While we're nursing our meat hangovers, we took a cue from last week's email about future-proofing your home to chat about 21st-century home ownership, including the thermodynamically efficient passive house, strategies for replacing cables in walls, current solar and battery capacity, novel construction materials, hanging furniture, and more!
Will: [00:00:00] And I want those smart ones that you aim the camera that maps where all the lights are. And then you can make patterns that go up the side of the tree.
Brad: [00:00:08] I just want ones that work. I want ones that emit light. How about that? Is that a good baseline to establish?
Will: [00:00:16] Look here's the deal. Those, those fancy ones are like 400 bucks. I'll give you all of my existing lights. You give me 400 bucks, even Zs.
Brad: [00:00:22] I don’t think that that's a good deal. I'm sorry. I haven't seen your collection of lights yet. Maybe we're talking about a quantity that I'm unaware of.
Will: [00:00:28] I have a tub. I have a tub of lights. I'm not giving you the exterior ones. I do have the outside lights. That's too much.
Brad: [00:00:35] I bought an extremely short string of lights last year, 10 lights,
Will: [00:00:39] That's not very many lights
Brad: [00:00:40] because, uh, on each light is a little miniature version of remember the leg lamp from the Christmas story.
Will: [00:00:48] Yeah. It's an important piece of art.
Brad: [00:00:50] Yes, of course. Uh it's it's just a little 10, light string of those. Just a bunch of little light off leg lamps.
Will: [00:00:56] Look, I have a confession Brad. I've never seen a Christmas story. I know everybody has gaps.
Brad: [00:01:02] stop this podcast. We're going to pause right now. Okay. We're back. Will has just watched a Christmas story.
Will: [00:01:10] I didn't expect it to go the way it went.
Brad: [00:01:12] It's really some shit. Isn't it.
Will: [00:01:14] Yeah. I like when they amputated that kid's leg and turned it into a lamp, I was
Brad: [00:01:17] Hah
Will: [00:01:18] that is surprising.
Brad: [00:01:20] you didn't know what kind of art they were talking
Will: [00:01:22] Right. I thought I was, I wasn't expecting like a saw turn there, midway through, but
Brad: [00:01:26] Yeah. Christmas is a, some serious, serious business in the Harland. Uh, yeah, we spent like twice, it was like 25 bucks on that string of novelty lights.
Will: DAMN
Brad: We're getting the decorations out a couple days ago. I plugged them in. They worked just fine. I got all excited that they worked. I strung them up where we actually wanted them plugged them back in. They had ceased to work.
Will: [00:01:48] I think it's the plug that you plugged them into the second time.
Brad: [00:01:50] No, I tried it all over the place and tried it. And three of her plugs, I sh jiggled for,
Will: [00:01:55] is it a one bad bulb sitch
Brad: [00:01:56] I probably.
Will: [00:01:58] Look, there's only 10 of all you need to do is take the bulb out of each one and replace it one at a time and then see which one is the, is the dead bulb.
Brad: [00:02:05] are those like universal ish. Like, I don't think this particular, you know, for $25, you would think that it would have come with a few spare bulbs, but I don't believe it did, but, but yeah. Can you pull them out of a different string made by somebody else.
Will: [00:02:15] Let's say sure
Brad: [00:02:17] Sounds safe.
Will: [00:02:18] is it it's usually led bulbs? usually LED bulbs don't die like that.
Brad: [00:02:21] No they're incandescent.
Will: [00:02:22] Oh, so that's the problem. Yeah. The incandescent ones are totally universal. Just get some spare incandescents, plug them in. You're good to go.
Brad: [00:02:29]Okay maybe I can salvage this extremely expensive novelty item then what, what is the mechanism? Is it just like a circuit thing? Is that what is a circuit being broken and is that why they stop working?
Will: [00:02:38] Yeah So, if they're wired in parallel, then the one light bulb burns out and they keep going. If they're wired in series, sorry, if they're wired in series one, light burns out and they stop all of them. Cause no electricity goes down the road. Cause it's just like, it's just like bulb wire, bulb wire, bulb wire, black wire, all the way back around to the plug.
Right? If they're wired in parallel, there's one wire that goes all the way down and touches every single one of them. And then the other wire goes. Maybe there's two wires that go down and touch every single one of them. Anyway, it's more expensive than making them parallel. So nobody does. Here's my life hack for you.
You can get a set of led bulbs and take the legs off of the shitty incandescent bulbs and just put the legs on the bulbs that you want instead of the bulbs that you have.
Brad: [00:03:24] Yeah, Where am I going to get a string of only 10 led bulbs though?
Will: [00:03:27] Look, if they're parallel just to cut the 10 off. Get get a string of 25. Cut the end off. Tape up the ends. You're good.
Brad: Wait is that safe?
Will:Probably
Brad: [00:03:38] there's a lot of, probably in this cold intro. I'm not sure how I feel about it.
Will: [00:04:10] Welcome to Brad and Will made a techpod I'm Will,
Brad: [00:04:13] I'm Brad what's up? Will,
Will: [00:04:14] uh, you know, Thanksgivings over man. Um, I've eaten a lot of stuffing.
Brad: [00:04:18] we're in it. We're in the holidays. We're post one holiday and pre another
Will: [00:04:23] We're getting most of our holiday shopping done this weekend for the first time in history.
Brad: [00:04:27] like remote shopping.
Will: [00:04:29] Not going anywhere you kidding it’s death everywhere is filled, filled with peril, fraught with peril.
Brad: [00:04:35]Just making sure.
Will: [00:04:36] Um, we made your mom's, uh, broccoli casserole.
Brad: [00:04:39] broccoli casserole. I was sad that we did not make it because we had other heavy dairy based vegetable dishes going on. And I was like, eh, it's maybe a little indulgent to also do the broccoli casserole.
Will: [00:04:51] I've never met a casserole. I didn't, I wouldn't consider over something that's healthier. Um, yeah, it was good. I think I made the best Apple pie I've ever made this year. Yeah, I used to go, we couldn't get the Macintoshes we usually get. And, uh, I did a couple of granny Smiths and a bunch of Courtlands and Courtlands, are like a baking Apple that that's, it's kind of crappy when you eat it raw.
It's a little soft, but, um, when you bake it, it holds up in the way that the granny Smith does, but it tastes like a Macintosh. It was a good ass Apple. I was very impressed
Brad: [00:05:22]It bakes up real nice. Are you still making your own crusts
Will: [00:05:25] I did not make my own costs this year. No.
Brad: [00:05:27] Wow. I'm just not standing on ceremony anywhere this year. Huh?
Will: [00:05:31] Look It was, it was, uh, the other thing we learned about this year, uh, is that the cooking isn't really the part that stresses us out before Thanksgiving. It's the keeping the house clean while we're also cooking. So like, like it's fine to spend 20 hours over like four days cooking to make food for a bunch of people.
That's no problem, but like keeping everything, not looking like it's a, just absolutely a hovel was, was the heart anyway. Uh, but we survived. Thanksgiving was fine. We did a FaceTime with a bunch of the people who usually come and, and, uh, then everybody retired off to play video games with their friends from around the country, in other parts of the house, which, which.
As I was sitting there playing Hades on the TV from the PC in the office. I was like, I remember, I remember when I spent dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars, trying to be able to play doom with my friend who lived like four doors down in the dorm.
Brad: [00:06:29] you could have just, you could have just gotten a wagon for 20 bucks. Just wheeled your PC over there.
Will: [00:06:33] Well, I didn't have an ethernet card, they were really expensive. I just had a modem.
Brad: [00:06:38] okay.
Will: [00:06:39] So we, we use the modems and eventually we got these weird modems that had, that was like, it could do full 28, eight, but it could also do a split conversation with like a 14 for data stream and, um, a GSM voice channel on the other side
Brad: [00:06:53]on the same line?
Will: [00:06:55] Aha. So you plugged a headset into the modem, like a, like a motto Monarch headset into the moment, just like we use to say voice chat on a game console, plugged into the controller now.
Brad: [00:07:06] Very primorial version of TeamSpeak.
