00:00SPEAKERChristmas lights dude and I want those smart ones that you aim the camera at it maps where all the
00:05SPEAKERlights are and then you can make patterns that go up the side of the tree I just want ones that work
00:11SPEAKERI want ones that emit light how about that is that a good baseline to establish
00:15SPEAKERhere's the deal those those fancy ones are like 400 bucks I'll give you all of my existing lights
00:20SPEAKERyou give me 400 bucks evensies I don't think that that's a good deal I'm sorry you haven't seen your
00:24SPEAKERcollection of lights yet maybe we're talking about a quantity that I'm aware of I have a tub
00:28SPEAKERI have a tub of lights I'm not giving you the exterior ones I do have the outside lights that's
00:33SPEAKERtoo much I bought an extremely short string of lights last year 10 lights that's not very many
00:40SPEAKERlights because on each light is a little miniature version of remember the leg lamp from the Christmas
00:47SPEAKERstory yeah it's a important piece of art yes of course it's just a little 10 light string of those
00:54SPEAKERjust a bunch of little light up leg lamps look I have a confession brad yes I've never seen a
00:58SPEAKERChristmas story what I know everybody has gaps stop this podcast we're gonna pause right now
01:06SPEAKERokay we're back Will has just watched a Christmas story I didn't expect it to go the way it went
01:12SPEAKERit's really some shit isn't it yeah I like when they amputated that kid's leg and turned it into
01:16SPEAKERa lamp I was like that is surprising you didn't know what kind of art they were talking about
01:22SPEAKERright I thought I was I wasn't expecting like a saw turn there midway through but yeah Christmas
01:26SPEAKERis a serious serious business in the heartland yeah we spent like twice like 25 bucks on that
01:33SPEAKERstring of novelty lights damn we're getting the decorations out a couple days ago uh-huh I plugged
01:38SPEAKERthem in they worked just fine uh-huh I got all excited that they worked I strung them up where
01:44SPEAKERwe actually wanted them plug them back in they had ceased to work you think it's the plug that
01:49SPEAKERyou plugged them into the second time no I tried it all over the place I tried it on 300 plugs I
01:54SPEAKERshe got like one is it a one bad bulb such I probably you look there's only ten of all you
01:59SPEAKERneed to do is take the bulb out of each one and replace it one at a time and then see which one
02:03SPEAKERis the is the dead bulb are those like universal ish like I don't think this particular you know
02:08SPEAKERfor 25 you would think that it would have come with a few spare bulbs but I don't believe it did
02:11SPEAKERbut but yeah can you pull them out of a different string made by somebody sure sounds safe is it is
02:18SPEAKERit led bulbs usually don't die like that they're incandescent oh so that's the problem yeah the
02:24SPEAKERincandescent ones are totally universal just get some spare incandescents plug them in you're good
02:28SPEAKERto go okay maybe I can salvage this extremely expensive novelty item then what what is the
02:33SPEAKERmechanism is it just like a circuit thing is that what is a circuit being broken and is that why
02:37SPEAKERthey stop working yeah so if they're wired in parallel then the one light bulb burns out and
02:42SPEAKERthey keep going if they're wired in series sorry if they're wired in series one light burns out and
02:47SPEAKERthey stop all of them because no electricity goes down the run because it's just like it's just like
02:51SPEAKERbulb wire bulb wire bulb wire bulb wire all the way back around to the plug right if they're wired
02:56SPEAKERin parallel there's one wire that goes all the way down and touches every single one of them and then
03:02SPEAKERthe other wire goes maybe there's two wires that go down and touch every single one of them anyway
03:06SPEAKERit's more expensive to make them in parallel so nobody does here's my life hack for you you can
03:11SPEAKERget a set of led bulbs then take the legs off of the shitty incandescent bulbs and just put the
03:19SPEAKERlegs on the bulbs that you want instead of the bulbs that you have yeah where am I going to get
03:25SPEAKERa string of only 10 led bulbs though look if they're parallel just to cut the 10 off wait get
03:31SPEAKERget a string of 25 cut the end off tape up the ends you're good is that safe probably there's
03:38SPEAKERa lot of probably in this cold intro i'm not sure how i feel about it
04:09SPEAKERso welcome to brad and will made a tech bod i'm will hi brad what's up will uh thanksgiving's
04:16SPEAKERover man i've eaten a lot of stuffing we're in it we're in the holidays yeah we're post one holiday
04:22SPEAKERand pre another we're getting most of our holiday shopping done this weekend for the first time in
04:26SPEAKERhistory like remote shopping i mean i'm not going anywhere are you kidding okay everywhere is just
04:33SPEAKERfilled with peril fraught with barrel just making sure um we made your mom's uh broccoli casserole
04:40SPEAKERi was sad that we did not make it because we had other heavy dairy-based vegetable dishes going on
04:46SPEAKERand i was like oh it's maybe a little indulgent to also do the broccoli casserole i've never met
04:52SPEAKERa casserole i didn't i wouldn't consider over something that's healthier um it was good i think
04:57SPEAKERi made the best apple pie i've ever made this year oh yeah we couldn't get the the macintoshes we
05:02SPEAKERusually get and uh i did a couple of granny smiths and a bunch of courtlands and courtlands are like
05:09SPEAKERa baking apple that's it's it's kind of crappy when you eat it raw it's a little soft but um
05:15SPEAKERwhen you bake it it holds up in the way that the granny smith does but it tastes like a macintosh
05:21SPEAKERit was a good ass apple i was very nice are you guys still making your own crusts i did not make
05:25SPEAKERmy own crusts this year no wow just not standing on ceremony anywhere this year huh look it was
05:32SPEAKERit was uh the the other thing we learned about this year uh is that the cooking isn't really
05:37SPEAKERthe part that stresses us out before thanksgiving it's the keeping the house clean while we're also
05:41SPEAKERcooking sure so like like it's fine to spend 20 hours over like four days cooking to make food for
05:49SPEAKERa bunch of people that's no problem but like keeping everything not looking like it's a just
05:53SPEAKERabsolutely a hovel was was the hard anyway uh but we survived thanksgiving was fine we did a facetime
06:00SPEAKERwith a bunch of the people who usually come and and uh then everybody retired off to play video
06:06SPEAKERgames with their friends from around the country in other parts of the house which which as i was
06:11SPEAKERsitting there playing hades on the tv from the pc in the office i was like man i remember i remember
06:19SPEAKERwhen i spent dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars trying to be able to play doom with my
06:24SPEAKERfriend who lived like four doors down in the dorm you could have just you could have just gotten a
06:30SPEAKERwagon for 20 bucks and just wield your pc over there well i didn't have an ethernet card they
06:35SPEAKERwere really expensive i had i just had a modem okay so we we used the modems and eventually we
06:42SPEAKERgot these weird modems that had that was like it could do full 28 8 but it could also do a split
06:47SPEAKERconversation with like a 14-4 data stream and um a gsm voice channel over the other side same line
06:55SPEAKERuh-huh so you plugged a headset into the modem like a like a mono monorail headset into the
07:01SPEAKERmodem just like we use to you know save voice chat on a game console plugged into the controller now
07:06SPEAKERvery primordial version of team speak kind of yeah it was only two people but we played a lot
07:12SPEAKERof duke nukem and doom and descent and i feel like there was one other thing but i don't remember what
07:19SPEAKERit was i mean if marty's listening he'll let me know um but to be clear not the thing your parents
