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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve been looking into this (along with some other options like tankless) since my water heater is the next major appliances due for replacement.

    Depending on the efficiency of your HVAC and water heater; it might still be cheaper to heat twice (water heater makes water hot & inside air cold; then HVAC makes inside air hot & outside cold). If your efficiency at the HVAC stage is more than double (most modern heat pumps give 3x to 4x efficiency; that’s both in the water heater and HVAC). It gets a bit complicated; but the short answer is when it’s efficient enough the switch between modes for the hot water heater might not be necessary.

    Longer answer; is you need to know the difference in performance of the water heater. Ex. your heating costs go from $10/mo with heat pump to $20/mo with electric element (obviously if gas is the alternate heat source that adds another conversion…). If the marginal increase in HVAC cost is less than that $10/mo difference, there’s no need to switch the hot water heater between modes!

    Undecided (you tube channel) has a few videos covering the basics that are worth a watch if you’re starting to look into the topic, but since you’ve already been doing research, maybe it’s all material you know? Quick link: https://www.instagram.com/undecidedmf/p/C4IrcBOsT_p/

    Edit adding a better link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGiNL9IT54&vl=en






  • A bit of an elaboration on why water towers are used in combination with pumps. Pumps are great for moving a constant amount of water around at whatever rate the pump is designed for (e.g. a small pump will move something like 1 gallon per minute). a big enough pump (or series of smaller pumps) can cause that pumped water to consistently flow at that rate.

    The problem is that people don’t use water at a constant rate. In the morning, several residents probably all run the shower at the same time. if too many people open the water tap at the same time, a pump will give each just a fraction of what they expect.

    But a water tank high up supplies water by gravity, you could open a large number of water taps, and as long as the pipes from the tank are big enough they’d all have the same pressure as if just one opened.

    The water is gradually pumped up to the tank no matter if people are using it or not, then when many people want water, they all get it at expected pressures and the tank start to empty. Eventually people close the taps, the tank will slowly start to fill again from the pump.

    This same basic design is also how water towers supply water to many single story buildings, it’s not a unique engineering feat for skyscrapers, but an adjustment to fit somewhere within the building’s footprint.




  • whyrat@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldAny love for Kubernetes here?
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    1 year ago

    I’d suggest Podman over docker if someone is starting fresh. I like Podman running as rootless, but moving an existing docker to Podman was a pain. Since the initial docker setup was also a pain, I’d rather have only done it once :/

    For me the use case of K8s only makes sense with large use cases (in terms of volume of traffic and users). Docker / Podman is sufficient to self-host something small.