Will: [00:07:09] Kind of, yeah, it was only two people, but we played a lot of Duke Nukem and doom and descent. And I feel like there was one other thing, but I don't remember what it was if Marty's listening. He'll let me know. Um,
Brad: [00:07:22] to be clear, not the thing your parents wish it had been, which is that they could continue to use the phone for their own purposes while you were modeming.
Will: [00:07:29] Well, I was in the dorm, so they didn't give a shit. They just couldn't call me. They were, they were, I had, once I turned up, figured out how to turn off, call waiting. Uh, my roommates girlfriend and my parents were all very disappointed.
Brad: [00:07:40] So you both got to play multiplayer DOOM and Didn't have to answer the phone. That sounds like a win. That's a win all around.
Will: [00:07:46] It was fantastic. It was a glorious day. That was a terrible modem for the internet also
Brad: [00:07:49] what you that's. Those are the types of feats you can achieve when you are the master of your own kingdom. When you have your dream abode.
Will: [00:07:58] The master of your own Dormaine
Brad: [00:07:59] I'm trying, I'm trying to segue here to identify the topic.
Will: [00:08:03] when, when w uh, when Will and Brad make a dream house?
Brad: [00:08:08] That's right. That's the theme of this episode. I'm just going to put that for the title. Um, this is kind of, I think this just kind of floated out of the, either after that email we got last week, uh, about smart homes and was specifically about future-proofing a smart home.
Will: [00:08:22] Yeah, I went and started reading a lot about passive homes again, which are remain very cool.
Brad: [00:08:26] Yes. Uh, I think that that email or mentioned the, the passive of home stuff.
Uh,
Will: [00:08:31] Yeah. Cause like we're in a situation where if I stay in California, I want to make my house the way I want it to be for the time that I'm going to spend living here and not just have it be the place I've spent 13 years in and kind of like dealing with minor annoyances, but not making any significant changes to
Brad: [00:08:48] well, why don't we take the shackles off here?
Will: [00:08:50] yeah.
Brad: [00:08:51] Why don't we dream bigger? Well, instead of, you know, sort of being constrained by what you were working with currently, uh, I don't know if I had, my idea was let's let's just, we'll just split ball about some fun stuff that would be, you know, good to do. If you took money was an object.
Let's say
Will: [00:09:07] I like money not being an object. That sounds fun.
Brad: [00:09:09] if you had the, maybe not infinite space, but quite a bit of space, let's say
Will: [00:09:14] We're going to need another 8,000 subscribers on the tech pod before we can make this stuff happen.
Brad: [00:09:18] just going to put the home ownership tier on there.
Will: [00:09:20] Yeah. Yeah. Brad buys a house.
Brad: [00:09:23] you at least know what it's like to buy a house and own a house. I mean, like, I, I don't know if we'll get into it here, but I've got all kinds of questions about like building code and zoning stuff.
Will: [00:09:33] Oh, that stuff's all recommendations. It's not, it's not actually binding you. Just kind of forgiveness, not permission situation.
Brad: [00:09:39] polite advice. Okay.
Will: [00:09:41] Yeah. Um, Yeah, buying a house is scary, man. Uh, you have to sign a whole bunch of, we have to come up with a whole bunch of cash and then you give them this thing called earnest money.
That means you're going to go through with the deal, unless something changes on their end and they get to keep the money. If you don't go through with the deal. And it's like 10 grand,
Brad: [00:09:58] Sounds like a bad deal.
Will: [00:09:59] I mean, look, you're, you're saying you're going to buy their house. California is also a weird, like I bought a house in Tennessee.
I bought a house in California, California, especially where we live is a nightmare because.
Brad: [00:10:09] I didn't know. You owned Tennessee houses.
Will: [00:10:11] Well, I bought a house for $58,000 in 1998. That was four bedrooms, two baths. I added a bathroom, it was a foreclosure and it needed a total redo. So some friends of my dad, like my dad's. My mom and dad's contractor, the guy who does all their work for them, just moved down into the house for three months with one of his buddies.
And like I would get, this was right when we started ARS too. So I was getting up at four o'clock in the morning to go be at home Depot and home Depot, or Lowe's when Lowe's open and get all the shit that they had on their list from the night before I would buy it. Cause if, if I let the contractors go to home Depot, those that day was gone.
I would never get anything done that day. So I would go collect all the shit that they needed. Put it in the back of the truck, drive it to the house, drop it off, and then get to my office by seven 30 and time for it to open work until like six o'clock at night. Cause I had a bad job. And then I would come home, uh, stop and get food food on the way home for the guys, drop it off, help them for four or five hours at 10.
O'clock go write the nightly news posts on Arstechnica. So if you go look at like 19 December of 1998, early 1999 news posts written by me, those were all written on about three hours of sleep and two full-time jobs.
Brad: [00:11:28] Hell of a grind
Will: [00:11:30] Um, and then I would go to sleep and wake up at four o'clock in the morning and do it in the next day.
And the guys would leave on the weekend. So I had weekends, but my parents would come down and they would help do shit on the weekends. But those were like more normal. That, that was a more humane hour.
Brad: [00:11:42] and then you immediately moved to California and never got to enjoy any of it.
Will: [00:11:45] I sold the house after I lived there for 12 months
Brad: [00:11:48] Wow.
Will: [00:11:48] and I made $60,000. So it was okay
Brad: [00:11:50] That's not, that's something.
Will: [00:11:52] Yeah. Well, no, I mean, I made, I made 35,000, but it was still, I was not unhappy. Um,
Brad: [00:11:59] we're not really talking about buying houses so much as like molding them
Will: [00:12:05] yeah, like,
Brad: [00:12:05] into, into their idealized form here.
Will: [00:12:09] like there's stuff living in a California house for the last 20 years, like double wall construction is nice. Um, we have a couple of closets that are just like a sheet of. Dry wall between the closet and the, and the rest of the house. There's no like double layers of drywall and studs, which is just the shittiest way to build a house ever.
Um, like there's that, but, but like fixing that is pretty expensive. Like we have to either eat into closet space or you can do wall space or like do significant work and, and probably it's easier. Like, that's the thing you would do if you tear down everything in the house and start over, um, There's also stuff that like I would totally do if we had a little bit more space, right?
Like, like having a central right now, all of like the electronics that run the house, the router and the switch and the modem and all that stuff are kind of like, there's a switch in the crawl space that distributes. Cause the main run goes to the crawl space. Um, and then the router and stuff comes into the garage and there's a couple of runs back and forth from there to the main run.
Um, but it would be really nice to have just like a small rack someplace with all the networking shit and the router and all that just plugged into it. So that, so that like it's in one convenient location and like you can turn it on and off all at once and, and stuff like that
Brad: [00:13:23] That place is called a basement.
Will: [00:13:25] We don't have basements here, man.
Brad: [00:13:27] I know that's a problem. That is one of the many problems with living here. It's very, it's very sad,
Will: [00:13:33] I mean, the garages are kind of like a lot of people in my neighborhood use their garage. Like we would have used a basement in Tennessee.
Brad: [00:13:38] I think of, I think of garages as hot and basements as cool though.
Will: [00:13:42] Yeah. I mean,
Brad: [00:13:43] you kind of
Will: [00:13:43] I assure you, my basement is cool.
Brad: [00:13:45] you want, you want you to watch your electronics in the cool place, not the hot place.
Will: [00:13:49] Yeah, but the, the, the, the, everything is so poorly insulated here. Like, like if I was making one change to my house, I would take all the walls off and, and, and insulate the living shit out of it, because.
Brad: [00:14:01] That's a pretty substantial change if you're only going to make one, but sure,
Will: [00:14:04] I mean, yeah, but it's always cold and drafty in this house. And all of these houses are like all of these tract homes that were built in the fifties and sixties. And even through like the early seventies are like that here.
Brad: [00:14:14] sure.
Will: [00:14:15] Um,
Brad: [00:14:16] this is maybe a good chance to just get down to brass tacks on this whole topic, because I'm kind of curious, like what you would do if you were building from the ground up like, maybe, maybe we should run through the passive home stuff for just cause that's what kinda got this started last week
Will: [00:14:30] Yeah. The, so the passive home is an idea that was started by a physicist, I think, in the seventies in Europe. Um, or maybe he just built the first one
Brad: [00:14:38] it's basically, I watched like the little kind of explainer video this morning and it's basically like the modern thermodynamics home.