07:24SPEAKERwish it had been which is that they could continue to use the phone for their own purposes while you
07:27SPEAKERwere motivating well this is while i was in the dorm so they just couldn't call me they were they
07:32SPEAKERwere i once i turned up figured out how to turn off call waiting uh my roommate's girlfriend and
07:38SPEAKERmy parents were all very disappointed so you both got to play multiplayer doom and didn't have to
07:42SPEAKERanswer the phone that sounds like a win that's a win all around it was fantastic it was a glorious
07:47SPEAKERday it was a terrible modem for the internet also that's those are the types of feats you can
07:51SPEAKERachieve when you are the master of your own kingdom when you have your dream abode the master
07:58SPEAKERof your own domain i'm trying i'm trying to segue here to the topic when when uh when will and brad
08:07SPEAKERmake a dream house that's right that's the name of this episode i'm just going to put that for the
08:11SPEAKERtitle um this is kind of i think this just kind of floated out of the ether after that email we
08:16SPEAKERgot last week uh about smart homes and it's specifically about future-proofing a smart home
08:21SPEAKERyeah i went and started reading a lot about passive homes again which remain very cool
08:26SPEAKERyes um i think that that emailer mentioned the the passive home stuff uh yeah because like we're
08:32SPEAKERin a situation where if i stay in california i want to make my house the way i want it to
08:37SPEAKERbe for the time that i'm going to spend living here and not just have it be the place i've spent
08:42SPEAKER13 years in and kind of like dealing with minor annoyances but not making any significant changes
08:47SPEAKERtoo well why don't we take the shackles off here yeah why don't we go to the jaeger okay okay
08:53SPEAKERinstead of you know sort of being constrained by what you were working with currently
08:57SPEAKERyeah i don't know my my idea was let's let's just let's just spitball about some fun stuff that
09:01SPEAKERwould be you know good to do if you money was not an object let's say i like money not being an
09:08SPEAKERobject that sounds fun if you had maybe not infinite space but quite a bit of space let's say
09:13SPEAKERwe're gonna need another 8 000 subscribers on the tech pod before we can make this stuff happen
09:18SPEAKERjust gonna put the home ownership tier on there yeah yeah brad buys a house you at least know what
09:23SPEAKERit'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
09:27SPEAKERi've got all kinds of questions about like building code and like zoning stuff and oh that stuff's all
09:33SPEAKERrecommendations it's not it's not actually binding you just kind of okay forgiveness not permission
09:38SPEAKERsituation polite polite advice okay yeah yeah um yeah buying a house is scary man uh you have to
09:46SPEAKERsign a whole bunch you have to come up with a whole bunch of cash and then you give them this
09:50SPEAKERthing called earnest money that means you're going to go through with the deal unless something
09:53SPEAKERchanges on their end and they get to keep the money if you don't go through with the deal
09:57SPEAKERand it's like 10 grand it sounds like a bad deal i mean look you're saying you're gonna buy their
10:02SPEAKERhouse california is also a weird like i bought a house in tennessee i bought a house in california
10:06SPEAKERcalifornia especially where we live is a nightmare because i didn't know you owned a tennessee house
10:11SPEAKERwell i bought a house for 58 000 in 1998 that was four bedrooms two baths i added a bathroom
10:19SPEAKERit was a foreclosure and it needed a total redo so some friends of my did like my dad's my mom
10:25SPEAKERand dad's contractor the guy who does all their work for them just moved down into the house for
10:30SPEAKERthree months with one of his buddies and like i would get this was right when we started ours too
10:35SPEAKERso i was getting up at four o'clock in the morning to go be at home depot and home depot or lows when
10:40SPEAKERlows opened and get all the shit that they had on their list from the night before i would buy it
10:45SPEAKERbecause if i let the contractors go to home depot those that day was gone i would never get anything
10:50SPEAKERdone that day so i would go collect all the shit that they needed put it in the back of the truck
10:54SPEAKERdrive it to the house drop it off and then get to my office by 7 30 in time for it to open work until
11:01SPEAKERlike six o'clock at night because i had a bad job and then i would come home uh stop and get food on
11:08SPEAKERthe way home for the guys drop it off help them for four or five hours at 10 o'clock i would go
11:14SPEAKERwrite the nightly news posts on ours technica so if you go look at like 19 december of 1998 early
11:21SPEAKER1999 news posts written by me those were all written on about three hours of sleep and two
11:27SPEAKERfull-time jobs that's a hell of a grind um and then i would go to sleep and wake up at four
11:32SPEAKERo'clock in the morning and do it in the next day and the guys would leave on the weekend so i had
11:36SPEAKERweekends but my parents would come down and they would help do shit on the weekends but those were
11:39SPEAKERlike more normal that was a more humane hour and then you immediately moved to california and never
11:44SPEAKERgot to enjoy any of it i sold the house after i lived there for 12 months wow and i made sixty
11:49SPEAKERthousand dollars so it was okay that's something yeah yeah well no i mean i made i made 35,000 but
11:54SPEAKERit was still i was not unhappy yeah so so i do we're not really talking about buying houses so
12:02SPEAKERmuch as like molding them yeah like into into their idealized form here like this stuff there's
12:09SPEAKERstuff living in a california house for the last 20 years like double wall construction is nice
12:15SPEAKERum we have a couple of closets that are just like a sheet of drywall between the closet and the and
12:22SPEAKERthe rest of the house there's no like double layers of drywall and studs which is just the
12:27SPEAKERshittiest way to build a house ever um like this that but but like fixing that is pretty expensive
12:34SPEAKERlike we have to either eat into closet space or into wall space or like do significant work and
12:39SPEAKERand probably it's easier like that's the thing you would do if you tear down everything in the house
12:42SPEAKERand start over um there's also stuff that like i would totally do if we had a little bit more space
12:49SPEAKERright like like having a central right now all of like the electronics that run the house the
12:53SPEAKERrouter and the switch and the modem and all that stuff are kind of like there's a switch in the
12:59SPEAKERcrawl space that distributes because the main run goes to the crawl space and then the router and
13:05SPEAKERstuff comes into the garage and there's a couple of runs back and forth from there to the main run
13:10SPEAKERbut it would be really nice to have just like a small rack someplace with all the networking
13:13SPEAKERshit and the router and all that just plugged into it so that so that like it's in one convenient
13:19SPEAKERlocation and like you can turn it on and off all at once and stuff like that that place is called
13:23SPEAKERa basement we don't have basements here man i know that's a problem that is one of the many problems
13:29SPEAKERwith living here yeah yeah it's very sad i mean the garages are kind of like a lot of people in
13:34SPEAKERmy neighborhood use their garage like we would abuse their basement in tennessee i think of i
13:38SPEAKERthink of garages as hot and basements as cool though yeah i mean basically i assure you my
13:44SPEAKERbasement is cool you want you want you want your electronics in the cool place not the hot place
13:49SPEAKERyeah but the but the the everything is so poorly insulated here it like like if i was making one
13:55SPEAKERchange to my house i would take all the walls off and and and insulate the living shit out of it
14:00SPEAKERbecause so you know that's a pretty substantial change if you're only gonna make one but sure
