Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

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Not to berate the family, but I live in the deeper, hotter, more humid south than Houston. We keep the thermostat on 80 all day, and lower it to 78 at night, as our house is old and not well insulated and it costs a fortune to cool.

This makes me wonder, more specifically, my parents had no AC until later in life. My gradparents had none until much later in their life. They lived in the same town as I do. People seem to really get upset about it being relatively mild in their house, and I note this with many of my colleagues (I went to a torture high school with no AC, and my folks did not turn it on much at home as we did not really have the money for it)...

Not trying to be an old grumpy person, but we seem to lack a little "eh, Ill be uncomfortable for a short while to help out a straining system that, oh, I don't know, needs to stay on to power hospitals and nursing homes and such".

OTOH, I would never consent to having someone else remotely control my IoT device. Sheesh, can you imagine a ransomware attack on that system?

The house I grew up in had central A/C once, but I think it broke before I was born, and my parents who grew up in the 1930s/40s without such things never bothered to fix it.

They never told me it was bad or selfish to have/use A/C though.

What I don't like about relying on fans is the bugs that find their way through the window screens.

Can I ask why you don't/haven't insulated your house?

I'm not asking to pick on you, I was wondering if it's just impossible given the construction of the homes, or what. During the power failure, I saw it mentioned that homes were poorly insulated. What gives?

Our homes are usually very well insulated to keep our cool air in, we also don't usually have multi-stories, just a long ranch home that's easier to cool.

What you saw mentioned during the freeze was the conflating of pipe insulation with wall insulation.

We usually don't insulate our pipes because we don't have freezes, this led to bursting of pipes, that was the main damage during the freeze.

There's flex piping that doesn't need insulation, but squirrels and such can chew through them and it's just expensive to re-pipe your home.

I'm sure everyone that had their pipes freeze most likely has flex piping now, at least partially.

There is no freeze proof piping, sadly. Up here in the northern states all the piping has to be protected and the stuff that's outside the walls needs heat tape.

Copper usually bursts if the water in it freezes. But PEX can freeze without bursting. It has just enough flex to handle the expansion of water into ice. It still might burst, but it’s much less likely than copper. At least that’s my understanding of it. It’s not freeze proof. But it is less prone to freeze damage.

People are paying for the resource, they should be able to use the resource. If there's not enough resource then the supplier should not sell the resource. No need to shame people for having a preference and using something they paid for.

The hospital and nursing home bit is nice fear mongering but unless you have an instance where that has happened it's not relevant. If we neared too close to capacity due to over demand the electric companies would due controlled brown outs for residential areas. There's also backup generators at hospitals for natural disasters incase a brown out is not possible, and those would not have been prevented by rationing.

I might agree with you generally, but the more I learn about power generation the harder the problem looks. A power grid requires balancing load with a higher degree of precision than you might think, and not just total sums, but also in different areas of the grid.

‘Ideally’ people would be paying spot pricing, so they’d be incentivized to ration properly. But we saw how well that worked out for the people doing that during Texas’ winter storm.

Now if everyone paid spot pricing eventually we’d have lots of smart outlets shutting off all but the most important power consumers in a house, and it wouldn’t be as big an issue to pay spot pricing, you could be asleep and know that only the refridgerator and thermostat are going to blow up your bill.

I don’t see a system like remote thermostat adjustment being an absolutely horrible solution to the general problem, when used sparingly and treated as the failure that it us, so it’s not relied on. Particularly when the alternative might be a total blackout. I’m not sure, but I suspect this might also be preferrable to rolling brownouts.

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