Will: [00:14:44] Yeah, pretty much
Brad: [00:14:45] right. Like, it's basically just about, about maximizing, like energy retention and stuff like that.
Will: [00:14:50] Yeah. So, so the idea is that if you seal the house properly and insulate it properly, so triple pane windows, um, uh, like all of when you're building the house, you make sure that all the places that air can escape or come in are, are close up either with like closed cell foam or installation or whether ceiling or something like that.
And you make sure that the house is essentially airtight. Right. Um, and then you, and then at the same time, you also get rid of any. Bridges places that heat can escape. So for example
Brad: [00:15:19] So I, they didn't really go into a lot of detail about what that meant exactly in that video is, are, is it just like, kind of like heat, conductive material?
Will: [00:15:26] It's less, he conducted the material and stuff like chimneys. Um, like your dryer vent is a perfect example. So if you think about it, your dryer vent takes warm air. That would be inside the house and then blast it out into the space where it just warms that warms that little spot right outside of your vent.
Um, things like, uh, uh, I mean, I guess pipes that go through walls, conceivably fit that. But I don't, I don't know how much they care about that stuff. Cause I can't imagine they actually conduct all that much heat. I'd say your plumbing vents probably have some, some aspect of that. Uh, but I don't, I don't know for sure.
I haven't looked into like the actual mechanics on the, on the low, low end. Um, the things like the, the vents underneath to your crawl space. If you have a crawl space, uh, normally you have those to keep it from getting wet in there, and I'm sure they have some other solution for that. Cause I bet that place stays sealed, so it stays warm.
But the idea of the passive house is that like the mere act of having heat generation, if stuff is insulated properly and there's shade in the summer, like the, the act of. Having people in the house and using it and having things like computers and TVs and ovens and stoves running is probably generate will probably generate enough heat that you don't have to use a heater ever.
Brad: [00:16:40] Yeah, they, that, that video I watched made the bold claim that you don't need a heater or air conditioner. If you do this right.
Will: [00:16:45] Aye. Aye. So. If I were building one of those today, I think I would probably still put some sort of heater and air conditioner in just because just to hedge against climate change. Cause it's easier to add that stuff when you're building than it is to retrofit it on later. And like when we're looking at, I don't, I haven't looked at anything to see how those passive homes hold up to 115 degree summer days when it doesn't really get below 80 at night.
And I think, I think that is a thing we have to think about now that we maybe didn't have to 20 years ago.
Brad: [00:17:14] Yeah. Yeah. Like maybe I almost feel like some kind of optional venting system, something that you could close off. Although, I mean, even having an optional opening is probably enough to let some, some heat out.
Will: [00:17:24] Well, well, one of the things, so, so there's a couple of things about the passive home. That a weird one is that you have to buy special appliances for things like the dryer, cause they have to not vent. Um, I think humidity control is probably a problem in those houses, especially if you live someplace wet, like we do, um, The the, um, the big one, I would like.
One of the things that people do here. This is, uh, aside from the passive house thing, but because it's usually hot during the day. And then as soon as like the sun goes down in the fog rolls in, it gets really nice and cool. A lot of people do whole house fans, which is basically one really, really powerful ducted high, high CFM fan that can vent all of the air and suck all of the air out of the house in like two, three minutes.
Um, and you put that in a central location and then just blast it straight out into the house and open. Like crack windows in all of the rooms and then flip that thing on for five minutes. And it turns over all the air in your house in like in like five, 10 minutes.
Brad: [00:18:22] Ah, that sounds delicious.
Will: [00:18:24] Um, it's awesome. Uh, we have some friends who have one and I regret not putting one in when we put the furnace in.
I didn't know about it then, but they're like, like you can do one that's window mounted for like a hundred bucks or you can, you can do, you can usually do a ducted one that goes in like the ceiling and your main hallway or something for, uh, under a grand. So it's way cheaper than putting in air conditioning.
If you live someplace coastal.
Brad: [00:18:47] So if you, if somebody just came to you with a blank check and was like, Hey, go build a house.
Will: [00:18:51] Yeah.
Brad: [00:18:51] Where would you start these days? Like, I know you have not gone, gone through it. Okay. Interesting. So that's kind of, what I wanted to get into here is just like, I don't know shit about this topic, cause I've never even owned. Previously, somebody else was home, much less built one myself. But like, do you have any sense of, are there contractors out there that are specializing in futuristic? Like I started to say modern building techniques, but of course they are, but like more and more forward-looking stuff like the passive house or, or other like smart home oriented building stuff.
Will: [00:19:20] Well, I mean, you can always find, there's definitely people that do like the default for a new home construction today in terms of smart home stuff is really, really high. Like when you're, if you think about it, like the difference between a home that is has like smart switches and stuff like that in a normal home is that you're paying instead of paying.
Yeah, three bucks for switches, you pay 50, 40, 35 bucks for switch. So you're paying like 10 X on the switches, but compared to the cost of building a house, which is going to be a couple hundred thousand dollars, probably like adding, you know, another 500 bucks for a thousand bucks for switches is a kind of inconsequential cost
Brad: [00:19:54] Sure. Yeah, but I mean, that's just kind of like a slight variation on your existing electrical work, right? Like I'm thinking more, I'm thinking more big picture stuff. Like the concrete is a good example of, of something I wouldn't have expected to hear.
Will: [00:20:04] Well, so, so the concrete is interesting to me, um, because it's thermally, like it holds a lot of energy, so it's warm at night and cool during the day. Right. Um, you can insulate it pretty easily by putting, you know, styrofoam and stuff like that in between the, the in-between layers, you know, some sort of insulating material,
Brad: [00:20:23] Wait styrofoam.
Will: [00:20:25] We get so like those, those foam boards.
So, you know, one of the ways that you insulate the walls of a house now isn't by putting that rolled pink shit in, you just put a bunch of these foam foam boards in and put
Brad: [00:20:38] What is that pink stuff.
Will: [00:20:40] It’s fiberglass, That's why it's so itchy. Um, but anyway, yeah. So, so like that stuff works, uh, it's resistant to weather. Which is important in 2020.
Um, when we're looking at like, I live on the coast and we see 60, 70 mile an hour wind gusts now, like I don't those when, when you get much higher wind than that, then shingles become a problem. Cause they just blow off and I don't want to deal with that. So, um, You know, it's it's yeah. It's stuff like that.
I think you can always find a contractor. That'll do this stuff you want to do. The question is, can you find somebody that's going to do it on the budget that you want and how much are you willing to spend to, to make that happen? And like I'm, if I build a house I'm not gonna. I like first off, I would never encourage anybody to try building a house from the beginning, from the get-go if it's their first house, because you're just going to build a house and you can be like, shit, I wish I'd done this and this and this and this and this.
And then you're going to end up building another house 10 years later, which is what my parents didn't the eighties. Right? Like they built three houses before they figured out what they liked and they had, and they had like, they were realtors. They had sold a bunch of houses. They'd remodeled dozens of houses at that point.
And they still fucked it up twice before they got it right. Um, I think like smart lighting is a really easy thing to do. I say easy, but you know, an easy air quotes thing to do that will make your house feel smart and in a really impactful way. And it sounds stupid when you say it, but like when you don't have to think about turning the lights on and off, when it's just a thing that happens for you, it's really nice.
Um,
Brad: [00:22:13]is there an aspect of that that is more involved because you're building as opposed to like, like.
Will: [00:22:18] No it’s much easier because you're building like
Brad: [00:22:19] that's what I mean, like, is there more, I guess, or I guess a better way to ask this is like, is there more you can do there then than when you're just kind of retrofitting with like a whole, like a, kind of a home assistant setup or
Will: [00:22:29] Yeah, you can, you can do things like integrate motion sensors in the places you want. Motion sensors. It requires a little bit of thinking future thinking about how you're going to use the house before you maybe know, but you can also do things that are relatively inexpensive. Like it's really when that, when the walls are open, it's really cheap to run wires.
