Even that example shows some thought has been put into non-car users.
The road itself is one way for car traffic, but two way for bikes. This likely allows a non-main road cut though for bike traffic.
The pavement (sidewalk) outside the front of the school is double the width and has bollards along it to stop cars parking on the pavement. This slow massively narrows the road to you’ll likely be driving about 20-30mph regardless of the speed limit.
The junction behind the initial street view has a tiny traffic island with a bollard to protect bikes coming the “wrong way” out of the one way road from cars turning into it. Without that cars turning right into it would always cut that corner.
Given the space constraints it’s actually a pretty well designed street.
As other have noted, it's 20mph, which is pretty common in cities in the UK. In that example even the more major road with two way traffic and a seperated bike lane is 20mph.
30mph is more common in towns.
You might see 40mph if going through a rural village.
50mph isn't too common, but you sometimes see it on smaller or busier major road (A roads).
60mph is the "national" speed limit for major roads and rural roads for cars. Some of these are narrow and twisty, so 60mph should be seen as a maximum, not a recommendation of how fast to actually go. For example, this road in Cornwall[0] would be under national speed limit of 60mph, but you'd have to be insane to drive at that speed. The national speed limit is actually lower for vehicles over 3 tonnes or towing (50mph) or heavy good vehicles and busses (40mph), which is why the signpost for national speed is a white circle with a black cross through it rather than a number.
You'll be 70mph on most motoways (highways) and for cars on national speed limit roads with a central reservation.
Yeah, default residential is 25mph in the US, which IMO is too fast for areas where kids might be running about. The only time I've seen lower is private neighborhood streets.
Yeah, overall Bristol isn't too bad – I've lived in worse places. However, many footpaths are very narrow – sometimes not even enough for two people to walk side-by-side – and there just isn't any more space unless you half the parking. That would actually be good eventually IMHO, but is a far larger change than the previous poster was suggesting.
In some ways these small narrow roads are better by the way, even for non-cars. Everyone understands the need to share the road. Big roads seem to create a "this is for cars only and everything else doesn't belong here and shouldn't be here" type of mindset.
I agree. Two lanes of parked cars is in some ways a "waste of space", but in areas with houses built before cars it's not actually too bad. Naturally keeps the speed of cars passing through pretty low so biking in the road isn't too dangerous.
You may have out of date information there. Mise was previously jdx and it used to use some of asdf plugins directly. Most of those have now been replaced by built in mode plugins for the popular runtimes. I believe it still has the option to use asdf plugins if you want to though.
mise borrows the plugins from asdf, which also makes it non-cross platform. Interesting discussion on this topic on their GitHub: https://github.com/jdx/mise/discussions/66
Solutions considered include adopting the vfox plugin system or transpiling all asdf plugins to ShellJs.
I made some progress on windows last week! I'm working on making it so vfox plugins can be used as the "default" backend instead of asdf which will be a prerequisite for windows support. Step 1 is being able to run vfox plugins inside of rust which I got pretty far on: https://github.com/jdx/vfox.rs
It'll be a long road ahead and I could certainly use some help if anyone out there is interested in moving it forward. That said, vfox is a really great project and they are targeting windows specifically. Windows will probably always be second in the mise ecosystem (because I don't use it) but my hope is I can get at least a baseline of support which would help teams that have occasional windows contributors.
A lot of these are UK based systems which are installed by installers with Heat Geek[0] training.
They're an interesting company who's trying to fill in the lack of training that traditional gas heating installers have to properly install air-to-water heat pumps in the UK. They also do homeowner training courses and a guarantee scheme on their certified installers (they'll fix the system for free if the SCOP is below a designed level).
They did a series of videos with Skill Builder[1] (who's a bit of a heat pump sceptic) where they fixed a badly installed heat pump that was causing a lot of issues. That install is currently 7th on the linked website[2] with a SCOP of 4.5 (450% efficient). Obviously a bit of a sale pitch from them, but there's loads of interesting information about WHY they're making the changes that they are.
I watched a few of their videos as well. Great stuff. Key take away is that there are a lot of installers that have no clue what they are doing. Which results in poorly performing systems. The issue is not the technology but the lack of training and experience.
Another good point is that even an old house with poor insulation can benefit from heat pumps. It just depends on sizing things properly and dialing things in properly. The UK has a lot of old houses that are quite old. This doesn't have to be a show stopper. There are a lot of myths and half truths around this topic. Of course you'll need more kwh for heating if your insulation is bad. But you should still get the same energy coefficients. And you'll pay a fortune in gas as well to get the place warm. Whether that's worth it with or without investing in insulation, windows, new roofs, etc. depends on a lot of things.