14:04SPEAKERi mean yeah but it's always cold and drafty in this house and all of these houses are like all
14:09SPEAKERof these tract homes that were built in the 50s and 60s and even through like the early 70s are
14:13SPEAKERlike that here sure well so maybe this is maybe a good chance to just get down to brass tacks on
14:18SPEAKERthis whole topic because i'm kind of curious like what you would do if you were building from the
14:24SPEAKERground up like maybe maybe we should run through the passive home stuff first because that's what
14:28SPEAKERkind of got this started last week yeah so the passive home is an idea that was started by a
14:33SPEAKERphysicist i think in the 70s in europe um he just built the first one it's basically i watched like
14:39SPEAKERthe little kind of explainer video this morning and it's basically like the modern thermodynamics
14:43SPEAKERhome yeah pretty much right like it's basically just about about maximizing like energy retention
14:48SPEAKERand stuff like that yeah so so the idea is that if you seal the house properly and insulate it
14:53SPEAKERproperly so triple pane windows um like all of when you're building the house you make sure that
14:59SPEAKERall the places that air can escape or come in are are closed up either with like closed cell
15:04SPEAKERfoam or insulation or weather sealing or something like that and you make sure that the house is
15:10SPEAKERessentially airtight right um and then you and then at the same time you also get rid of any
15:16SPEAKERbridges places that heat can escape so they didn't really go into a lot of detail about what that
15:21SPEAKERmeant exactly in that video is our is it just like kind of like heat conductive material well so it's
15:26SPEAKERless heat conductive material and stuff like chimneys um like your dryer vent is a perfect
15:31SPEAKERexample okay so if you think about it your dryer vent takes warm air that would be inside the house
15:36SPEAKERand then blasts it out into space where it just warms that warms that little spot right outside
15:40SPEAKERyour vent um things like uh uh i mean i guess pipes that go through walls conceivably fit that
15:49SPEAKERbut i don't i don't know how much they care about that stuff because i can't imagine they
15:52SPEAKERactually conduct all that much heat i'd say your plumbing vents probably have some some aspect of
15:57SPEAKERthat but i don't i don't know for sure i haven't looked into like the actual mechanics on the on
16:01SPEAKERthe low low end um things like the the vents underneath to your crawl space if you have a
16:06SPEAKERcrawl space uh normally you have those to keep it from getting wet in there and i'm sure they have
16:11SPEAKERsome other solution for that because i bet that place stays sealed so it stays warm but the idea
16:16SPEAKERof the passive house is that like the mere act of having heat generation if stuff is insulated
16:22SPEAKERproperly and there's shade in the summer like the the act of having people in the house and using it
16:29SPEAKERand having things like computers and tvs and ovens and stoves running is probably generate will
16:35SPEAKERprobably generate enough heat that you don't have to use a heater ever yeah they that video i watched
16:41SPEAKERmade the bold claim that you don't need a heater or air conditioner if you do this right i i so if
16:46SPEAKERi were building one of those today i think i would probably still put some sort of heater and air
16:50SPEAKERconditioner in just because just to hedge against climate change because it's easier to add that
16:55SPEAKERstuff when you're building than it is to retrofit it on later and like when we're looking at i i i
17:00SPEAKERdon't i haven't looked at anything to see how those passive homes hold up to 115 degree summer
17:05SPEAKERdays when it doesn't really get below 80 at night and i think i think that is a thing we have to
17:10SPEAKERthink about now that we maybe didn't have to 20 years ago yeah yeah like maybe i'd almost feel
17:15SPEAKERlike some kind of optional venting system something that you could close off although i mean even
17:20SPEAKERhaving an optional opening is probably enough to let some some heat out well well one of the things
17:26SPEAKERso so there's a couple things about the passive home that are weird one is that you have to buy
17:29SPEAKERspecial appliances or things like the dryer because they have to not venture um i i think
17:36SPEAKERhumidity control is probably a problem in those houses especially if you live someplace wet like
17:39SPEAKERwe do um the the um the big one i would like one of the things that people do here this is
17:49SPEAKERaside from the passive house thing but because it's usually hot during the day and then as soon
17:52SPEAKERas like the sun goes down and the fog rolls in it gets really nice and cool a lot of people do
17:57SPEAKERwhole house fans which is basically one really really powerful ducted hi hi cfm fan that can
18:05SPEAKERvent all of the air and suck all of the air out of the house in like two three minutes
18:09SPEAKERand you put that in a central location and then just blast it straight out into the house and open
18:15SPEAKERlike crack windows in all of the rooms and then flip that thing on for five minutes and it turns
18:19SPEAKERover all the air in your house in like in like five ten minutes oh that sounds delicious um it's
18:24SPEAKERawesome uh we have some friends who have one and i regret not putting one in when we put the furnace
18:29SPEAKERin i didn't know about it then but they're like like you can do one that's window mounted for like
18:33SPEAKERa hundred bucks or you can you can do you can usually do a ducted one that goes in like the
18:39SPEAKERceiling in your main hallway or something for uh under a grand so it's way cheaper than putting in
18:44SPEAKERair conditioning if you live someplace coastal so if you if somebody just came to you with a blank
18:49SPEAKERcheck and was like hey go build a house yeah where would you start these days like i know you have
18:53SPEAKERnot gone gone through okay interesting so that's kind of what i wanted to get into here is just
18:57SPEAKERlike i i don't know shit about this topic because i've never even owned previously somebody else's
19:02SPEAKERhome much less built one myself but like do you have any sense of are there contractors out there
19:08SPEAKERthat are specializing in futuristic like i started to say modern building techniques but of course
19:13SPEAKERthey are but like more more forward-looking stuff like the passive house or or other like
19:18SPEAKERsmart home oriented building stuff well i mean you can always find there's definitely people that do
19:23SPEAKERlike the default for a new home construction today in terms of smart home stuff is really really high
19:28SPEAKERlike when you're if you think about it like the difference between a home that is has like smart
19:32SPEAKERswitches and stuff like that in a normal home is that you're paying instead of paying you know
19:37SPEAKERthree bucks for switches you pay 40 35 bucks for switches you're paying like 10x on the switches
19:42SPEAKERbut compared to the cost of building a house which is going to be a couple hundred thousand dollars
19:46SPEAKERprobably like adding you know another 500 bucks for uh or a thousand bucks for switches is is a
19:52SPEAKERkind of inconsequential cost yeah i mean that's just kind of like a slight variation on your
19:57SPEAKERexisting electrical work right like i'm thinking more i'm thinking more big picture stuff like the
20:00SPEAKERconcrete is a good example of of something i wouldn't have expected to hear well so so the
20:05SPEAKERconcrete is interesting to me um because it's thermally like it holds a lot of energy so it's
20:11SPEAKERwarm at night and cool during the day right okay um you can insulate it pretty easily by putting
20:17SPEAKERyou know styrofoam and stuff like that in between the the in between layers you know some sort of
20:22SPEAKERinsulating material wait styrofoam we get so like those those foam boards so you know one of the
20:28SPEAKERways that you insulate the walls of a house now isn't by putting that rolled pink shit in you