And like, if you're willing to do it, you can just do it yourself and you can run them and then hide them back behind the wall. Or in the attic or in the crawl space or whatever, and leave them there so that if you want to poke them up later, you can easily without having to do the actual runs yourself.
So stuff like that, I, I highly recommend, um, like put ethernet, put cat six anywhere if you're building a house, put cat six everywhere. You can possibly imagine you'd ever want to have some sort of data or power connection.
Brad: [00:23:15] So you're really getting into my wheelhouse here because a, I love hiding electronics. I strongly feel that gadgets should be used and not seen, which is why I've got all my network gear mounted on the back of this desk and stuff like that. But, um, running cables is the most exciting thing to me about potentially owning a house someday, maybe.
Um, but, uh, I'm wondering if there's like, are there permanent solutions that you're aware of or can you think of one for. Like, I guess it would be some kind of a conduit situation where you could easily some mechanism that would easily allow you to run any cable you want after the fact, without opening walls, back up, like some kind of conduit and open panel situation in the wall or something like that.
Do you get what I'm saying?
Will: [00:23:58] So in my experience, conduit, sometimes it makes it harder. Like if you run an empty conduit, it's easy to run the wire through. But if there's already wires in the conduit, it's, it's a challenge.
Brad: [00:24:06] Well, that's that you get into the situation where you're like attaching the new wire to the end of the old wire and pulling it through right at point
Will: [00:24:11] Yeah. And that never works. Right. That never does what you wanted to do.
Brad: [00:24:14] But it sounds so simple.
Will: [00:24:15] Look, my father, when he, when they built their office, he had this brilliant idea to put a bunch of conduit in the floor for ethernet and stuff. But then this was in like the early nineties before ethernet was really available. So we didn't know what cable to run and.
We made it sealed. And then he was like, we're just gonna hook a balloon on the end of this thing with some sand in it. And we'll hook the shop vac back up to the end, want it to come out and it'll just work. And I was like, Oh, I don't know about this one, dad. And it worked once, but then as soon as there was a wire in there or any like dead bugs or anything, it, it was a disaster.
So, um, I think. Uh, it's w if, if you have access to a space between floors, so if you have access, if you have a crawl space below in an attic above using a cable, snake is super duper like a cable puller, really easy. You, um, you need a long drill bit and you, you, you're going to have to kind of patch up a hole in the, in the wall to put your panel in any way to put your, your, your plug cover in.
So you put, uh, electrical boxes behind that and then screw the screw, the, um, you know, the panel covers into that and screw whatever your jacks are into those boxes. And you can put those in, in a way that they don't have to tie into studs. Uh, you can leave those loose and then that makes it even easier.
Um, but yeah, like if you drop strings down there, something like that. So you have something to tie off to. It's just going to come. The strings are just going to rot before you need them
Brad: [00:25:36] Yeah, I guess, I guess there's always going to be challenges to working inside of something that you can't see or maneuver around in behind a wall. Like, um,
Will: [00:25:43] but for 20 bucks now you can get a, uh, wireless, uh, like snake, snake scope thing that you can shove up in the walls to see. Yeah. Did you not know about these
Brad: [00:25:54] is it like a laparoscopic, house surgery or something
Will: [00:25:55] like a laparoscopic camera for your, for holes in your house and back. Like
Brad: [00:25:59] That's incredible.
Will: [00:26:00] I bought them for gopher holes to jam one down in the gopher hole and see what we can see down there.
Brad: [00:26:04] What did you see?
Will: [00:26:05] A bunch of dirt. It was really boring.
Brad: [00:26:07] you didn't see any gophers.
Will: [00:26:08] No, they, it turns out they saw the light coming and we're like, fuck this.
Brad: [00:26:11] had vacated the premises. Okay. Yeah, I was just.
Will: [00:26:15] so that, like, if you. If you are not afraid to make a hole in your dry wall and cover it with a plate, like you just cut a hole. That's the shape of the plate, the, of the, of the gang box that goes in there.
And then you put one of the, the no stud gang boxes in that has the ears. And they're like, the ears are just like, they're like little flaps that fold in when you're pushing it in, then you turn a screw and they fold out. So it holds, it, holds it up against the wall, real tight.
Brad: [00:26:38] Okay. As soon as you said, uh, no sta gang box with ears, I got to the point where I assumed you were just making up terms,
Will: [00:26:44] No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Um, and, and then like, like if you do that and then you get to, you can get drill bits, uh, specifically for this they're kind of expensive, but they're worth having, if you're, if you're going to run a lot of cable, uh, that are like four or five feet long that you can angle in and the shafts are bendy, so you can angle them in to the gang box hole, get down to the floor where you're drill.
Yeah, drilling through the, the floor and then push them down through the hole. And then there's a string hole on the end that you can tie the string into and pull the bit and the cable and everything back up. So, um,
Brad: [00:27:19] And is that somewhat reusable? Like really what I'm getting at here is just like, you know, we're, we're at a point now where like cable standards are changing often enough that you're probably going to want to swap cables in your walls out at some point. And so like some kind of like, Permanently or mostly permanently reusable situation where you could run new cables to replace the old ones.
Like I'm surprised there's not more of a kind of an established solution for that.
Will: [00:27:41] Um, I mean, it's just work. It's just hard work. The thing, the thing to remember though, is if you run, if you run. Uh, cat six, which is good for up to 10 gigabit ethernet, theoretically through the walls, and then everything else lives in that server rack, any fiber or anything weird that you're going to put in, in the future to make like the server talk to the, the switch more effectively is going to be.
Easily accessible. And then if you want to get fancy, you can run some dark fiber to like, to like the entertainment center and where your main PC is going to go and stuff like that. But realistically, it's a long time before we're going to need fiber in the house. I think for most people.
Brad: [00:28:16] You're probably right. But yeah. So it's only been in the last year or so that fiber in the home has become enough of a thing that I would even have an idea like that, but like USB is another example of like, and this is getting into wall plates and I wanted to mention that as well. Like it seems like we're finally.
Finally, starting to actually go through the USB a to C transition,
Will: [00:28:35] I mean, USB D is just around the horizon, Brad.
Brad: [00:28:38] stop talking about that fool me once can't get fooled again. Um, I mean this, this gets into the wall plate stuff a little bit, but like, is there similarly a, is there a solution that is not like a hard installed wall plate, but it's more of a, kind of a soft pass-throughs situation where you could run.
Cables. I don't know. I feel like I'm not describing this well, but like,
Will: [00:29:01] You mean to get USB power in your wall sockets
Brad: [00:29:02] yeah, like, like, like, you know, again, like I say up until about a year or two ago, you would have just defaulted to straight up 20 year old USBA ports and forgotten about it. But like, we are getting to that point now where like, probably most of the devices I've gotten in the last six months are USBC now.
So like, like, uh, that's a solution that lets you swap things like that out without having to do a bunch of reinstalling.
Will: [00:29:26] So Switching out gang switching out like power outlets is really, really easy. Like if you, if you know how to turn off. The circuit breaker for the outlet and know how to test, to make sure that that breaker is actually off, which means like you flipped the breaker that you think is going to turn off those sockets that you're looking at, and then you plug something in and make sure it doesn't turn on when the breaker is turned off.
Right. Then you take off the gang plate cover, you unscrew the two screws that hold that, that outlet in place. And then there's three screws and three wires on the back of that. You don't ever want to touch the copper part because some of it can still be hot, even if the breaker's off. Um, but you unscrew those three wires and then you screw three wires back onto the new outlet.
And if you, I think the safe way to do is probably to do one at a time and like unhook and then re screw and then unhook and re screw it's. It's like a 10 minute job. Like it's, it's it's um, I wouldn't want to do it every year, but I wouldn't. Like if there's a big transition, like one of the things Gina had asked about was if we could get some USB ports on kitchen counter, cause like often there's an iPad or a phone or something there that's being used while she's, well, one of us is working in the kitchen, um, and it would be nice to be able to just charge that stuff straight from the wall without having to have a brick there.
But, but,
Brad: [00:30:40] What if you hollowed out the bottom of the counter and installed wireless charging in there instead.