Most of the nonsense about heat pumps not working at lower temperatures is easily refuted by the notion that much of Scandinavia runs on these things for decades. Most of the people having issues with heatpumps are simply buying the wrong stuff, or having it installed wrong, or both. People have proper arctic winters in Scandinavia. Also there's a reason lots of Scandinavians ended up in places like Montana: it feels like home to them but with better summers (it's much further south). If people can do heat pumps in northern Norway, Montana is a walk in the park.
it's funny actually, i've been binging their videos the past few weeks, since i'm looking into buying a home in need of renovation, and was happy to see their logos as part of one of the default columns.
they claim also to be mainly motivated by the climate crisis and are even, now, developing an open source water heater, which... you don't often hear about in industries such as home appliances or heating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFBbArwAXS8
i'd love to install an air-to-water heatpump myself, but i'm untrained and i guess i'm feeling a bit of the dunning–kruger effect while learning from the heat geek videos.
Heat pumps require some domain-specific knowledge to build a system that costs less than gas for the same building (the crossover point is near a seasonal average COP of 4.0 at UK's gas and electricity prices, as mentioned in other comments SCOPs of 4.5 are very possible). Yet there are subsidies available and installers without the knowledge (who would normally be installing gas systems) are installing them basically without sizing radiators correctly or by doing things that reduce performance (big buffer tanks, lots of zoning, extra pumps that are unnecessary, etc.).
So there are lots of horror stories of companies installing systems that don't work very well and cost a lot of money to run, which makes people think heat pumps are crap. But usually people like Heat Geek trained installers can fix such systems without changing the equipment - often both providing more comfort than gas (less thermal cycling because heat pumps with inverters can modulate their output more precisely instead of hard switching on and off) and costing less to run than gas.
I see, thanks. This provides a counterpoint to the sibling comment of "they don't perform but everyone blames the user for doing it wrong", but also sounds true, so hopefully as installers learn more about how to correctly install heat pumps, they'll perform better.
COP is Coefficient Of Performance, basically the heat they produce divided by the electricity input, so a COP of 4.5 means that 1kW of electricity produces 4.5 kW of heat (it's taking heat from the environment so you can say a COP of 4.5 means it's running at 450% efficiency, but that's only in terms of electricity use, not actual overall efficiency - but electricity use is what we care about).
COP is only an instantaneous measurement though, and changes depending on the outside temperature. So if you need heating for five months a year, and it's usually exceeding COP of 5 for 80% of that time but dips down to a COP of 3.0 on the three or four coldest days of the year, it's not really correct to say it's either >5 or that it's 3.0 - so SCOP is used as a 'seasonal' COP that is averaged over a longer time period, so you can compare different systems over the longer term.
COP (coefficient of performance) is taken at a full load condition with specific indoor/outdoor conditions.
SCOP (seasonal coefficient of performance) is a weighted average of performance at different load conditions that represent different outdoor conditions based upon an average binning of weather conditions.
Most if not all energy/green subsidy schemes in the UK in the past couple of decades resulted in tons of cowboys rushing after the gold, and doing a terrible job and even causing serious long-term damage to the property.
No different this time round I imagine.
It's so infuriating - literally handing money to conmen
Maybe. However a heatpump sized to cool your house in summer cannot heat your house when the temperature is below about -3C. The heatpump might be able to produce heat to -25C, but it is too small to produce enough. Thus my system (in the US) that I just paid a lot of $$$ to install last fall leaves me using the backup gas heat a lot more than I wanted last winter which is disappointing. (It did get below -25C last winter for 2 days so I'd need that backup heat anyway, but I was expecting only 2 days not most of a month)
A properly sized system will be based upon the worst of the heating or cooling conditions.
Luckily an inverter heat pump can run down to about 25% full load so even with them coupled and in an imbalanced heat/cool environment you can still see good performance year round.
British note: UK govt subsidies for some insidious reason are not available to "reversible AC" style systems, so the dominant form here is air-to-water.
I had mine fitted last year. Retrofitted to existing radiators with 8mm pipework. With natgas backup/hot water boiler. At the end of this month I intend to go back and correlate the bills against the previous year (both kWh and £), because like a lot of discussion in this thread I think the installers have made some poor decisions. There's too much poorly insulated external pipework.