20:32SPEAKERjust put a bunch of these foam foam boards in and put what what is that pink stuff it's fiberglass
20:38SPEAKERis it yeah okay that's why it's so itchy okay um but anyway yeah so so like that stuff works uh
20:45SPEAKERit's resistant to weather which is important in 2020 um when we're looking at like i live on the
20:51SPEAKERcoast and we see 60 70 mile an hour when gusts now like i don't those the when when you get much
20:58SPEAKERhigher wind than that then shingles become a problem because they just blow off and i don't
21:03SPEAKERwant to deal with that so um you know it's it's yeah stuff like that i think you can always find
21:11SPEAKERa contractor that'll do the stuff you want to do the question is can you find somebody that's going
21:14SPEAKERto do it on the budget that you want and how much are you willing to spend to to make that happen
21:19SPEAKERand like i'm if i build a house i'm not gonna i like first off i would never encourage anybody
21:25SPEAKERto try building a house from the beginning from the get-go if it's their first house
21:28SPEAKERbecause you're just gonna build a house and you're gonna be like shit i wish i'd done this and this
21:31SPEAKERand this and this and this and then you're gonna end up building another house 10 years later which
21:34SPEAKERis what my parents did in the 80s right like they built three houses before they figured out what
21:38SPEAKERthey liked jeez and they had then they had like they were realtors they had sold a bunch of houses
21:43SPEAKERthey had remodeled dozens of houses at that point and they still fucked it up twice before they got
21:47SPEAKERit right um i i think like smart lighting is a really easy thing to do i say easy but you know
21:55SPEAKERan easy air quotes thing to do that will make your house feel smart in a really impactful way and it
22:04SPEAKERsounds stupid when you say it but like when you don't have to think about turning the lights on
22:08SPEAKERand off when it's just a thing that happens for you it's really nice is there is there an aspect
22:13SPEAKERof that that is more involved because you're building as opposed to like much easier because
22:18SPEAKERyou're building like that's what i mean like is there more i guess a better way to ask this is
22:21SPEAKERlike is there more you can do there than then when you're just kind of retrofitting with like
22:26SPEAKERlike a kind of a home assistant setup or yeah so you can you can do things like integrate motion
22:31SPEAKERsensors in the places you want motion sensors sure it requires a little bit of thinking future
22:36SPEAKERthinking about how you're going to use the house before you maybe know but you can also do things
22:41SPEAKERthat are relatively inexpensive like it's really when that when the walls are open it's really
22:45SPEAKERcheap to run wires and like if you're willing to do it you can just do it yourself and you can run
22:49SPEAKERthem and then hide them back behind the wall or in the attic or in the crawl space or whatever
22:54SPEAKERand and leave them there so that if you want to poke them up later you can easily without having
22:59SPEAKERto do the actual runs yourself so stuff like that i i highly recommend um like put ethernet put cat6
23:08SPEAKERanywhere if you're building a house put cat6 everywhere you can possibly imagine you'd ever
23:12SPEAKERwant to have some sort of data or power connection so you're really getting into my wheelhouse here
23:17SPEAKERbecause a i love hiding electronics yeah i i strongly feel that gadgets should be used and not
23:22SPEAKERseen yeah which is why i've got all my network here mounted on the back of this desk and stuff
23:26SPEAKERlike that but um running cables is the most exciting thing to me about potentially owning
23:32SPEAKERa house someday maybe um but uh i'm wondering if there's like are there permanent solutions
23:38SPEAKERthat you're aware of or can you think of one for like i guess it would be some kind of a conduit
23:44SPEAKERsituation where you could easily some mechanism that would easily allow you to run any cable you
23:50SPEAKERwant after the fact without opening walls back up like some kind of conduit an open panel situation
23:55SPEAKERin the wall or something like that do you get what i'm saying so in my experience conduit sometimes
24:00SPEAKERmakes it harder like if you run an empty conduit it's easy to run the wire through but if there's
24:03SPEAKERother wires in the conduit it's it's a challenge well that's so that you get into the situation
24:07SPEAKERwhere you're like attaching the new wire to the end of the old wire and pulling it through right
24:11SPEAKERat that point yeah and that never works right that never does what you wanted to do but it sounds so
24:14SPEAKERsimple look my father when he when they built their office he had this brilliant idea to put
24:18SPEAKERa bunch of conduit in the floor for ethernet and stuff before this was in like the early 90s before
24:23SPEAKERethernet was really available so we didn't know what cable to run and we made it sealed and then
24:30SPEAKERhe was like we're just gonna hook a balloon on the end of this thing with some sand in it and we'll
24:34SPEAKERhook the shop back up to the end we want it to come out and it'll just work oh i don't know about
24:39SPEAKERthis one dad and it worked once but then as soon as there was a wire in there or any like dead bugs
24:45SPEAKERor anything it it was a disaster so um i i think uh it's if you have access to a space between floors
24:54SPEAKERso if you have access if you have a crawl space below in an attic above using a cable snake is
24:59SPEAKERsuper duper like a cable puller is really easy you um you need a long drill bit and you you you're
25:06SPEAKERgonna have to kind of patch up a hole in the in the wall to put your panel in anyway to put your
25:11SPEAKERyour your plug cover in so you put uh electrical boxes behind that and then screw the screw the um
25:19SPEAKERyou know the panel covers into that and screw whatever your jacks are into those boxes and you
25:22SPEAKERcan put those in in a way that they don't have to tie into studs you can leave those loose and then
25:27SPEAKERthat makes it even easier um but yeah like if you drop strings down there something like that so you
25:32SPEAKERhave something to tie off to it's just going to come the strings are just going to rot before you
25:35SPEAKERneed them yeah i guess i guess there's always going to be challenges to working inside of
25:39SPEAKERsomething that you can't see or maneuver around in yeah but like but for 20 bucks now you can get a
25:45SPEAKERuh wireless uh like snake snake scope thing that you can shove up in the walls to see
25:52SPEAKERyeah did you not know about these is it like a laparoscopic house surgery or something it's like
25:56SPEAKERa laparoscopic camera for your holes in your house and like that's incredible i bought them
26:00SPEAKERfor gopher holes to jam one down in the gopher hole and see what you can see down there what
26:04SPEAKERdid you see a bunch of dirt it was really boring you didn't see any gophers no they it turns out
26:08SPEAKERthey saw the light coming and were like fuck this they had vacated the premises okay um yeah so like
26:16SPEAKERif you if you are not afraid to make a hole in your dry wall and cover it with a plate like you
26:22SPEAKERjust cut a hole that's the shape of the plate the of the of the gang box that goes in there and then
26:27SPEAKERyou put one of the the no stud gang boxes in that has ears and they're like the ears are just like
26:32SPEAKERthey're like little flaps that fold in when you're pushing it in then you turn a screw and they fold
26:35SPEAKERout so it holds it holds it up against the wall real tight okay as soon as you said no a no stud
26:40SPEAKERgang box with ears i got to the point where i assumed you were just making up terms no no no no
26:46SPEAKERum and and then like like if you do that and then you gotta you can get drill bits uh specifically
26:52SPEAKERfor this they're kind of expensive but they're worth having if you're if you're gonna run a lot
