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.
The killer feature is that you can extend this with your own macros. E.g. if you want the address bar to recognize "hn " as a prefix keyword, and redirect "hn firefox address bar" to, say, Algolia — you simply create a bookmark with "Keyword": "hn" and "URL": "https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%s" (not actually a URL, don't click on it) – %s indicating where the macro parameter substitutes. Then "hn firefox address bar" macroexpands to
HN won't let me edit or delete the first time I replied and I don't like how its formatted. Though I just tested and am adding this sentence as an edit, strange site behavior... Sorry for repost folks but need to:
Oh boy, "the list"... Here goes a simplified version:
The simple flight path in the video does not relly do it justice. When you throw it outside, it will have a beautiful loooong curved flight. When there is some wind, it often goes to explore the sky for quite a while before it comes back down again.
If anybody knows a design that can compete with this one, I would be very interested to try it!
> they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free
I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc.
I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. They are passionate about cheap mindless entertainment. I see the same things in their friends and classmates. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
I’m sure there are a few youths who are using their time productively and it will pay dividends for them. But, from what I’ve seen, the vast majority aren’t interested.
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.