The table in there assumes pretty high quality insulation and the neoprene-looking stuff doesn't meet that standard so would have to be thicker. Note that the way the performance of pipe insulation varies non-linearly with the pipe and insulation radius so it's a bit unintuitive.
How do I know? I had the same problem with my installers.
I have this outdoor unit https://cooperandhunter.us/product/ch-hyp36lcuo. This past winter the temperature dipped into -20C (-11F), had no issues maintaining temperature in the low 70s in the house. I was running them in heat pump only mode (resistive strips were not used).
In the summer our temperature regularly reaches into 90s (above 30C) and the house is very comfortable on those days as well with the same heat pumps
Hmm, that's interesting, we have fairly large temperature swings (typically -15 C in the winter to 40 C in the summer), so it'd be interesting to see if the heat pump could replace the AC unit and the gas heating.
I'm in a similar zone and replaced (delivered) propane with a ground source heat pump 2 years ago. Constant temperature indoors (3C warmer in summer than winter) with plenty of AC capacity to spare. Breakeven is about 5 or 6 years.
They work okay in my area for -1C to 46C, imagine for your range maybe you just get a model that has improved heating over a basic one, whether that means ground source, more stages, or a heating element.
I've watched a few videos of his and I'm not sure I'd characterise him as entirely skeptical of the technology as a whole, but more skeptical of the government incentives to retrofit.
He argues in one of his videos that there aren't enough qualified installers who actually understand heat pumps, and the government incentives are encouraging cowboys, basically, to take the government cash and provide unsuitable installations. Then secondly, a lot of the insulation installers also don't know what they're doing and are creating damp problems by neglecting ventilation.
Even as someone who is a huge fan of heat pumps, it's hard to disagree with him. There are a lot of difficulties with retrofits in the UK, where we have a lot of old terraced housing stock with poor insulation, no mechanical ventilation, and small gardens. Then on top of that, there are almost no tradespeople who actually understand the technology or why that housing stock is unsuitable without extensive improvements.
To be frank, even regular gas plumbers are shocking here. They don't install correctly rated systems, don't set the temperature correctly and don't enable the weather compensation functionality that is built into all modern combi builders and can save you 30%. They just install an over-sized boiler and whack the temperature up to maximum. At least it keeps the house warm, at the cost of inflated bills. That's without getting into the FUD about chemical water softening (and use of magic magnetic "water conditioners" instead), continued use of loft header tanks and not understanding how to improve or balance water pressure.
No they don't and it's kind of like agile everyone tells you it's not done the right way otherwise it would work. But when is sold it's sold as is it's great.. Very deceiving for customers
In terms of saftey ratings, BYD do very well in the Euro NCAP ratings. 5/5 for all their cars in the European market, including the small Dolphin car[0]. This doesn't include the Seagull though as they don't sell it in Europe yet.
The Sainsbury's and Tesco ones happened on the same day (last Saturday), but the scale was very different. Sainsbury's were unable to take card payments nationwide. My local one said it was due to the internet connection in their store not working. It also affected planned deliveries, likely because the scanners they use to fetch and pick the orders didn't have a connection.
Sainsbury's blamed this on a botched "software update".
Greggs happened today and was card payment related but doesn't seem to be nationwide (I've not been to one today so not 100% sure if that's true).
Yes, but only if they proactively switch to the new fee terms. They can still with the current terms (which doesn’t allow non AppStore distribution) and not pay the CTF.
Makes switching to the new fee structure pretty unattractive for a lot of big companies.
That’s amazingly cheap to me if it’s a unit price per kWh.
In the UK for me unit prices from April to July last year were £0.50/kWh (USD$0.64) and that was with the government implementing a price cap and subsidising it.
It’s down dropped to a more reasonable £0.29 (USD$0.37) but that’s still with the government capping the maximum rates that can be charged, but no longer subsidising energy companies as the UK wholesale rate is lower than the cap.
You have to remember that in the US we have deregulated electricity so power charge and delivery charge are separate. That 12c might only be the electric cost. Delivery charge is about 60% of the cost of the whole kwh for me. 40c is probably the delivery + cost of electricity itself.
Up here in BC it is 0.0975CAD/kWh for the first 1350kWh/2 months and then 0.1408CAD/kWh after - and BC Hydro is publicly owned and almost exclusively hydroelectric.