26:55SPEAKERof cable uh that are like four or five feet long that you can angle in and the the shafts are bendy
27:01SPEAKERso you can angle them into the gang box hole get down to the floor where you're like drilling
27:07SPEAKERthrough the the floor and then push them down through the hole and then there's a string hole
27:13SPEAKERon the end that you can tie the string into and pull the bit and the cable and everything back up
27:17SPEAKERso okay and is that somewhat reusable like really what i'm getting at here is just like
27:23SPEAKERyou know we're we're at a point now where like cable standards are changing often enough that
27:27SPEAKERyou're probably going to want to swap cables and your walls out at some point and so like some kind
27:31SPEAKERof like permanently or mostly permanently reusable situation where you can run new cables to replace
27:37SPEAKERthe old ones like i'm surprised there's not more of a kind of an established solution for that
27:41SPEAKERum i mean it's just work it's just hard work the the thing the thing to remember though is if you
27:46SPEAKERrun if you run cat6 which is good for up to 10 gigabit ethernet theoretically through the walls
27:53SPEAKERand then everything else lives in that server rack any fiber or anything weird that you're
27:57SPEAKERgoing to put in in the future to make like the server talk to the the switch more effectively
28:02SPEAKERis going to be easily accessible and then if you want to get fancy you can run some dark fiber to
28:08SPEAKERlike to like the entertainment center and where your main pc is going to go and stuff like that
28:12SPEAKERbut realistically it's a long time before we're going to need fiber in the house i think for most
28:16SPEAKERpeople you're probably right but yeah it's only been in the last like year or so that fiber in the
28:20SPEAKERhome has become enough of a thing that i would even have an idea like that but like usb is another
28:24SPEAKERexample of like and this is getting into wall plates and i wanted to mention that as well like
28:28SPEAKERit seems like we're finally finally starting to actually go through the usb
28:33SPEAKERa to c transition i mean usb d is just around the horizon let's not talk about that fool me once
28:41SPEAKERdamn it she can't get fooled again um i mean this this gets into the wall plate stuff a little bit
28:47SPEAKERbut like is there similarly a is there a solution that is not like a hard installed wall plate but
28:52SPEAKERis more of a kind of a soft pass through situation where you could run cables still i feel like i'm
28:59SPEAKERnot describing this well but you mean like to get usb power in your wall sockets yeah like like like
29:04SPEAKERyou know again like say up until about a year or two ago you would have just defaulted to
29:09SPEAKERstraight up 20 year old usb-a ports yeah and forgotten about it but like we are getting to
29:13SPEAKERthat point now where like probably most of the devices i've gotten in the last six months are
29:18SPEAKERusb-c now so like like a solution that lets you swap things like that out without having to do
29:24SPEAKERa bunch of reinstalling so switching out gang switching out like power outlets is really really
29:31SPEAKEReasy like if you if you know how to turn off the circuit breaker for the outlet and know how to
29:36SPEAKERtest to make sure that breaker is actually off which means like you flip the breaker that you
29:40SPEAKERthink is going to turn off this those sockets that you're looking at and then you plug something in
29:44SPEAKERand make sure it doesn't turn on when the breaker is turned off right then you take off the gang
29:49SPEAKERplate cover you unscrew the two screws that hold that that outlet in place and then there's three
29:55SPEAKERscrews and three wires on the back of that you don't ever want to touch the copper part because
29:59SPEAKERsome of it can still be hot even if the breaker is off um but you unscrew those three wires and
30:05SPEAKERthen you screw three wires back onto the new outlet and if you you i think the safe way to
30:09SPEAKERdo is probably to do one at a time and like unhook and then re-screw and then unhook and re-screw
30:15SPEAKERit'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
30:20SPEAKERi wouldn't like if there's a big transition like one of the things jean had asked about was if we
30:24SPEAKERcould get some usb ports on kitchen counter because like often there's an ipad or a phone
30:30SPEAKERor something there that's being used while she's well one of us is working in the kitchen um and
30:34SPEAKERit would be nice to be able to just charge that stuff straight from the wall without having to
30:38SPEAKERhave a brick there but if you haul it out the bottom of the counter and installed wireless
30:42SPEAKERcharging in there instead look that is that is a if the devices at hand used wireless charging
30:48SPEAKERthat would be a totally viable solution um here's maybe a better test case for what i'm talking
30:54SPEAKERabout like you're totally right about swapping out the usb power force but like a solution for just
30:59SPEAKERpassing cables through a wall like the idea i have is like let's say you've got like your office with
31:04SPEAKERyour pc on in one room and across the wall on the other side is your living room with your big tv
31:09SPEAKERyeah let's say you want to run like a video out through the wall from your pc i have that okay so
31:14SPEAKERas opposed to having to install wall plates and daisy chaining you know you like the i guess the
31:20SPEAKERstandard way to do it is you would plug hdmi from pc into a wall plate there's another cable behind
31:26SPEAKERthat inside the wall that goes to another wall plate on the other side so you're actually you're
31:29SPEAKERgoing through like what three or four discrete cables there yeah but it doesn't matter because
31:33SPEAKERthe to the computer it just sees it as one so that's what i that's exactly what i have so i have
31:38SPEAKERon one wall plate there's female female jacks facing out on both sides of the wall
31:44SPEAKERone of the wall plates has a female socket on the inside and one has a male wire coming out of the
31:51SPEAKERback and they're literally like three inches apart from each other on either side of the wall
31:56SPEAKERso one plugs i plugged them in put those put those plates on and it's good that's it that's
32:01SPEAKERall there is to it sure that the ideally you want to do those on gang gang boxes that are hammered
32:08SPEAKERinto studs because the hdmi connector is a fairly requires a fair amount of force to pull in and out
32:15SPEAKERand on those ear gang boxes it's a little wobbly sure but yeah that works fine it's worked it's
32:21SPEAKERworked 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
32:27SPEAKERso that's why i actually bring this up is that even you know hdmi standards are changing and at
32:31SPEAKERsome point you're not going to be able to do what you want to do with those wall plates anymore so
32:34SPEAKERlike i was envisioning like almost like a doggy door for cables where you could just pass a cable
32:40SPEAKERthrough a wall like a little trap door situation so i had that for a long time and i switched to
32:44SPEAKERthis because it was less annoying having the cable dangling through the wall like you can put a you
32:50SPEAKERcan put just like a loopy gang box on there that'll protect the wall so the cable doesn't
32:54SPEAKERlike erode the gypsum board or anything um but but like it was not having having the ability to move
33:01SPEAKERthat cable through the wall was bad for a lot of reasons like it was it it made gypsum dust
33:06SPEAKEReverywhere oh um it opened a huge hole into the cold part of the house so like sure it essentially
33:14SPEAKERvented the crawl space into my living room which wasn't great um there were a lot of reasons that
33:20SPEAKERit was so the other thing is the the on the wall plates if you buy all the same kind of wall plates
33:26SPEAKERwhich you should if you're building a house then the then the whole size for each socket is a
33:32SPEAKERstandard so for example you can get like a three whole wall plate that has three squares in it
