At least hardwick has a downtown.

Very true. Which is why it is important to check that before investing in a heat source.

What about from a permitting/code perspective? If the barn is already part of the footprint then it might be easier to fix it up then go through whatever environmental permit process related to impermeable surfaces etc. etc.

You can feel the wind in half of my living room because we need windows so badly.

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if you live in an area with frequent power outages, a wood stove for backup heat is a great idea.

Vermont Energy Contracting & Supply. I'm in Chittenden County. Love the ducted system, they just tore out the furnace and replaced it with an air handler with a heat pump coil and one outdoor unit. We repurposed existing ductwork so no noticeable difference outside the basement.

Before I got my heat pump I looked at historic electric outages and temperatures over the past 10 years. It was a clear winner in terms of efficiency and reliability of infrastructure.

I grew up with wood.I have a pellet stove currently but heat pump tech has come a long way and they truely are hard to beat at this point

This. And, I believe the only way currently to remove a Sheriff is by legislative impeachment, a slow laborious process. The reason we are seeing so much corruption and abuse of office among sheriffs is due to lack of oversight and accountability. I fully support legislation to curb this abuse of office

geo's awesome, if you have the right conditions (and bank account).

-17 at my house this morning and the heat pump system is purring. it goes into defrost for 5 minutes every 45 minutes or so, but the temp inside is within a degree or two of set point.

The section 8 and 55 plus crowd are the ones that are desperately hurting.

That over simplified "law" would only be true is housing were a commodity and everyone had access to all the market info. Then if we built a noticeable oversupply of housing, prices would fall.

Housing is not really a commodity and we are building mostly for the high end of the market. A small study was done after several new projects were built in my Burlington ONE neighborhood and the average rent in the area went up, not down! Basically the new apartments came in with significantly higher rent and advertised how fancy they were. Other apartments increased their rental price to be near, but significantly lower than the new ones. The cost of new construction is so much higher than the cost of an apartment in an older building that is paid off, that there's plenty of room for new construction to pull up rent prices.

Burlington has added around 1000 new apartments in the past several years, and the increase in rent has sped up. I think part of the problem is that it would require maybe 10x as much new construction to make a noticeable oversupply, and the market would build an oversupply if it can help it. So we have to have policies on existing buildings, like restricting short term rentals like Burlington did, increasing the tax preference for owner-occupied, etc.

What has changed over the past few years when the cost of housing was increasing was not an increase in population or decrease in supply as that simple economic idea would suggest. It was a change in who owns housing and their profit expectations. The tripling of the share of single family homes that are owned by investors was likely a big cause.

I'm in northern VT as well and I have one phone with ATT and one phone on Mint. Both have dead zones in my area, but Mint had vastly more.

That site was a wetland and even the solar racking had to make special accommodation of that. The fact that housing couldn't be built there wasn't because of NIMBY.

New apartments are Section 8? Which ones? In Burlington, the new affordable housing I'm aware of is only what is required by the City's inclusionary zoning when market rate housing is built.

We used to have a shitty little 1br apartment in Burlington, and our heat was about on par with that per month. Of course the upstairs neighbors were only paying 100/mo because they got all of our heat 😭 couldn't get out of that place quick enough between the heat fuckery and lack of driveway maintenance. I used to have to pull everyone out of the driveway in my outback, otherwise everyone would get stuck and gridlock the parking lot.

This is where the geothermal setups really shine.

Fuck, I'd love me some heat pumps, let alone a geo setup.

No, it doesn’t happen. Trees don’t “explode.” In extreme cold, you might hear loud gunshot-like sounds in the woods.

Trees contain water and that water can freeze and cause them to crack with a loud pop.

Trees don’t explode.

People got SIM swapped as a result of this breach. Google itself was not breached, but TMO was, and Google rides TMO's network. Yes, no personal information was taken, but a phone number and SIM pairing is enough to swap a high profile target (and TMO's previous breaches have resulted in PII getting exfil'd). Verizon is also generally known as the hardest carrier to SIM swap (though not infallible). This probably doesn't matter for the average person, but if you have a job that grants you access to valuable information, or are another juicy target (journalist, lawyer, activist), you don't want to get swapped. Verizon got breached last year too, but they also have swapping protections built into their account security options.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-fi-data-breach-let-hackers-carry-out-sim-swap-attacks/

Curious for your take on the breach though, since you didn't actually share any information. Let me know if I got anything wrong.

Both are possible, the ground does it too, it's called a "Cryoseism" or ice quake!

We also elect our legislators.

Great post, /r/heatpumps would appreciate the data too. I didn’t track it to your degree, but I noticed similar performance with my hyper heat (single zone 18k BTU).

Having thought about it some more, and thanks to this information, I believe it is maple trees violently cracking. The edge of the pasture that I spoke of in the post is facing south and elevated above the surroundings, so it is likely that the trees there warmed up more than the ones in the woods. This would explain why I heard the noises only for the first few hours following sunset, since the sap was still readily flowing through the tree as it was freezing rapidly. I have definitely heard many loud cracks on a cold winter night, but this was exceptional.

The “poors” cannot just “leave”. The money required to do so is cost prohibitive. Also, finding work with the current public transportation system is tough too.

The “poors” are stuck here.

I understand your post and you’re right, but the housing crisis is a reality in many states. Here, one is more likely to freeze to death without a home. I believe that makes it a tad more urgent.

I think you feel the same way.

Kirby/stj/lyndon: -31 on my therm. outside..no idea what the feels like is but thankfully there wasnt any wind when i went out about quarter to. Brr indeed!

OTOH everything after this is gonna feel like spring!

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