Will: [00:30:43] look, that is, that is, uh, if the devices at Hand. Used wireless charging, that would be a totally viable solution.
Brad: [00:30:51] Um, here's maybe a better test case for what I'm talking about. Like you're, you're totally right about swapping out the USB power ports, but like a solution for just passing cables through a wall. Like the idea I have is like, let's say you've got like your office with your PC on, in one room and across the wall on the other side is your living room with your big TV.
Let's say you want to run like a video out through the wall from your PC. Okay. So as opposed to having to install wall plates and Daisy chaining, you know, like. The, I guess the standard way to do it is you would plug HDMI from PC into a wall plate. There's another cable behind that inside the wall that goes to another wall plate on the other side.
So you're actually, you're going through like what three or four discrete cables there.
Will: [00:31:32] Yeah, but it doesn't matter because the, to the computer, it just sees it as one. So that's what I, that's exactly what I have. So I have on one wall plate, there's female, female Jack's facing out on both sides of the wall. One of the wall plates has, um, female socket on the inside and one has a male wire coming out of the back.
And they're literally like three inches apart from each other on either side of the wall. So one plugs, I plugged them in, put those, put those plates on and it's good. That's it. That's all there is to it. Um, that, that ideally you want to do those on gang gang boxes that are hammered into studs because the HDMI connector is a fairly, requires a fair amount of force to pull in and out on those ear gang boxes, it's a little wobbly.
Um, but yeah, that works fine. It's worked. It's worked for me for a long time. If I, if I want to go to 4k, I think I have HDMI 1.3 or whatever reports in there.
Brad: [00:32:28] So that’s why I actually bring this up is that even, you know, HDMI standards are changing and at some point you're not gonna be able to do what you want to do with those wall plates anymore. So like I was envisioning like, almost like a doggy door for cables where you could just pass a cable through a wall, like a little trap door situation or something like
Will: [00:32:43] So I had that for a long time and I switched to this because it was less annoying having the cable dangling through the wall. Like you can put a, you can put just like a loopy gang box on there. That'll protect the wall so that the cable doesn't like erode the gypsum board or anything. Um, but, but like, it was not.
Having having the ability to move that cable through the wall was bad for a lot of reasons. Like it was, it made gypsum dust everywhere. Um, it opened a huge hole into the cold part of the house. So like it essentially vented the crawl space into my living room, which wasn't great. Um, there were a lot of reasons that it was, so the other thing is the, the on the wall plates, if you buy all the same kind of wall plates, which you should, if you're building a house.
Then the, then the hole size for each socket is a standard. So for example, you can get like a three-hole wall plate that has three squares in it. And each one square was ethernet one square was HDMI one square was It was cable back when that was a thing. And then you could pop those out and replace them really easily.
So like, if you want to replace the HDMI one, you just get the new version of HDMI pop that one out, put the, put the new one
Brad: [00:33:52] Oh, you mean the literal port would come out.
Will: [00:33:54] the literal
Brad: [00:33:54] It's just, it's
Will: [00:33:55] square. It's
Brad: [00:33:56] it's just, it's just a, it's just a cutout for the port to fit
Will: [00:33:58] Yeah. It's like one inch by one and a half inches or something like
Brad: [00:34:01] Okay. I assumed all the plates you would buy would come with ports kind of hard, hard, wired into them.
Will: [00:34:06] And those ports are like, no more than 10 bucks. Usually they're like, uh, like the ethernet ports are like 50 cents each when you buy them in bulk. So yeah,
Brad: [00:34:14] I'm just, I'm, I'm all about a reusable and replaceable and kind of modular solutions and not being locked into any standards for too long, so. Okay. That's awesome.
Will: [00:34:22] Yeah, it won't apply to the power cause there's transformers and stuff that happened to have had to have to happen to the power sockets. But, um, but yeah, it's like, there's no reason not to like that stuff is super, super easy to upgrade. Um, one of the other things I, I, I have spent a lot of time thinking about spending a lot of time in a relatively small room with one vent and no air conditioning and running a giant ass computer with a, with a 300 watt GPU or something in it that it would be swell to have to a use the heat generated in this room to heat the rest of the house and be, uh, have a way to get the heat generated in this room, out of this room without necessarily roasting everybody else in the house.
Brad: [00:35:07]okay, you should undervolt that GPU I did it. That's pretty awesome. That Card is consuming. This 3080 is consuming, let's say 50 to 70 Watts less now than it was
Will: [00:35:15] How much of a performance hit did you take.
Brad: [00:35:17] zero. I mean, I haven't benched him. I haven't benchmarked. Well, I did, I did do some, uh,
Will: [00:35:21] I haven't benchmarked it
Brad: [00:35:22] I did a few benchmarks and eyeballed the numbers look the same, and I certainly can't tell a difference in any of the games I played yet.
Will: [00:35:28] Well, I play player. Unknown's battlegrounds, the ultimate life and death fight a crafting game union game, which is not actually a union, but just claims to be a union. Uh, I I'll try it
Brad: [00:35:36] I kept the clock speed at, let's see it capped it at 1850, and I think it was spiking up to, to like maybe 1900. So you're only, you know,
Will: [00:35:44] probably 15, 50 hertz
Brad: [00:35:45] what is it, what is a 50 megahertz difference on the GPU with all the other bottlenecks you're talking about? Right. Like, it's, I, I can't tell a difference.
Will: [00:35:52] I'll give it a try.
Brad: [00:35:52] It's it's pretty good. It's pretty good.
Will: [00:35:55] Uh, anyway, it's still gets hot as shit in here. Cause there's two computers running like, like a, if I had a way that I can, if I could run fiber to the garage and like have everything that's on the streaming PC, like have a bunch of connections here for all this stuff.
That's on the streaming BC, but not have to have this streaming PC right here. Totally would do that.
Brad: [00:36:13] so that is like maybe the biggest question I brought into this thing. Uh, is a way to do basically exactly what you just brought up, which is like, I love the idea of having a rack in the basement. That's not just say an NAS and maybe even like your PF sense box, if you want to rack one of those, but also like what if your streaming box was a rack-mounted thing in that stack?
You know, like what if X, Y, and Z that is not like gaming consoles and your desktop gaming PC. All just lived in that same stack, but then you get into situations where it's like, okay, well now I need to run a 20 foot USB cable to a hub and they'd run 20 to 30 feet of HDMI. You know what I mean? Like they're like, some of those cables will travel over distances like that very well.
Um, and some of those connectors just aren't made to be extended out period, you know? So like I'm trying to think
Will: [00:36:58] put all this stuff in a basement and your office was directly above the rack. It's only like a five foot run, 10 foot run.
Brad: [00:37:05] So, yeah, I'm trying to visualize, like, what are all the things you would need to run to be able to have like every PC that's not your desktop in a different room.
Will: [00:37:12] So for me, it's two, HDMI a USB and a D and a display port, or HDMI.
Brad: [00:37:18] So that's like, that's pretty doable,
Will: [00:37:21] I mean, look in a perfect world. Somebody would make some sort of like a port streamer thing that takes all of these dubers. You plug one box in on one end there's fiber on the other end, and then you run it through fiber or whatever, Thunderbolt three, whatever it is up into the thing. And then the ports are, there's a, the same ports on the other end.
Brad: [00:37:37] That sounds impossible.
Will: [00:37:40] It's like a digital snake. That's all I want.
Brad: [00:37:43] It's not so much to ask.
Will: [00:37:45] No, it's simple. Really? Um, get the D the dedicated, cooling, like the dedicated studio space is I think the thing that keeps the passive house from working for me, cause I think I probably generate too much heat in here.
Brad: [00:37:58]Just pumping way too much energy into the equation.
Will: [00:38:00] Look, I'm just, I'm just a big watt generator, man.
I just can't can't stop cranking those Watts.
Brad: [00:38:05] I heard that about you.
Will: [00:38:06] Yeah.
Brad: [00:38:07] Um, I've watched a video recently that I thought was pretty interesting and to be fair, I feel like it's kind of a sad commentary on the times. It could, because it was about, uh, apartments. It was about housing in San Francisco about the housing crisis in San Francisco apartments and how they were maximizing space.