33:37SPEAKERand each one square was ethernet one square was hdmi one square was cable back when that was a
33:42SPEAKERthing and then you can pop those out and replace them really easily so like if you want to replace
33:46SPEAKERthe hdmi one you just get the new version of hdmi pop that one out put the put the new one in oh you
33:52SPEAKERmean the literal port would come out the literal port is just a little square it's like it's just
33:56SPEAKERlike it's just a it's just a cut out for the port to fit into yeah it's like that's one inch by one
34:00SPEAKERand a half inches or something like that okay i assumed all the plates you would buy would come
34:03SPEAKERwith ports kind of hard hard wired no and those ports are like no more than 10 bucks usually
34:09SPEAKERthey're like like the ethernet ports are like 50 cents each when you buy them okay bulk so i'm just
34:14SPEAKERi'm i'm all about reusable and replaceable and kind of you know modular solutions and not being
34:19SPEAKERlocked into any standards for too long so okay that's awesome okay yeah it won't apply to the
34:24SPEAKERpower because there's transformers and stuff that happen to have to have to happen in the power
34:27SPEAKERsockets but um but yeah it's like there's no reason not to like that stuff is super super
34:33SPEAKEReasy to upgrade okay um one of the other things i i i have spent a lot of time thinking about
34:40SPEAKERspending a lot of time in a relatively small room with one vent and no air conditioning
34:44SPEAKERand running a giant ass computer with a with a 300 watt gpu or something in it it would be swell
34:51SPEAKERto have to a use the heat generated in this room to heat the rest of the house and b
34:57SPEAKERuh have a way to get the heat generated in this room out of this room without necessarily roasting
35:02SPEAKEReverybody else in the house okay you should undervolt that gpu okay i did it it's pretty
35:08SPEAKERawesome it's that card is consuming this 3080 is consuming let's say 50 to 70 watts less now
35:14SPEAKERthan it was how much how much of performance did you take zero i mean i haven't benchmarked
35:19SPEAKERwell i did i did do some uh i haven't benchmarked it i did a few benchmarks and eyeballed the numbers
35:24SPEAKERlook the same and i certainly can't tell the difference in any of the games i played yet
35:28SPEAKERwell i played player unknown's battlegrounds the ultimate life and death fight a crafting
35:31SPEAKERgame union game which is not actually a union but just claims to be a union uh i'll try it
35:36SPEAKERi capped the clock speed at let's see i capped it at 1850 and i think it was spiking up to like
35:42SPEAKERmaybe 1900 so you're only you know probably 1550 hertz what is it what is a 50 megahertz difference
35:47SPEAKERon the gpu with all the other bottlenecks you're talking about right like it's i i can't tell
35:51SPEAKERit's true i'll give it a try it's it's pretty convinced me it's pretty good uh anyway it still
35:56SPEAKERgets hot as shit in here because there's two computers running like like a if i had a way
36:00SPEAKERthat i could if i could run fiber to the garage and like have everything that's on the streaming pc
36:07SPEAKERlike have a bunch of connections here for all the stuff that's on the streaming pc but not have to
36:11SPEAKERhave the streaming pc right here totally would do that so that is like maybe the biggest question i
36:15SPEAKERbrought into this thing yeah uh is a way to do basically exactly what you just brought up which
36:20SPEAKERis like i love the idea of having a rack in the basement that's not just say a nas and maybe even
36:25SPEAKERlike your pf sense box if you want to rack one of those but also like what if your streaming box was
36:30SPEAKERa rack mounted thing in that stack you know like what if x y and z that is not like gaming consoles
36:36SPEAKERand your desktop gaming pc all just lived in that stack but then you get into situations where it's
36:42SPEAKERlike okay well now i need to run a 20-foot usb cable up to a hub need to run 20 30 feet of hdmi
36:48SPEAKERyou know what i mean like there's some of those cables will travel over distances like that very
36:51SPEAKERwell um and some of those connectors just aren't made to be extended out period you know so like
36:58SPEAKERi'm trying to figure out all this stuff in a basement and your office was directly above the
37:02SPEAKERrack right it's only like a five-foot run 10-foot run so yeah i'm trying to visualize like what are
37:07SPEAKERall the things you would need to run to be able to have like every pc that's not your desktop
37:11SPEAKERin a different room so for me it's two hdmi uh usb and a d and a display port right or hdmi
37:18SPEAKERso that's like that's pretty doable i mean yes look in a perfect world somebody would make some
37:23SPEAKERsort of like a port streamer thing yeah takes all of these doobers you plug one box in on one end
37:29SPEAKERthere's fiber on the other end and then you you run it through fiber or whatever thunderbolt 3
37:33SPEAKERwhatever it is wait for one thing and then the ports are there's the same ports on the other end
37:37SPEAKERthat sounds impossible it's like a digital snake that's all i want it's not so much to ask no it's
37:45SPEAKERsimple really yeah um get the dedicated cooling like the dedicated studio space is i think the
37:53SPEAKERthing that keeps the passive house from working for me yeah because i think i probably generate
37:57SPEAKERtoo much heat in here just pumping way too much energy into the equation look i'm just i'm just
38:01SPEAKERa big watt generator man i just can't can't stop cranking those watts i've heard that about you
38:06SPEAKERyeah um i watched a video recently that i thought was pretty interesting and to be fair i feel like
38:13SPEAKERit's kind of a sad commentary on the times yeah because it was about uh apartments it was about
38:18SPEAKERhousing in san francisco about the housing crisis in san francisco apartments and how they were
38:21SPEAKERmaximizing space and it might have come out of our discord actually but um essentially they were
38:28SPEAKERattaching things like your bed and dresser space and really just about anything it's not like a
38:35SPEAKERchair to the ceiling with a system of motorized pulleys oh i like this like everything would just
38:43SPEAKERretract into the ceiling after you got up and started going about your day is this like a is
38:47SPEAKERthis like a tiny house hack so so yes like in this in this case and again this is why i said it's a
38:52SPEAKERsad commentary in this case this was a way to allow a person to live in like i don't know a one
38:58SPEAKEReight by ten room or something i love this for their entire living space and like the space would
39:04SPEAKERbecome the bedroom at night when you lowered the bed down from from the ceiling you know it would
39:08SPEAKERbecome kind of a living room in the day when the bed was up there that kind of thing this is the
39:12SPEAKERother thing if i were building right now i would do higher ceilings because like our ceilings are
39:20SPEAKERtoo low to do that kind of stuff and i think i think like for a multi if you especially if you're
39:28SPEAKERtalking about a small house which if you live in a coastal area or a city someplace you're going to
39:32SPEAKERhave like having the ability to do lofts for stuff that's like like having the ability to loft my
39:37SPEAKERkid's bed in her bedroom would be amazing but with eight foot ceilings it's not there's not enough
39:44SPEAKERspace underneath the loft to make it actually usable space it's just kind of like at best a
39:48SPEAKERreading nook or something like it's not like someplace we could put our school desk or anything
39:52SPEAKERlike that so who why bother it's just means that like if it's harder to make her bed so we're not
39:59SPEAKERgoing 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
40:06SPEAKERlike seeing a loft where they put drawers underneath the stairs to get up to the loft
40:11SPEAKERsure that's that seems like a super useful thing because usually it's just dead space
