Yeah; loss of utility heat in the wither has a much higher fatality risk, I'd think. The difference is, many homes have multiple heating methods available to them. If the natural gas is out, use an electric spaceheater, for example. Some homes use electric heat, others natural gas, others heating oil (which is a distributed solution.. or at least, involves a caching layer!)

Many homes have fireplaces or wood-burning stoves, again, for backup.

I think the parent means they don't want to take a nap in the midday heat.

That said, presumably it's still cool enough to sleep indoors, because, while the outdoors is hot, the indoors has not yet fully heat soaked.

Right, the idea is that you go find a comfortable place and rest rather than staying in the heat and exerting yourself at whatever job you were doing.

I'm not sure about a surplus. 4-9pm are still peak hours and a quick skim of this CAISO page[1] indicates we're importing electricity during peak hours.

I think the solar generation from say 10am-4pm is where you'd find a surplus, if there is one.

At least at my home, there's only ~20% difference between peak and off-peak rates, but, if you have A/C, it still makes sense to pre-cool on hot days, back it off at 4pm and then turn it back up at 9pm if you still need the cooler temps to sleep.

1. https://www.caiso.com/content/summer-loads-resources-assessm...

Peak hours after you subtract all the non utility solar.

The peak grid demand has slowly been moving later in the day (and year) because home and commerical and industrial solar is displacing grid demand.

https://www.caiso.com/documents/californiaisopeakloadhistory...

People regularly use this solar success to claim solar is useless.

Pre-cooling makes sense. Also, in the evening, whole house fans are pretty great. It seems like we have a lot of options?

I’m in the SF bay area, though, so that’s playing on easy mode.

Maybe not peak, but there is significant overlap, and batteries are cheap enough to cover the gap for the non-overlapping part (e.g. 7-9pm)

Whereas for winter heating, you would want to preheat a lot, and you would also need an oversized PV array, because there's just way less energy available from the sun.

My home doesn't have A/C, but the only time I wish I had it was to sleep on hot nights, which this doesn't really solve.

I think many of us (myself included) operate under this fundamental assumption that air conditioning is somehow sinful and wrong, against the natural order of things, but heating spaces is a good and worthwhile use of resources.

I made a slightly-snarky comment along these lines once, and a fellow commenter on HN pointed out how efficient air conditioning is. For one, it's always accomplished via heat pump; eg, moving heat, so the only byproducts are electricity consumption and waste heat. We know how to produce clean electricity. On the flip side, heating indoor spaces also produces waste heat, but a lot more of it. Much worse, the vast majority of home heating (at least in the US) is done by burning fossil fuels. If you compare the heating demands of the northeast to the cooling demands of the south, in terms of BTUs, the heat demands are way more intensive.

The most important factor in this equation is the temperature change required. The temperature differential between a winter temp of 20 or 30F to an indoor temp of 70F requires SO much more energy than cooling from a summer temp of 90F to indoor temp of 70F.

So I can remain smug about living in a mild climate in the Bay Area; my total energy consumption is much lower than the average home. But I probably shouldn't feel smug about not needing A/C when the real problem is the gas furnace I run every morning and part of the day, for months on end, from November to March.

(My house is actually currently missing several walls; the gas furnace has been thrown in the trash and it's being replaced with 3 heat pumps, which will give me both A/C _and_ more efficient heat. No thanks to PG&E, which will reward my GHG reductions by charging me out the ass for the electricity required to heat my home).

I think the other part is historical -- humans have harnessed combustion-based heat in their shelter for thousands to millions of years.

Powered air conditioning didn't really take off until the mid 20th century. Prior to that most simply used fans.

>I think many of us (myself included) operate under this fundamental assumption that air conditioning is somehow sinful and wrong, against the natural order of things, but heating spaces is a good and worthwhile use of resources.

I don't think I have ever met or heard anyone think or say that...

I'm curious where you grew up. Heating indoor spaces in the winter has been effectively mandatory during the lifetimes of anyone who would be commenting here. On the flip side, air conditioning only became widespread during the lifetimes of many HN commenters, and the population explosion in the sun belt (desert southwest of the US) is a relatively recent phenomenon. So from a familiarity perspective alone, heat is far more popular. That's before you get into the way A/C is often treated as a luxury, from installation to utilization costs.

