TV or on the radio). Completely nuts.
That reminds me of the time I was flipping through TV channels and stopped in on TBN to see what color Jan's hair was going to be. Instead, I found Paul preaching about how anyone watching his programming and NOT sending him donations was stealing from him.
Eventually, but it wasn't first class, rather to port UNIX software into VMS.
Just like MS-DOS had plenty of C compilers to chose from, while it was actually written in Assembly, and most folks were programming in Turbo and Quick Pascal, Turbo and Quick BASIC, Clipper,...
Hardly the same kind of C for everything like on UNIX.
That a lot of software wasn't written in C on VMS is beside the point, the fact is that a totally normal K&R C was available on VMS, just the same as e.g. Pascal was available. And the C compiler was popular among people writing TCP/IP software (and I don't mean re-compiling some Unix ftp client), where they could just sit down with Steven's book and code.
On the contrary, that is indeed the point, safe languages have been a thing already before UNIX/C took off, and even the reason why Multics had a higer security score than UNIX, thanks to PL/I.
> Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.
Indeed, although C kind of felt second-class on VMS since the language has a lot of Unixisms embedded in the standard library and, to a lesser extent, the language itself.
Being able to define command line interfaces using cld files on VMS was really wonderful and you got things like abbreviations of options (and commands) to their shortest unique initial string was quite nice (so, for example, the directory command could be named as such but everybody just typed dir).
Very familiar with it. Ran it in production for a major gambling company in my country for years. The stability was okay (no better than say Solaris) but the ergonomics for administrators and developers was absolutely horrid.
The Alpha though? It's a shame DEC couldn't push it hard enough to prevent x86_64 from happening.
Woz talked about the early days in an interview, and he said something like (paraphrasing) "Steve [Jobs] could call companies and get free samples for me, and negotiate low prices for other stuff, something I simply couldn't do".
It sounds like they complemented each other during the startup. And it was Jobs who suggested that they should try running a company.
At the end of the day many different types are needed to make complex products work. Humans at least are unlikely to be able to accomplish all this individually as it requires character traits that are in conflict with each other.
With all humans the difficult part is getting all the needed traits to make a business/product work without getting ones like backstabbing/jealously that cause problems later.
My opinion differs - learning how memory is accessed via assembly language will make it super easy to understand e.g. how C pointers actually work, something which can be surprisingly difficult for those who go directly to a high level (compared to assembly) language, but very easy if you come from machine code/assembly.
Seconded. I bought the first edition of "Programming the 6502" way back in the neolithic, and I enjoyed it greatly. I even read parts of it again now and then these days too, just because I like it.
I used to write assembly on, at first, the AIM-65, and later the Apple II.
Is Programming the 6502 enough to learn Assembly on the Apple II ? But it doesn't explain the memory and screen management, right ? So how can we learn that ?
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the screen memory of the Commodore machines (ViC-20, Commodore 64) were the most straight-forward. As opposed to the more janky Apple II memory map.
You could do a lot worse than picking up a new Commodore 64 Ultimate [1]. They're a more or less faithful remake of the Commodore 64 but have an HDMI port, SD card instead of disk drive, etc. You could learn BASIC, should be able move to assembly as well—a quick search pulled up a YouTube course on 6502 assembly for the Commodore [2].
(I realize I am not contributing "books"—but others have done well in this regard. I did want to share what I think is a pragmatic way to learn 6502.)
Is the Apple II Reference Manual good for that ? Or anything specific to the Apple II, like "What's Where in the Apple" or "Understanding the Apple II" ?
It's actually hydro+wind in Norway, not just hydro. Hydro has been able to cover nearly 100% of household needs, and most of industry, up till now. The wind, controversial as it is in some places, has managed to offset some of the problems with hydro (nowadays the inter-European deals in practice forces Norway to sell off electricity from hydro in the summer, where in the past that would be saved for the upcoming winter)
If you have a poorly insulated house then the fix is to insulate it, which is what a lot of people are doing around here, with very hold houses. My house is less than 60 years old and very well insulated for the time, and it holds up even today - it's always warm, with the heat pump not even close to its max power.
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