In the UK, it's expensive, and it's not the technology, it's everything else. I don't see how that can improve unless the installation costs come down, and I don't know how that could/would happen.
I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).
The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.
The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.
Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.
I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.
I wasn't ripped off, but I didn't go for the cheapest quote either. I wasn't trying to suggest my installation was typical or what someone could expect to pay in the UK, the point I was trying to make was the cost of labour adds significantly, and overall even if you paid half what I did, it's still too much to expect the majority of UK households to take it up.
My system is larger than typical for a UK home, I also paid a premium to have it installed by a company with an excellent reputation for their work, I'd had a new roof the week before and wanted a high quality installation.
I also went with a company that let me decide how I wanted it installed; other companies wanted to put the batteries in my loft or under the stairs which was an absolute no from me, I don't want them inside my home, and I had them install the batteries and inverter in a brick out house on the opposite end of the property to where the consumer unit is, again, at a premium.
I had per-panel optimisers and monitoring hardware installed, and because I wasn't aware of it until later, I added the bird-mesh on after signing the contract and did get ripped off on that part (NOTE: if you get solar in the UK, and have ever so much as seen a pigeon, get bird mesh).
It's also worth noting that checking today, all of the hardware has dropped in price, my panels are now 20% cheaper, batteries are 15% cheaper, inverter is 10% cheaper, and I imagine installations and labour might be cheaper in the winter than the peak of summer like I had mine installed.
All of that said, the total cost of installation doesn't really matter so much as the ROI, which for me works out at most ~6 years, if none of the hardware fails in the meantime.
EDIT: There's a mistake in my previous comment which I based all of the subsequent numbers on; the cost of 2 batteries + inverter was closer to £5k not £3.5k.
Absolutely. A local company is currently advertising 12 470w panels, 10kwh storage for £7695 fully installed with additional pannels fully installed for £200 each. /r/uksolar is a great resource for comparing quotes.
There are a lot of variables that need to be factored in, and they don't cover many of them in these cheaper quotes.
What size inverter? Is it a hybrid inverter? 10kWh of Storage is 8-9kWh usable because batteries are only warrantied to 80-90% depth-of-discharge, is that enough?
Since there's only ~5.6kWp of panels in that quote it's probably over-provisioned, and it will likely come with a smaller inverter, say 3.6kW, which is what a lot of these cheaper companies will do, and export will be limited under G98 to 3.68kW.
That also means that in peak sun, your 5.6kW of panels are going to clip at the inverter capacity and you won't be able to access more than that limit in power.
£200 per extra panel isn't bad, the company I went with charged £300, but mine came with per-panel optimisers (at my request, mainly for the monitoring functionality rather than optimisation). If I wanted to add an additional elevation though, that would be per-panel cost plus ~£2000 for the additional elevation of scaffolding.
If you're going for one of these installations and haven't already, ask these questions, and if you can get a decent price that's great, I wish you luck. I'm not on reddit so I can't comment on the quality of that sub.
That quoted price is nuts I did it cheaper in Canada in 2007. And that was with tracking panels (which I would never do again, I'd just buy more panels).
They may be an expert in Go, but from their writing they appear to be misunderstanding (or at least misrepresenting) how things work in other languages. See the previous discussion here: https://lobste.rs/s/exv2eq/go_sum_is_not_lockfile
> They may be an expert in Go, but from their writing they appear to be misunderstanding (or at least misrepresenting) how things work in other languages
Thanks for that link.
Based on reading through that whole discussion there just now and my understanding of the different ecosystems, my conclusion is that certainly people there are telling Filippo Valsorda that he is misunderstanding how things work in other languages, but then AFAICT Filippo or others chime in to explain how he is in fact not misunderstanding.
This subthread to me was a seemingly prototypical exchange there:
Someone in that subthread tells Filippo (FiloSottile) that he is misunderstanding cargo behavior, but Filippo then reiterates which behavior he is talking about (add vs. install), Filippo does a simple test to illustrate his point, and some others seem to agree that he is correct in what he originally said.
That said, YMMV, and that overall discussion does certainly seem to have some confusion and people seemingly talking past each other (e.g., some people mixing up "dependents" vs. "dependencies", etc.).
> but then AFAICT Filippo or others chime in to explain how he is in fact not misunderstanding.
I don't get this impression. Rather, as you say, I get the impression that people are talking past each other, a property which also extends to the author, and the overall failure to reach a mutual understanding of terms only contributes to muddying the waters all around. Here's a direct example that's still in the OP:
"The lockfile (e.g. uv.lock, package-lock.json, Cargo.lock) is a relatively recent innovation in some ecosystems, and it lists the actual versions used in the most recent build. It is not really human-readable, and is ignored by dependents, allowing the rapid spread of supply-chain attacks."
At the end there, what the author is talking about has nothing to do with lockfiles specifically, let alone when they are applied or ignored, but rather to do with the difference between minimum-version selection (which Go uses) and max-compatible-version selection.
Here's another one:
"In other ecosystems, package resolution time going down below 1s is celebrated"
This is repeating the mistaken claims that Russ Cox made years ago when he designed Go's current packaging system. Package resolution in e.g. Cargo is almost too fast to measure, even on large dependency trees.
I started learning Blender recently to have a play with throwing something on my blog with Three.js (we're a long way from that), but I appreciate now how you want to remove as much geometry as possible that isn't visible to the user to give the impression it's all very much there and solid, but presents the actual bare minimum to look right[0].