And it might've come out of our discord actually. But, um, essentially they were attaching things like your bed and dresser space and really just about anything. That's not like a chair to the ceiling with a system of motorized pulleys.
Will: [00:38:40] I like this
Brad: [00:38:41] Like everything would just retract into the ceiling after you got up and started going about your day.
Will: [00:38:47] is this like a, is this like a tiny house hack?
Brad: [00:38:49] So, so yes, like in this, in this case, and again, this is why I said it's a sad commentary in this case, this was a way to allow a person to live in likw. I don't know, a one eight by 10 room or something
Will: [00:39:00] I love this.
Brad: [00:39:01]for their entire living space. And like the space would become the bedroom at night. When you lowered the bed down from the ceiling.
You know, it'd become kind of a living room in the day when the bed was up there. Like that kind of thing.
Will: [00:39:12] This is the other thing. If I were building right now, I would do higher ceilings. Because like our ceilings are too low to do that kind of stuff. And I think, I think like for a multi, if you, especially, if you're talking about a small house, which if you live in a coastal area or city someplace, you're going to have like having the ability to do lofts for stuff.
That's like, Like having the ability to loft my kid's bed or bedroom would be amazing. But with eight foot ceilings, it's not, there's not enough space underneath the loft to make it actually usable space. It's just kind of like at best a reading nook or something like, it's not like someplace we could put our school desks or anything like that.
So why bother? It's just means that like, if it's harder to make her bed, so we're not going to fuck with it. Um, I I'm, I'm, I'm very into like, I love, I love one of my favorite things is like seeing a loft where they put drawers underneath the stairs to get up to the loft like that, that seems like a super useful thing.
Cause it's usually it's just dead space. Um, I think all that stuff is super cool.
Brad: [00:40:19] If you could fold your bed away, would you ever make your bed again?
Will: [00:40:23] I wouldn't make my bed everyday. When I folded up into the wall,
Brad: [00:40:26] I don't think that counts.
Will: [00:40:27]Look the beds made honey.
Brad: [00:40:29] How are you going to know the difference?
Will: [00:40:31] It's like Schrodingers bed
Brad: [00:40:34] You'll find out when you lie on it.
Will: [00:40:35] Yeah. Is it made or unmade? Who knows? Oh, well it looks like it was messed up, but it must've gotten messed up when it folded up in there.
I don't know, know what's going
Brad: [00:40:41] that pulley man, that thing just really has a mind of its own.
Will: [00:40:43] here. My question is if you have the folding up bed, do you still sleep with your head toward the wall? Where if the bed folds up while you're in there, you're going to be standing on your head and, and like break your neck potentially. Or do you sleep with your feet to the wall and your head in the middle of the room?
Brad: [00:40:58] That's a good question. So you're talking,
Will: [00:41:00] everybody sleeps with their head to the wall? Why do we sleep with our head to the wall? It's a weird thing.
Brad: [00:41:04] you talking about, talking about the bed, like folding down from vertical to horizontal.
Will: [00:41:08] Yeah. Like, have you ever been inside a Murphy bed when it was, felt folded up?
Brad: [00:41:10] No.
Will: [00:41:11] Oh, we went to a, we rented a house one time when I was a kid with some friends, for like a family vacation
Brad: [00:41:17] Murphy bed in the Google here.
Will: [00:41:19] Murphy bed is the one that pulls out it's like on hydraulics and folds up into the box on the wall.
Brad: [00:41:22] I see.
Will: [00:41:23] And we spent the entire weekend like this other family and my sister and I folding each other up into the beds.
Brad: [00:41:30] Of course.
Will: [00:41:31] And like, it was definitely better to be feet, feet down when you were folded up in the bed. Cause it was a little hinky. If you were head down,
Brad: [00:41:39] a little hinky maybe sounds like an understatement to me.
Will: [00:41:42] look when you're 10, a little hinky is okay. When you're 40, a little hinky is shit. I'm going to have to go and get a physical therapist now.
Brad: [00:41:49] That’s fair, Uh, so the situation I'm talking about, the, the bed remained horizontal at all times. It was literally suspended from the ceiling on yes. And like you literally hit a button and it just retracted upwards into the ceiling. It did not fold.
Will: [00:42:01] we thought about doing that for the kiddos bed too. Just like hook and chains on the four corners and hoisting it up. So it's like four feet off the ground. It was a bad idea.
Brad: [00:42:10] Decided against it. Yeah.
Will: [00:42:11] Gina was like, I'm not allowing this. And she was probably right.
Brad: [00:42:13] there, you know, just obvious safety concerns to having an entire bed suspended over your head all day long. But I, I, I didn't fully grasp the mechanics of this. Um, but they said they have some like foolproof mechanical solution for making sure those things don't ever fall down.
Like
Will: [00:42:28]do we need to refer back to the Douglas Adams thing about the only difference between a thing that is impossible to fail and designed to fail is that, you know, when it does fail, it will be impossible to fix.
Brad: [00:42:39] They swore they swore that it was mechanically impossible for that bed to fall on your head, but I'm not entirely sure.
Will: [00:42:46] Um, I don't know. I don't know about impossible to fail. That seems like, that seems unlikely to me, but, uh, um, I, I like, I like that, like, there's something, so, I mean, we, there are three of us. We live in a thousand square foot house, which in, most of the country is as, is a pretty small house. I think.
Um, I really like living in a small house. If I could change one thing, it would be awesome to have two bathrooms,
Brad: [00:43:14] I can see it.
Will: [00:43:15] one bathroom with a kid, and like everybody having to get out of the house at the same time of the day is a little bit of a challenge.
Brad: [00:43:23] Well now nobody has to leave the house or can leave the house ever. So that problem has been obviated.
Will: [00:43:29] this is weird. I've become a nighttime shower guy.
Brad: [00:43:32] So have I
Will: [00:43:34] Like,
Brad: [00:43:34] that's interesting.
Will: [00:43:35]I like to take a show right before bed. Cause then I get into bed. The sheets are all nice. I'm all clean. When I get in the sheets.
Brad: [00:43:39] Yeah, totally. I'm with you. I mean, the only downside of that is when you put it off for too long and then you get sleepy and then you don't want to bother, but you also don't want to give them the bed dirty
Will: [00:43:49]I mean realistically how dirty are we getting these days
Brad: [00:43:50] then you, then you find yourself sleeping on the couch occasionally.
Will: [00:43:54] look, I've done that.
Brad: [00:43:55] yeah, that's, that's interesting. I have not heard that from anybody else and it hadn't.
Will: [00:44:00] Yeah, I've always been a morning shower guy, and now I've had to adapt to being an evening shower. Sometimes I do both, but usually it's just evening. Um, I feel like, uh, let's see, what else are we forgetting? Anything that was on the,
Brad: [00:44:12] yeah, I don't know. I thought, I thought we might dream a little bigger than we have here. I was trying to come up with some just like outlandish ideas for like, Oh, if money was no object, what would you do if you were building a house? Like what kind of cool future stuff would you do to take up your house?
But.
Will: [00:44:26] I would absolutely do full solar and some sort of storage thing.
Brad: [00:44:31] that was like the last thing I was going to mention, but I mean, that, that is, that's a big pie in the sky thing of like, Oh, let's just say that batteries are 10 times more efficient. Now. Now we can do this.
Will: [00:44:40] I, you know, I don't even think it's that pie in the sky. I think if you design the house and think about how you like this. So the secret of doing generators, cause we had generators at my house when I was a kid and my parents have generators that they're at their house now because the power goes out fairly often in the winter.
And since they're, since they're all electric utilities and on a well, like they don't have toilets. If the, if the power out
Brad: [00:45:03] Yes. But I di I live that reality for the entirety of my youth. So I, I get it.
Will: [00:45:07] Yeah. So the trick is you don't want to have the circuits that are on the fail over. So you have to decide which circuits are on the fail-over when the, when the power goes out. Right. And you have to be smart about that because it has to be the things that actually need to stay on like the refrigerator and the wellhead pump and probably your internet.
If that's a thing that. That can conceivably keep going when the power's out. Um, but you don't like, like they don't have that. I think the things that they have on are their master bedroom, the kitchen stuff, and then like living room, they use portable lamp. They use like solar, solar charging lanterns. If the power is out, uh, the heat pump is on.