The Midwest. In my experience, either people have central air, or in older houses they put window units in all over the house.

All the apartments I see have mini-splits or in-wall units. I put a floor standing dual-hose unit in my bedroom where my desktop PC and server also are.

In upstate NY we have some summers with just a few days where I'd want air conditioning, we have some when I'd want it for July-August. Usually space blankets on the windows in the day and fans to thoroughly equilibriate at night get us through.

If you take out the abnormally perfect climates of Hawaii and California then lowest energy users for heating and cooling are Arizona, Florida, Louisiana and Texas.

Almost all ACs Ive seen until recently are not heat pumps. Traditional refrigerant based are far more popular.

Aren't heat pumps also refrigerant-based?

As I understand it, a heat pump is an AC unit that can be driven backward. In heat mode, they are air conditioning the already-cold outside, which works as long as the compressor can chill the refrigerant lower than the ambient outside air.

They even use the same refrigerant, usually R-410A and R-454B.

Huh. You’re right. I thought the differences went beyond just heating but nope - just heating.

> The temperature differential between a winter temp of 20 or 30F to an indoor temp of 70F requires SO much more energy than cooling from a summer temp of 90F to indoor temp of 70F.

Yeah but at least in the winter you have alternatives.

I spent the first month of the year in a 100 year old home in the Midwest during a record breaking snow storm.

I was fine. It was cold, but I had clothes, sock, blankets, etc. Space heaters are cheap and they work. Hell I could blast the oven out in the open if I needed to.

OTOH I’ve been in central Florida in peak summer with a dead AC for weeks. There is no refuge from <90f indoors. Evaporative coolers don’t work in humidity, fans don’t work, nothing but AC will work. When I didn’t have AC in Florida I had two options:

- soak the sheets in water so they’re cool enough for me to at least lay down and fall asleep comfortably

- pay money to go somewhere else.

Just peruse the comments here to see how difficult they are to obtain on many cars.

These conversions are super common. What am I missing?

It feels very much like AI is creating AI lock-in (if not AI _vendor_ lock-in) by creating so much detailed information that it's futile to consume it without AI tools.

I was updating some gitlab pipelines and some simple testing scripts and it created 3 separate 300+ line README type metadata files (I think even the QUCIKSTART.md was 300 lines).

I _do_ find it weird that the LCDs from crashed cars are so expensive. I wonder if newer models have better screens, so people with older cars upgrade? Or if they're a common failure point?

I have a Model 3, but I can't say I follow the forums.. but I've never heard of screens failing -- I'm sure it happens but I think if it was common problem I'd have heard of it.

I'd guess they fail not on their own, but because they are human interface devices and take the brunt of abuse... e.g. iPhone screens are a popular repair despite being reliable components.

My 2016 Model S LCD panel developed the well-known fault of delamination and leaking some kind of sticky fluid.

Turns out the early Model S vehicles used consumer grade LCD panels that weren’t designed for the prolonged high heat you get in a metal and glass box left outside in the sun all day.

Tesla since upgraded their vehicle screens to proper automotive-grade LCDs which are excellent.

My point is, automotive-grade hardware is higher spec than regular consumer computer hardware, hence the high prices.

As an aside, I upgraded my whole computer and screen from MCU1 to MCU2 and it was worth the upgrade.

Credit to Tesla for building a retrofit computer upgrade for old vehicles. Thats a non-trivial thing to engineer and I appreciate their effort. Other car manufacturers would prefer you were compelled to buy their latest vehicle instead.

Some newer models have better (bigger) screens, and some are incompatible since they've slightly changed the connector. Old models (pre highland/ jupiter facelift) have used the same display shown in the article for a very long time across M3 and MY. What usually happens is that they physically break because people are not that careful, so the touch screen ends up breaking - although you really have to put a lot of force to break that display.

I have a 2023 model 3 and my screen had a small defect develop, a slightly darker area in a roughly half cm diameter area. I think most people would have never noticed but I pointed it out to Tesla service and they replaced the screen.

"YouTube argued that it was not a social media company and that its features were not designed to be addictive."

Well, that's laughable.