Anyone got example of levels with cool stuff hidden outside of the player area that can't be accessed while clipping is enabled? I remember some stone tablet with credits, in some game, in an "Aztec" area/level many, many years ago, don't remember which game though.
That's the thing about scaling; you offload the work to the "client" (the TV in this case) and make it do the work, it need not send back more than a simple identifier or string in an API call (of course they'll send more), so they get to use a little bit of your electricity and your TVs processing power to collect data on you and make money, with relatively little required from them, other than some infra to handle the requests, which they would have had anyway to collect the telemetry that makes them money.
Client side processing like this is legitimate and an excellent way to scale, it just hits a little different when it's being used for something that isn't serving you, the user.
I'm guessing that's 60 million people that don't have a small child that can just type stuff that looks kind of like code but doesn't actually work like code.
At least in my experience, most of the poor UX can be explained by the fact that LG shipped underpowered hardware for the OS and apps that are expected to run on it. I bought my TV a year ago and it lags or loses input on the main menu, and it's even worse in apps. Forget it if you want to use the overlay menu to change a setting lol
If you remember Palm/HP webOS, it had Preware homebrew that didn't require exploits to run, it was supported by default and was amazing. LG patched the one vuln that would have let me at least root the TV.
The Android TV devices I bought from reputable retailers are at least beefy enough to handle input without lag, and I can run whatever APK I want on them.
The only software that I want to run on my TV are TV channels, and all the streaming operators, for anything else I have devices that I don't need to root.
My Android TV on the other room is equally just good enough to run Android, also not going to win any benchmarks.
Agree that the overlay menus on WebOS take their time to come up, but I am not going into them all the time for them to get into my nerves.
I have a C8 from LG, and I'm so happy with it after so many years, works wonderfully as a dumb panel, and a great panel at that. I wonder if it's impossible to use the newer ones like that. Anyone has any experience? Asking because our neighbors want the same great "tv".
I have to agree, simply not buying LG isn't an option, we'd have to rule out just about everyone for the same reason.
I have a slightly older WebOS LG TV, it has PS5, Switch 2, and FireStick 4K Max and an Onkyo receiver plugged in, and as an OLED TV it's incredible, LG would always be my first choice for picture. Don't care about built-in sound as I use a sound-system.
Right now I'm in the market for another TV at around 65inches and was looking at the 2025 model LG OLED, I likely won't connect it to the internet and will probably just hook up an Apple TV following some discussion in another comment section about how much I hate my Fire TV for being ad-ridden.
Really I wish LG or someone would just make a dumb TV with 4+ HDMI, ARC, perhaps DP and a remote and let us hook up what we want; but it'll never happen.
This is my plan for beginning of new year (42" model), mixed games & desktop usage (I know oled ain't best for windows work but non-oled gaming monitors are rather crap ie due to non ideal local dimming, ghosting, mediocre colors compared to oled and so on).
Didnt plan on making it also a TV with internet connection, now I darn sure as hell won't.
Its really sad state of things that the best course of action now for new hardware is to simply use it as it is, never update or plug online since for any chance of any minor issue being fixed there is 100x the risk it will go to shit in substantial ways (I have Samsung q990d - they soundbar literally dying for good after an official update, but that one you had to at least push yourself from phone or via usb).
Not possible with everything, or at least not without substantial hacking for many.
That seems a bit of an overreaction. The top 10 front loading washing machines on Consumer Reports' rating list are 8 LGs followed by a Samsung and another LG.
If you don't want WiFi you can still get a top rated washer. The LG WM3400CW, which is in a 3 way tie for high score, does not have WiFi (or Bluetooth, or any other radio).
Note: Consumer Reports says that it does have WiFi but they are mistaken. It does have LG's "SmartDiagnosis" which lets you view diagnostic data in their app which is probably what confused them. On models with WiFi the app gets the data via the network.
On the 3400 you press some buttons on the washer to tell it to send diagnostics, and then it sends them acoustically similar to the way analog modems sent data. You tell their app to use the mic to listen to that and decode the data.
The WM3470CW, #10 on the Consumer Reports list, also is radio free and uses sound for SmartDiagnosis. Consumer Reports correctly lists this one as not having WiFi.
That's the problem. Front-loading washers have generally been a terrible invention. Unbalancing and mold are among the widespread problems. The actually reliable washers are still top-load.
I've always wondered, since we only have front-load washers here in the UK, is there some sort of advantage to it, aside from space, which seems to be the obvious one, does gravity help with battering the clothes around when the drum spins slowly enough they can fall from the top of the drum?
Front loaders are gentler on clothes, use a lot less water, use a lot less energy, and spin faster in the spin cycle so there is less work for your dryer if you use one.
Top loaders are easier to load and unload, cheaper, and slightly easier to maintain.
With front loaders you should wipe the gasket after use because water left in its folds can promote mold and odors. With both you should leave the door open when not in use so air can circulate in the drum. With a front loader the open door can get in the way and is easier to accidentally close.
Interesting, thanks, I had no idea about much of this, I was aware of the door/mould thing, and stacking, though it's not something I've ever seen done here in the UK personally.
As a "typical" British household, we don't use a dryer, don't even own one in fact, we just hang our clothes to dry, which always struck me as ironic for such a humid, cold country, with smaller (than the US) homes and thus less space to hang stuff to dry.
It’s funny, I never connected my G5 to the network or accepted any of the optional T&Cs, so there’s now numerous places in the UI that say “accept terms to see personalised content”.
I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).
The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.
The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.
Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.
I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.
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