Indeed. Everyone would do well to remember that kind of thing in the US, but only some people actually do. That's why these discussions almost always quickly devolve into irrelevant things like "What? I pay $0.05 per kWh! It says so right on my bill under 'Price to compare'!"
And then the discourse diverges into yet-another discussion about how billing works, and power deregulation, and other things.
But the only number that matters is the total cost per kWh -- including delivery, distribution, generation, taxes, fees, grift, and whatever else might be included in the bill total.
And that's easy to figure out: Total dollars billed divided by total power consumed, for any given billing period.
The result is a number, in US dollars (or whatever local currency), that neatly and inclusively expresses what a person was actually-charged, per kWh, for electricity in their home for that period.
---
So, for example: My most recent electric bill was, in total, $176.26.
I used 1,111kWh during that period.
$176.26 ÷ 1,111kWh = a cost of $0.158 per kWh, plus or minus a rounding error, for the power I used last month.
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Only now can I extrapolate that if that my total cost per kWh remains static over time (it will not, but it is likely to be close), then: A 10 Watt difference in 24/7 power consumption is equivalent to ~$13.85 per year, for me.
I can now also evaluate that cost in more practical terms, wherein: I can see that using an extra 10 Watts on a 24/7 application costs me less than one decent beer per month, or one twelve-pack per year. And I'm pretty far from wealthy, but I can see that drinking one fewer beer per month isn't going to make me wealthier in any practical sense of the word. A 10-Watt difference in power consumption thus won't weigh heavily on my decision to use one system or another -- as long as it is just one such system.
Yep. PG&E + EBCE/AVA runs around $0.52/kWh on the low end to $0.68/kWh on the high end out here. Generation is about a third of that, the rest is delivery. Using PG&E for both distribution and generation would add 5% to the total cost. PG&E got a 13% rate hike approved this for year, and they're asking for another hike in March.
As we race towards $1/kWh I wonder where the breaking point will be.
I'm on a time-of-use plan so the costs vary both on when and how much you use.
The most expensive states (except Hawaii) for electricity like Massachusetts and New Hampshire have electricity at about 18 cents per kWh. Hawaii has it at about 30 cents per kWh but they're an island so I imagine that complicates things. In most states it ranges from 9 to 14 cents per kWh.
California will vary quite a bit. The municipal power companies are quite reasonable (in the Bay Area: Alameda, Palo Alto, Santa Clara?).
PG&E (the dominant player in northern california):
- lobbied hard against muni power
- spent its safety budget on executive compensation
- is recouping its maintenance costs and criminal penalties from its ratepayers instead of from its shareholders
- got Newsom to stack the regulatory body (CPUC) with PG&E sycophants
- is back to paying its shareholders dividends
- has one of the most influential California politicians (Willie Brown) on their payroll
Yes, it's obscene that in a climate as mild as the Bay Area, $400+ utility bills are the norm. Short of some major revolt, rates are set to go up in March as well.
If they’re applying for a visa or citizenship there’s likely requirements that you must have spent X% per year in the country and not abroad, even if it’s inside the schengen zone (or similar). Asking for the exact dates of your travel outside the country is likely the best way to do that
There’s a threshold, you need to have been physically present in the US for 50% of the days of the year requirements.
For example if you’re applying for citizenship based on the 5 year rule, then you must’ve been physically present for at least 30 months (913 days to be exact) in those 5 years prior to your application.
18 months (548 days) if you’re applying based on the 3 year rule as a spouse of a US citizen.
So 8 days instead of 12 can mean it’s no big deal or it can mean you’re not eligible if those 4 days make or break your required amount of days physically present in the US.
It’s one of those silly things the government already knows but wants you report anyways.
While the US doesn’t do a passport check before leaving via the airport, airlines automatically send over departure information to CBP, that’s how they are able to show this information in the I-94 on the website.
Obviously entry is also recorded.
I suppose it’s a way to make it easier to filter out ineligible people at the beginning of processing applications without having to delve into the records to verify and in part to see if you’re honest.
The road itself is one way for car traffic, but two way for bikes. This likely allows a non-main road cut though for bike traffic.
The pavement (sidewalk) outside the front of the school is double the width and has bollards along it to stop cars parking on the pavement. This slow massively narrows the road to you’ll likely be driving about 20-30mph regardless of the speed limit.
The junction behind the initial street view has a tiny traffic island with a bollard to protect bikes coming the “wrong way” out of the one way road from cars turning into it. Without that cars turning right into it would always cut that corner.
Given the space constraints it’s actually a pretty well designed street.