Uh, but, but then the only bedrooms that have power are their bedroom. And I think one of the guests rooms maybe, um, And, and it ends up like if you design your stuff so that the batteries are running that thing and you live someplace that gets enough sun and you have enough solar panels on the roof, you should be able to live more or less normally, um, w with, with like a reasonable number of panels and a reasonable number of batteries at this point.
Brad: [00:46:15] Do you have any idea of what quantity? I mean, I don't know the numbers would be super meaningful to me, but I wonder like just kind of maybe an hour count of how much power you can reasonably store these days.
Will: [00:46:25] I mean, there's the power walls. I'd have to look it up, but the power walls that Tesla is selling are I'm going to type right now. Sorry.
Brad: [00:46:33] No, it's fine. Actually. I mean, are our, the power walls are the use cases for those intended to be, to run a home on not that's not for really charging their vehicles.
Will: [00:46:41] Yeah, no, the whole point of it is to run the home. If, so the point of it is to buy electricity from the grid at night when it's cheap and to sell it back during the day when it's expensive, um, you know, capitalism, the let's see, I'm looking to see how much energy. They have, and, and you can do fail over with them.
So like the trick is if you want to do fail over with solar so that you have power, when the sun's out, you still have to have some sort of circuit that turns everything off. So you don't pump energy back in the grid and electrocute the line workers, which is, which obviously would be bad. Um, the power walls hold like two, three kilowatt hours.
I think I'm I'm Oh, here we go. Specs 13.5 kilowatt hours on the power of wall.
Brad: [00:47:26] Oh that’s not nothing.
Will: [00:47:27] And they can be floor or wall mounted, indoor and outdoor. You can do up to 10. So like your, a house, my size, I would need like two probably. Um, and that that's even if I want to keep using like the gaming PC and the giant TV and stuff like that.
Brad: [00:47:42] that's actually like more feasible than I realized how, I mean, I guess the key is how expensive are those things?
Will: [00:47:48] Well, I mean, so the thing about the roof, the solar is you probably want to do it when you do a roof, right? Cause you're cause like you don't want to have the roof. Um, hold on. Let's see what let's come T I'm going to see what I'm going to see, what they recommend for my house. Two 50 is the average electric bill.
No. So the recommendation, so they will, they say three power walls for 25 grand, 24 five.
Brad: [00:48:16] Mm
Will: [00:48:17] Uh, and if I add another $12,000, they can give me 8.6 kilowatts worth of solar panels. So
Brad: [00:48:23] for? That was okay. That's.
Will: [00:48:25] yeah, 36 K for the panels and the wall, which is pretty expensive.
Brad: [00:48:31] Wow, well, that is expensive, but that's, those are the types of prices I was seeing people quoting just for the solar panel install, you know, a handful of years ago.
Will: [00:48:39] Well, and I was gonna say, so the presumably that puts me at 250 bucks a month off of my electric bill. So I'm, I'm not paying a thousand dollars every four months. So in that context, you're looking at four divided by four times 36 is so like 10 years you paid for it.
Brad: [00:48:58] Yeah. So still a good handful of years to pay itself off, off, but
Will: [00:49:01] The thing is, I don't know what the life span on the batteries is.
I assume that they're building these things with enough capacity above and below is that you don't dip into the 80 plus percent in the sub 0%. So presumably they should last a really long time.
Brad: [00:49:15] Yeah, we have.
Will: [00:49:17] Um, and also you shouldn't probably, I mean, I guess you use them all the time. Cause the point is to buy electricity when it's cheap and sell it when it's expensive.
So.
Brad: [00:49:25]I just, just barely been looking at fail-over generator situations recently, even for all the gas powered ones, those are not cheap. Like I was looking at them for my parents who might need them in the near future, but like, they've got like a manual, you know, manual generator, but the ones that fully tie in are a pretty penny.
Will: [00:49:45] Um, and, and just so you know, with the three walls, three, three batteries, and the panels that they recommend, they're saying it's 7.5 days, backup duration before you start losing. So you have full power for seven and a half days before the, the batteries are drained all the way.
Brad: [00:50:02]That’s not terrible.
Will: [00:50:03] Yeah. And presumably if you are, are, are thoughtful about your electrical use, you know, during the daytime then you're yeah.
You're back on. So anyway, and they're saying that's a $40,000 twenty-five years savings, which is a little suspect, but anyway,
Brad: Ah that’s a sales pitch for you.
Will: yeah. Um, I don't, I don't think that that is an unreasonable thing to spend money on at this point.
Brad: [00:50:29]No, Especially if
Will: [00:50:29] I don’t know if Tesla is the place I would buy the batteries. I know that they've had problems with their solar panels.
I don't know how the batteries are. I haven't looked at any of this stuff. So don't take that as a, as a recommendation for a product to buy. I'm just using it as an example. Cause it's the one, everybody knows.
Brad: [00:50:42] Yeah, but I mean, especially if you're in an area prone to frequent outages, like we are where you would, you would think that they should have just buried all the power lines several decades ago instead of having to fix them five times every winter. But,
Will: [00:50:57] Um, th the other thing is the, the economics on that changed dramatically. If you're not in a state that lets you sell power back to the power company during the day when the panels are generating
Brad:I don’t know there were such states.
Will:Yeah, they'll, uh, Texas is like that. So if you, if you can sell to the grid during the day when the price is high and buyback at night, when the price is low, because demand is low, this makes a ton of sense.
If you are someplace that does not allow you to do that, the, the, the economics change pretty dramatically. So, um, and it'll take a lot longer to pay off anyway. Uh, I think, I mean, I think that's a good at places I need to wrap it up.
Brad: [00:51:34] That’s a decent the little survey, I appreciate, uh, hearing about all this advice that I will never get to make use of. As long as I live in the state of California,
Will: [00:51:41] You'll get there.
Brad: [00:51:42] maybe
Will: [00:51:43] Look, there's a crash coming. It's a good time to buy when it turned during a real, when the market really bottoms out, um,
Brad: [00:51:48] I hear Fresno is nice.
Will: [00:51:51] central Valley hot, what I feel like there's, there's gotta be some crazy pie in the sky thing, but like, I don't, like, I don't want to pin Opticon around my house.
Right.
Brad: [00:52:01] Probably not.
Will: [00:52:04] I mean, maybe, I guess, I guess it would be cool to have like a house space, drone that flies up and surveys the perimeter and scares off. Like, yeah, here's what I would like. I would like something that keeps the raccoons and gophers and skunks from digging up my backyard every goddamn night.
That would be dope. Like a little robot that comes out and yells at them and squirts him with water.
Brad: [00:52:21] Okay. I thought I was thinking maybe like some kind of ultrasonic device or something, but maybe that works too. Robots are always good.
Will: [00:52:27] I look, I maybe, I think at one of those little robotic mowers, it can just, I can just set it to trigger winter. There was motion go out and scare them off. Um, yeah, I don't, I mean like a water capture system, I would love, I feel like we waste a ton of water in gray water.
Brad: [00:52:42] Like we're, we're not the experts to talk about this, but I would love to hear from people more ecologically minded people. Like I like the passive houses, a good example of that, right. Of something that is just like, not exactly high tech, like it's all pretty sensible. Conservation stuff, you know, but it's employed in a very efficient way to just reduce resource constraints.
Will: [00:53:00] Well, I, I went to a talk a few years ago from a woman who is a gray water environmentalist and err, and she's like, look, it's asinine that we flush our toilets with drinking water. When our houses produce a ton of non-potable water that we should be using for that. And like the plumbing change to make.
Like there's the, the costs to make your toilets flush with gray water when your building is almost nothing, because you basically just add a pump and a cistern , and to collect water from kitchen sinks, bathroom sink, utility sinks, stuff like that. And then pump that and then run a separate water line from there to the toilet.
Right to the, to fill the toilet tanks. And it's like a few hundred bucks worth of stuff. And maybe a little bit more hassle when you're building, it's really hard to retrofit in though. Cause every, you know, the plumbing, isn't just one giant maze of pipes and, and it means that we would use half of, cause the toilets are one of the biggest water consumers in most people's houses, especially if you have old toilets.
