My parents ALWAYS marinate their steaks in a ziplock bag of liquid marinade, immediately slap those soggy slabs on the grill without drying, and subsequently cook them to a rubbery puck of grey meat. Suggestions to change their ways is futile - Americans don’t like being told they bbq incorrectly…

Looking around, I find it incredible that the island was covered in trees before the Vikings arrived, and it still hasn’t recovered

Definitely recommended! Beautiful landscape everywhere you go

I’m on mobile and tbh don’t have time to dig into this too much, but I think you would do well to calculate the point of optimum efficiency for your specific scenario. I am in a similar scenario and hope to put together a spreadsheet that I could share if it doesn’t already exist elsewhere, but here is what I would do:

1. Find out if your heat pump IOM specifies the minimum ambient temperature before electric auxiliary heat kicks in (sometimes called “em heat” or emergen heat). Electric heat will always be the most expensive source of heat, so you should use oil heat when temperatures drop below that.

2. Look up the peak electric rate (in $/kW-hr) for your utility company. Use this to calculate the cost, per hour, to run your heat pump in all temperatures tabulated in your link. This will tell you how expensive it is to run your heat pump in a worst-case scenario.

3. Calculate the cost to run your boiler, per hour. This is where you will have to do your own homework on efficiency of your boiler, rate of consumption, and cost of oil in your location. Hard to say if the boiler will run at full capacity or part load, but most are capable of running between 20-100% of nameplate capacity (5:1 turn-down). Summarize your findings into a coat to run your boiler per hour.

4. When the answer for #2 exceeds the answer for #3, you’ve identified your switch point! Note that this relies on a number of assumptions, like that the heat pump is running full capacity.

Schlage encode plus is fantastic, especially if you have an iPhone to utilize homekey to tap your phone/watch to unlock.

It generally has better reviews online than the Yale locks, but the benefit is greatly diminished if you don’t use iOS. Also - it’s wifi only, no zwave or zigbee. Originally promised a software update for Matter, but apparently something in the standard changed and will now have to be an updated SKU.

I don’t have experience with the aprilaire, but I also have a basement that requires a dehumidifier to run all the time. I’d love to try a whole home dehumidifier but wonder if you’d have to get the upper levels of the house too dry to keep the basement at the desired humidity (since it will always be more humid down there than the rest of the house).

One alternate solution I’d like to look into long term is a heat pump water heater, which has the benefit of being more efficient than more other water heaters, plus the benefit of dehumidifying the space around it due to the refrigeration cycle it uses. This only sounds reasonable b/c my water heater is on the older side so I might have to replace it eventually anyways. Wanted to throw that out there in case it was a possibility for yourself too! Not sure how it would work for the crawl space tho.

Full-disclosure: I’ve done VERY littler research on this. Just dabbling into some google searches in my free time and work in a related field and feel mildly knowledgeable on the subject.