40:16SPEAKERum okay i think all that stuff is super cool if you could fold your bed away would you ever make
40:21SPEAKERyour bed again i mean i would make my bed every day when i fold it up into the wall
40:26SPEAKERi don't think that counts the bed's made honey how are you gonna know the difference
40:30SPEAKERyeah you'll find out when you lie in it yeah is it made or unmade who knows oh well it looks like
40:38SPEAKERit was messed up it must have gotten messed up when it folded up in there i don't know what's
40:40SPEAKERgoing on that pulley man that thing just really has a mind of its own here's my question is if
40:45SPEAKERyou have the folding up bed do you still sleep with your head toward the wall where if the bed
40:49SPEAKERfolds up while you're in there you're going to be standing on your head and then like break your
40:52SPEAKERneck potentially or do you sleep with your feet to the wall and your head in the middle of the room
40:57SPEAKERthat's that's a good question like everybody sleeps with their head to the wall why do we
41:02SPEAKERsleep with our head to the wall it's a weird thing you're talking about you're talking about the the
41:05SPEAKERbed like folding down from vertical to horizontal yeah like have you ever been inside a murphy bed
41:09SPEAKERwhen it was folded up oh oh we went to a we rented our house one time when i was a kid with some
41:14SPEAKERfriends for like a family vacation typing murphy bed into google here murphy bed is the one that
41:19SPEAKERfolds out it's like hydraulics it folds up into the box on the wall i see i see and we spent the
41:24SPEAKERentire weekend like this other family and my sister and i folding each other up into the beds
41:30SPEAKERof course and like it was definitely better to be feet feet down when you were folded up in the bed
41:36SPEAKERbecause it was a little hinky if you were head down i could start a little hinky maybe sounds
41:40SPEAKERlike an understatement to me look when you're 10 a little hinky is okay when you're 40 a little
41:46SPEAKER[ __ ] i'm gonna have to go get a physical therapist now that's fair uh so the situation
41:50SPEAKERi'm talking about the the bed remained horizontal at all times it was literally suspended from the
41:54SPEAKERceiling yes and like you literally hit a button and it just retracted upwards into the ceiling
42:00SPEAKERit did not fold we thought about doing that for the kiddos bed too just like hooking chains
42:04SPEAKERon the four corners and hoisting it up so it's like four feet off the ground
42:09SPEAKERit was a bad idea decided against it yeah jeana was like i'm not allowing this and she's probably
42:13SPEAKERright there's obvious safety concerns to having an entire bed suspended over your head all day long
42:18SPEAKERbut i i didn't uh fully grasp the mechanics of this um they said they have some like foolproof
42:24SPEAKERmechanical solution for making sure those things don't ever fall down do we need to refer back to
42:28SPEAKERthe douglas adams thing about the only difference between a thing that is impossible to fail and
42:33SPEAKERdesigned to fail is that you know when it does fail it'll be impossible to fix sure they swore
42:40SPEAKERthey swore that it was mechanically impossible for that bed to fall in your head but i'm not just
42:43SPEAKERentirely sure um i don't know i don't know about impossible to fail that seems like a
42:50SPEAKERthat seems unlikely to me but uh i i like i like that like there's something
42:58SPEAKERso having i mean we there are three of us we live in a thousand square foot house which in
43:01SPEAKERmost of the country is is a pretty small house i think um i really like living in a small house
43:10SPEAKERif i could change one thing it would be awesome to have two bathrooms i could see it one bathroom
43:16SPEAKERwith a kid and like everybody having to get out of the house at the same time of the day
43:21SPEAKERis a little bit of a challenge well now nobody has to leave the house or can leave the house
43:26SPEAKERever so that problem has been obviated yeah this is weird i've become a nighttime shower guy
43:32SPEAKERso have i like i like to take a shower right before bed because i get into bed the sheets
43:37SPEAKERare nice i'm all clean when i get in the sheets yeah totally i i'm with you i mean the only
43:41SPEAKERdownside of that is when you put it off for too long and then you get sleepy and then you don't
43:44SPEAKERwant to bother but you also don't want to get in the bed dirty i mean realistically how dirty are
43:49SPEAKERwe getting these days then you find yourself sleeping on the couch occasionally but i've
43:54SPEAKERdone that yeah that's that's interesting i have not heard that from anybody else and i hadn't
43:59SPEAKERyeah i've always been a morning shower guy and now i've had to adapt to being an evening shower
44:04SPEAKERsometimes i do both but usually it's just evening yeah um i feel like uh let's see what else are we
44:10SPEAKERforgetting anything that's on the yeah i don't know i thought i thought we might dream a little
44:14SPEAKERbigger than we have here i was trying to come up with some just like outlandish ideas for like
44:19SPEAKERuh if money was an object what would you do if you were building a house like what kind of cool
44:23SPEAKERfuture stuff would you do to tech up your house i would absolutely do full solar and some sort of
44:30SPEAKERstorage thing that was like the last thing i was going to mention yeah i mean like that is that is
44:34SPEAKERa big pie in the sky thing of like oh let's just say that batteries are 10 times more efficient now
44:39SPEAKERnow we can do this i you know i don't even think it's that pie in the sky i think if you design the
44:44SPEAKERhouse and think about how you like this so the secret of doing generators because we had generators
44:49SPEAKERat my house when i was a kid and my parents have generators at their at their house now
44:53SPEAKERbecause the power goes out fairly often in the winter and um since they're since they're all
44:58SPEAKERelectric utilities and on a well like they don't have toilets if the power goes out but i die i
45:04SPEAKERlive that reality for the entirety of my youth so i i get it yeah so the trick is you don't want to
45:10SPEAKERhave the circuits that are on the failover so you have to decide which circuits are on the failover
45:15SPEAKERwhen the when the power goes out right and you have to be smart about that because it has to
45:20SPEAKERbe the things that actually need to stay on like the refrigerator and the wellhead pump and probably
45:25SPEAKERyour internet if that's a thing that that can conceivably keep going when the power is out
45:30SPEAKERum but you don't like like they don't have the i think the things that they have on are their
45:37SPEAKERmaster bedroom the kitchen stuff and then like living room they use portable lamp they use like
45:43SPEAKERsolar solar charging lanterns if the power is out uh the heat pump is on uh but but then the
45:50SPEAKERonly bedrooms that have power are their bedroom and i think one of the guest rooms maybe um
45:56SPEAKERand and it ends up like if you design your stuff so that the batteries are running that thing and
46:02SPEAKERyou live someplace that gets enough sun and you have enough solar panels on the roof you should
46:06SPEAKERbe able to live more or less normally um with with like a reasonable number of panels and a
46:13SPEAKERreasonable number of batteries at this point do you have any idea what quantity i mean i i don't
46:17SPEAKERknow the numbers would be super meaningful to me but i wonder like just kind of maybe an hour count
46:22SPEAKERof how much power you could reasonably store these days um i mean those the power walls i'd have to
46:27SPEAKERlook it up but the power walls that tesla is selling are i'm gonna type right now sorry no
46:33SPEAKERit's fine actually i mean are the power walls are the use cases for those intended to be to run a
46:38SPEAKERhome on not that's not for really charging their vehicles yeah no the whole point of it is to run
46:42SPEAKERthe home okay if so the point of it is to buy electricity from the grid at night when it's cheap
