Dave @ Dave @lemmy.nz

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2 yr. ago

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It seems you can do a lot yourself but you wouldn't be able to avoid an electrician completely. The thing that stands out to me is that you can't connect the house to the grid, and you can't connect new subcircuits. So you can replace existing hot points, but if you install new ones then you can run the cabling but need to have an electrician actually connect it to the power, and need the work to be inspected.

They talk about cutting the electrician time down to a few days for this design, I guess you could make it one day if you do the leg work yourself and just have them there for the inspection and connection.

For assembling, it seems like you should be able to do it with a few friends so long as you have a loader crane type thing. I presume you can hire those but I'm not sure what the class requirements are to drive them.

We got solar somewhat recently. You can often get cheap finance through your bank if you have a mortgage, $10k should be enough for a few panels. While a battery would be good for resilience, it's a significant cost that Consumer NZ reckons doesn't pay for itself and is only worth doing if you are looking for that protection from power cuts. It does seem like that's what you want, but you can add a battery later, and if you lose power for a long time then having power during the day is still better than none at all.

One thing that surprised me was how little power the house battery stores. As the nights get longer, we are often left without much power in the battery come morning. And if the heating is on we often don't make it through and it starts pulling from the grid.

The battery is about 13KWh and we have a Leaf EV that's maybe 25 or 30Kwh, so if you charge overnight then it just drains the whole battery.

Sounds like you didn't believe you could fly.

I just really want to see where the numbers come from.

You know people self hosting email, I know people self hosting email. But that is certainly not the case for the vast, vast majority of individuals. For businesses, I have seen Exchange take over what used to be smaller hosts, and Google has broken into the small/medium business world as well. I have searched and searched and found nothing, but I don't see why it should be so hard to do. Obtain a list of email addresses from some data breach (I dunno how but I'm sure security researchers do it all the time) then check their DNS to see what proportion point at big tech. My gut feel is that it's a large proportion, but maybe that's just the corner I work in.

email can be run using hundreds of servers on dozens of platforms even from your own house and interact with the email network.

It's nice that it can, but the point of this list is is that what actually happens for the majority of people?

And from my experience, the answer is no, the vast majority of people use Microsoft or Google.

This claim is "Top Provider User Share: Google ≈ 17% → Score: 27/30"

Where does this number come from? Gmail alone claims 1.5 billion active users. Outlook.com has 500 million. But then you have to start adding up all the email users worldwide that are using services hosted by Microsoft (all the Exchange business customers), and the google customers as well (that may or may not be included in the Gmail figures). Then there are all the ISP email addresses that use these services as the provider.

I find it hard to believe that email is as decentralised as claimed here, and I'm really keen to see more data on how it was calculated.

The reason I find it so hard to believe is that when Microsoft fucks up (and given time they always do), a significant portion of the business customers I deal with get affected.

They cover it here: https://livinghouse.nz/#living-house-cost-breakdown

They allocate $15k for insulation. It says cost dependant on location - different parts of the country have different requirements for R value so I'm guessing they are going for bare minimum required by law. However, it turns out they are an architecture company not a building company so they simply sell you the plans for $10k and you contract your own builders to do it (they have agreements with suppliers for most of it but you aren't required to use them). What I'm getting at is you can spend a bit more and get better insulation if you wanted to.

The process manager lets you kill any process.

You can also click the do it anyway button when it's waiting on shutdown, but I've had less consistent success with that.

No mention of insulation, which should be a top priority for low income housing, otherwise the heating and cooling costs will be crazy.

I eventually found this site: https://livinghouse.nz/

It has this cost breakdown:

There's also this more detailed breakdown: https://livinghouse.nz/#living-house-cost-breakdown

It seems it does have insulation, as they allocate $15k for the cost of insulation including delivery.

Heating is via a heatpump (with power partly provided from the solar). The place is only 85sqm so it should be enough to keep it cosy, since it will have to meet modern insulation requirements. It also uses a heat pump hot water system which should save on the power bills.

Also, doesn't fisher and paykel have a fairly poor reputation for reliability?

Yeah I generally avoid them. Lucky thing is that the site explains that they are not builders just architects, you buy the plans from them then find a builder to build it. They have agreements with certain suppliers to bring down the costs but presumably you can decide to buy different appliances.

What surprises me is that they count using an email service as self-hosting. With that logic wouldn't bluesky get a high score because people can bring their own domain easily?

Whaaaaaaaat? Pivot tables are a 2 second job to summarise large amounts of transaction data or similar by month or year. Lookups or countifs would take so much longer!

Not to mention that you can drill into the data using them.

If that is your most unnecessary comment then you must not comment very much because it seems helpful and well placed.

Haha I get the needing to vent. I do try to post nonpolitical stuff as with the politics in the world at the moment the political content can easily outnumber the rest and that's not particularly helpful for mental health.

It's really specifically tailored to reduce the labour required. I think the quality reduction is in the design, it's not exactly the prettiest, they said all plumbing and electronics are designed to be together to reduce tradesman hours (does that mean you don't get hotpoints in convenient places?), all will be exactly the same (you can already get cheaper houses by mass producing the exact same design).

I am also not a fan of high ceilings, which can be hard to heat. Corrugated iron for all cladding is nice and cheap but not exactly the nicest looking.

I wonder how this compares functionally to a flat pack house. It might not be that much different, in terms of both price and function.

It's a good point on the insulation though. It has no mention of that, but says it's pre-consented, so must meet insulation requirements. Are these prefab panels naturally well insulating?

Yeah, it doesn't have specs but I'd guess $15-20k of solar and appliances. It would be pretty awesome for building state houses.

I think this is pretty cool. Obviously every house looks the same but they have shaved a significant amount of labour out of the process, saving a huge chunk of money.

Does anyone know how much it would normally cost to build a 3 bedroom 85 sqm house? The article doesn't mention a comparison price.

I get why it's necessary but outside of programming jobs are there other job applications that require you to do actual work? I'm not a programmer, have done dozens of job interviews and have never done work outside the interview outside of preparing the job application.

I've done tests at the interview (excel, and a written maths test for one a long time ago) and I've done psychometric tests but nothing is quite the same as having to build an entire project with a high chance of getting rejected.

We always presented it as a game we play. My kids are very curious about the world and I'm on the side of not lying to them.

But the articles assumptions are wrong, my kids know there's not a real Santa but it doesn't stop them wanting to write Santa a letter or visit him at the mall.

I tend to find we more tech savvy people vastly overestimate how tech savvy the average person is.

However, I suspect you are right about the people interested in home automation eventually hitting that point and coming across Home Assistant.

Home Assistant have done a great job reducing the barrier to entry. Significant improvements in UI editors and all but removing the need for any YAML config for an average user. Plus the Home Assistant Yellow and Green meaning you no longer need to know how to set up a server and can instead buy a hub off the shelf. Surely these efforts are a big part of why the number of installations has increased so much.

Well it sounds like you dodged a bullet if the team uses tabs not spaces. Insanity!

Congrats on the new job. Money for IT projects seems a bit hard to come by at the moment. Though interestingly I've seen recruitment fail to get any suitable candidates for higher level roles. I wouldn't like to be leaving uni looking for a first job right now, that's for sure.