So, um, stuff like that is like the kind of outside the box, thinking that costs practically nothing and has a massive impact now.
Brad: [00:54:08]Seems like a lot of, a lot of inefficiencies in home building built up around things, just being done the way they've always been done.
Will: [00:54:14] There's a lot. Well
Brad: [00:54:15] that seems like, that seems like the big impediment in a lot of cases.
Will: [00:54:18] Well that, and then there's also a lot of, like, if you're talking about houses that are built in mass tract houses are usually built by the cheapest and the cheapest way possible. So they don't do things like put fucking insulation in the walls because this code only requires it in the ceilings or in the attic or whatever.
And, and you end up with these houses that like costs $30,000 less than the, than to do it the right way. But they, the total cost of ownership over 40 years of the 50 year life span of the house is hundreds of thousands of dollars more because we're wasting an ad we're contributing to carbon in the atmosphere and all sorts of other stuff.
It's just, yeah anyway
Brad: [00:54:54] Have you ever looked into lawn upkeep in that context? Like I was, when I was reading the other day, the Clover is, is kind of, uh, becoming a big thing in lawn management because it's very self-sustaining and like much lower, uh, water requirements. And I want to say it's like better, a better ecosystem for insects and stuff like that as well.
Will: [00:55:11]So the model lithic lawn is one of those things it's really bad for the environment. Cause you, you replace native stuff with non native stuff, and then you get rid of all the food that the bugs and the critters and stuff eat. So like my gopher problem is explicitly because we have a fescue lawn and it attracts a lot of grubs and the grocers, like the grubs.
And then here we are, um, The, the lawns are a shit show. I mean, I, I, if we didn't have a kid, I would've gotten rid of my lawn as soon as she's not interested in playing in the backyard, we're going to replace the lawn with stuff that is native and doesn't require watering because the wa the watering is the problem as much as anything
Brad: [00:55:47] What is the, uh, yeah. What is the, what is the term for the type of law that requires zero irrigation? Like, it's basically a dry lawn. It's like kind of landscape with rocks and stuff like that. There's a, there's
Will: [00:55:55]You can do that. The fake grass is really good now, too.
Brad: [00:55:58] There's a word for that kind of landscaping. And I can't remember what it is.
Will: [00:56:01] um, I mean, it's, it's, it's just, uh, arid landscaping. Maybe. I don't know if you use it. The trick is all you have to do is plant native plants because the native plants know what to do here. Right? Like th the other benefit is that if you plant that stuff, you don't have to maintain it as much.
So, you know, versus mowing the lawn twice a week in the summer, because you fertilize it like an asshole like I do, then, then you, you are just, you know, have stuff that's supposed to grow here and it works well, and it's pretty, and it looks nice and all, you know,
Brad: [00:56:30] zero escaping is the word I'm looking for X, E R I escaping.
Will: [00:56:35] Yeah, that makes sense. Uh it's I, I get, I get the, I get somebody's water bill who lives in Beverly Hills because they gave my email address as their email address when they signed up.
So I get angry notifications when they go over their watering allotment every month. It's great. Really terrific. Um, But yeah, I think stuff like that. I mean, I think the thing to do is think about what the impact of your houses is, what the footprint is and doing things like insulating better reduces carbon emissions because you use less energy to heat and cool.
A landscaping appropriately uses less water. Um, building something that is sturdy and isn't going to have to be torn down in 20 years because it didn't hold up to the changes in the climate. And the weather that we're going to face are is, is important. Cause like the most environmentally catastrophic thing you can do when you're building your house is build a house, right?
Like you're cutting down trees, you're making nails, you're building all this plastic to go in and insulation and all this stuff. And like, you need to make that last as long as you can. So. So I like concrete brutalist,
Brad: [00:57:40] yes,
Will: [00:57:40]brutalists knew what was up.
Brad: [00:57:41] it tends to stick around.
Will: [00:57:43] Uh, I don't know if I want to live in a concrete house though is the thing.
Brad: [00:57:47] No, ah you put whatever you want on the inside.
Will: [00:57:49] that's true. That's true. Um, speaking of, uh, things that we are thankful for. I did a lot of thinking about things I was thankful for as I was watching, like I said, my daughter and wife played video games with voice from across the world with friends and family members. And I was like, this is amazing.
Brad: [00:58:07] No, you know, there's a lot of things we take for granted these days.
Will: [00:58:09] Yeah sometimes the future is good. Right? Uh, I'm thankful for our patrons who. Um, have, have been a really positive force in my life for the last year. Like the checking in on the discord every day, um, has been a source of sanity and fun and, and human contact. That has been really nice as we've been stuck in our homes.
Brad: [00:58:31] for sure.
Will: [00:58:32] Um, and this is the last episode of the month. So as always, we think, uh, are a bunch of more patrons than normal, but, uh, first let's thank the executive producer level patrons, Jacob Chappell, Andrew Cotton, and David Allen as always. We appreciate you guys, but we also appreciate our associate producers and everyone else.
Uh, so thanks to Tom Hilton, Jacob Wilson, Terry Cox, Arthur geese, the bunny fiend. Then Gomi David Julian. Dan Brockman Jad, Rita, Thomas Shea, and Graham banks. Thank you all so much. And everyone, uh, from, from all levels of the discord of the, of the Patrion on up, uh, if you, uh, want to find out how to get in on the discord action, you can for two bucks a month at patrion.com/techpod, uh, I don't know what we're going to do.
Our, our Patron exclusive episode about this month right now,
Brad: [00:59:22] I'm sorry, our what exclusive episode.
Will: [00:59:24] patron exclusive episode.
Brad: [00:59:27]Oh that right? Yes.
Will: [00:59:28] Hey, did you hear that? I pronounced the person from Denmark's name, right? Or Finland? I can't remember
Brad: [00:59:34] Oh, finish, finish. I believe it was. Yeah. So yes, I believe he did. Yes.
Will: [00:59:38] See, occasionally,
Brad: [00:59:39] Yes. Once in a while, as long as it's Scandinavian.
Will: [00:59:43] Yeah. Uh, but uh, you can find out, uh, again, it's, uh, patrion.com/techpod.
You can find out how to support the show. We appreciate it. If, look, we know that this year is a brutal for everyone. So if you can't support the show, that's also fine. Um, yeah. Tell your friends.
Brad: [00:59:58] Spread the word.
Will: [00:59:58] Do the tweets, let the people on your other discords know that there's a better discord out there, come in and be like, Hey man, this discord blows, Do you know what’s great, the techpod discord. It w it reps, it's like nine out of 10, 9.9 out of 10.
Brad: [01:00:12] There you go.Will: [01:00:13] Um, we had somebody come in the other day who worked at Canopius in the nineties. Did you not see it yesterday? You gotta go back.
Brad: [01:00:20] I am
Will: [01:00:21] this this morning,
Brad: [01:00:22] I'm literally typing that word into the search right now.
Will: [01:00:25] Yeah, it was good stories there.
Brad: [01:00:27] What? Wow, man. Holy
Will: [01:00:30] Maybe we should start doing member spotlights for the Patrion exclusives.
Brad: [01:00:33] I started to just quote from what they said, but I don't think that's that's maybe
Will: [01:00:36] Yeah, no, no,
Brad: [01:00:37] let people join and read it. It's not like there's anything sensitive in it or not, but it's just looks like a, Oh my God.
We have to end this podcast. I have to read this conversation right now. Holy crap.
Will: [01:00:47] uh, we'll be back next week.
Brad: [01:00:48] wait. He's got the, he's got the source code from that.
Will: [01:00:51] look man. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good discord. I'm telling ya. Um,
Brad: [01:00:56] That's a good time.
Will: [01:00:57] We will be back next week with another episode, uh, Patrion patron, exclusive episode coming soon. Let's say maybe first, 1st of December, since the, this month has kind of happened fast. We'll get it out sometime this week though. Um, thanks Brad. It's good to talk to you as always,
Brad: [01:01:14] Yep. Take care of y'all.
Will: [01:01:15] Bye everybody.