I’ve mentioned a few times that we’re building a passive house (fence just went up, Yay!). One of the “different” things about passive house is that everything is electric – everything. In a recent discussion around HVAC in passive houses, I mentioned that using natural gas (NG) would be a really bad idea. The other person asked, why. Having spent […]
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Last night I participated in a panel discussion around building sustainable homes that was sponsored by NextHaus Alliance, the folks who are building our passive house. This is totally why I was included in the discussion. It makes sense to put your customers in front of a bunch of people and have them talk about why they selected your business, […]
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The SPAN IO Smart Electric Service Panel is a really neat approach to solving some electrical service load issues. But there are several drawbacks that make it the wrong choice in many situations. Especially all-electric homes.
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A friend recently mentioned some hesitancy around parking an EV in their attached garage. I get that, kind of, we all probably remember the problems that Chevy had with their Bolt EV. They actually said out loud “don’t park it in the garage”. But it’s important to keep some context around the actual risk. While EV do occasionally light on […]
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I’ve talked through some of the preliminary research and outputs for the electrical system in our passive house, but I haven’t mentioned the requirements that drove the decision making or explained the proposed design in detail. We’re going to fix that.
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There are many factors that make determining return on investment for something as complicated and unique as a home’s HVAC system difficult. I was looking forward to this video from Matt because I knew that he had opted for a Water Furnace ground-source (aka geothermal) heat pump setup. We’re opting for air-source for our passive house, probably a Mitsubishi Hyper-Heat […]
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I’ve received a few questions around the post I wrote comparing some of the popular all-in-one (AIO) inverter batteries to a hybrid inverter plus stand-alone batteries. Most notably from our architect, and the solar/storage company they usually work with. I was planning to write a post digging into that in more detail anyway, so here goes…
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I mentioned in a post that we started the process of building a passive house. Given the level of “smart” and gadgets going into the house I thought it might be interesting to document the steps involved. This is the “before” installment.
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We recently purchased a tear-down with the goal of building a new passive house on the lot. Naturally, there will be will be a massive solar array on the house, and probably on the detached garage as well. Picking a panel fairly easy because the differences in PV (photovoltaic) products seems to mostly come down to warranty period. Energy storage […]
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