46:49SPEAKERand to sell it back during the day when it's expensive um you know capitalism the
46:56SPEAKERlet's see i'm looking to see how much energy they have and and you can do failover with them so
47:03SPEAKERlike the trick is if you want to do failover with solar so that you have power when the sun's out
47:07SPEAKERyou still have to have some sort of circuit that turns everything off so you don't pump energy back
47:11SPEAKERin the grid and electrocute the line workers which is which obviously would be bad um the power walls
47:18SPEAKERhold like two three kilowatt hours i think i i'm here we go specs 13.5 kilowatt hours on the power
47:26SPEAKERwall oh that's not nothing and they can be floor wall mounted indoor or outdoor you can do up to 10
47:31SPEAKERso like you're a house my size i would need like two probably that's not so bad um and that that's
47:39SPEAKEReven if i want to keep using like the gaming pc and the giant tv and stuff like that that's
47:42SPEAKERactually like more feasible than i realized how i mean i guess the key is how expensive are those
47:47SPEAKERthings well i mean so the thing about the roof the solar is you probably want to do it when you
47:53SPEAKERdo a roof right because yes because like you don't want to have the roof um hold on let's see what
48:00SPEAKERlet's i'm tight i'm gonna see what i'm gonna see what they recommend for my house 250 is the
48:08SPEAKERaverage electric bill no see recommendation so they want they say three power walls for 25 grand
48:15SPEAKER24 5 and if i add another 12 000 they can give me 8.6 kilowatts worth of solar panels
48:22SPEAKERwait is that just okay so yeah 36k for the panels and the wall which is pretty expensive
48:31SPEAKERwell that is expensive but that's that those are the types of prices i was seeing people
48:35SPEAKERquoting just for the solar panel install you know a handful of years ago well and i was gonna say so
48:40SPEAKERthe presumably that puts me at 250 bucks a month off of my electric bill so i'm not paying a
48:49SPEAKERthousand dollars every four months so in that context you're looking at four divided by four
48:54SPEAKERtimes 36 is so like 10 years you paid yeah still still a good handful of years so i mean the thing
49:01SPEAKERis i don't know what the lifespan on the batteries is i assume that they're building these things
49:06SPEAKERwith enough capacity above and below so you don't dip into the 80 plus percent and the sub zero
49:12SPEAKERpercent so also presumably they should last a really long time yeah we've also you shouldn't
49:18SPEAKERprobably i mean i guess you use them all the time because the point is to buy electricity
49:21SPEAKERwhen it's cheap and sell it when it's expensive so i've just just barely been looking at failover
49:27SPEAKERgenerator situations recently even for like gas-powered ones those are not cheap like i was
49:31SPEAKERlooking for for my parents who might need them in the near future but like that they've got like a
49:36SPEAKERmanual you know manual generator but the ones that fully tie in are a pretty penny and and just so
49:47SPEAKERyou know with the three walls three three batteries and the panels that they recommend they're saying
49:53SPEAKERit's 7.5 days backup duration before you start losing so you have full power for seven and a
49:59SPEAKERhalf days before the while the batteries are drained all the way that's not terrible yeah
50:04SPEAKERand presumably if you are are thoughtful about your electrical use you know during the daytime
50:10SPEAKERthen you're yeah you're back on so anyway and they're saying that's a forty thousand dollar
50:17SPEAKER25-year savings which is a little suspect but anyway that's a sales pitch for you yeah um
50:24SPEAKERi i don't i don't think that that is an unreasonable thing to spend money on at this point
50:28SPEAKERno especially if your tesla is the place i would buy the batteries i know that they've had
50:31SPEAKERproblems with their solar panels i don't know how the batteries are i haven't looked at any of the
50:35SPEAKERstuff so don't take that as a as a recommendation for a product to buy i'm just using it as an
50:39SPEAKERexample because it's the one everybody knows yeah but i mean if you especially if you're in an area
50:44SPEAKERprone to frequent outages like we are where yeah you would you would think that they should have
50:50SPEAKERjust buried all the power lines several decades ago instead of having to fix them five times every
50:54SPEAKERwinter but um the other thing is the the economics on that change dramatically if you're not in a
51:02SPEAKERstate that lets you sell power back to the power company during the day when the panels are
51:06SPEAKERgenerating i didn't know there were such states yeah the texas is like that so if you if you can
51:12SPEAKERsell to the grid during the day when the price is high and buy back at night when the price is low
51:16SPEAKERbecause demand is low this makes a ton of sense if you are someplace that does not allow you to do
51:21SPEAKERthat the the economics change pretty dramatically so sure um and it'll take a lot longer to pay off
51:28SPEAKERanyway uh i think i mean i think that's a good place as any to wrap it up decent little survey
51:34SPEAKERi appreciate uh hearing about all this vice that i will never get to make use of as long as i live
51:39SPEAKERin the state of california you'll get there maybe look there's a crash coming it's a good time to
51:44SPEAKERbuy when i'm starting a real when the market really bottoms out um i hear fresno is nice
51:51SPEAKERcentral valley uh hot what i feel like there's there's got to be some crazy pie in the sky thing
51:56SPEAKERbut like i don't like i don't want a panopticon around my house right right probably not um
52:04SPEAKERi mean maybe i guess i guess it would be cool to have like a house-based drone that flies up and
52:08SPEAKERsurveys the perimeter and scares off like yeah here's what i would like i would like something
52:13SPEAKERthat keeps the raccoons and gophers and skunks from digging up my backyard every goddamn night
52:17SPEAKERthat would be dope like a little robot that comes out and yells at them and squirts them with water
52:21SPEAKERokay i thought i was thinking maybe like some kind of ultrasonic device or something but
52:25SPEAKERmaybe that works too robots are always good i look maybe if i get one of those little robotic mowers
52:30SPEAKERit can just i can just set it to trigger when there was motion go out and scare them off
52:35SPEAKERum yeah i i don't i mean like a water capture system i would love i feel like we waste a ton
52:40SPEAKERof water yeah water like we're not the experts to talk about this but i would love to hear from
52:45SPEAKERpeople more ecologically minded people like i like the passive house is a good example of that right
52:49SPEAKERof something that is just like yeah not exactly high tech like it's all pretty sensible conservation
52:55SPEAKERstuff you know but it's employed in a very efficient way to to just reduce resource constraints
53:00SPEAKERwell i went to a talk a few years ago from a woman who is a gray water environmentalist and or and
53:06SPEAKERshe's like look it's asinine that we flush our toilets with drinking water when our houses
53:11SPEAKERproduce a ton of non-potable water that we should be using for that and like the plumbing change to
53:18SPEAKERmake it like there's the the cost to make your toilets flush with gray water when you're building
53:24SPEAKERis almost nothing because you basically just add a pump and a cistern to collect water from
53:30SPEAKERkitchen sinks bathroom sinks utility sinks stuff like that and then pump that and then
53:36SPEAKERrun a separate water line from there to the toilet right to the to fill the toilet tanks
53:42SPEAKERand it's like a few hundred bucks worth of stuff and maybe a little bit more hassle when you're
53:45SPEAKERbuilding it's really hard to retrofit in though because every you know the plumbing is just one
53:50SPEAKERgiant maze of pipes and and it means that we would use half of because the toilets are one
53:56SPEAKERof the biggest water consumers in most people's houses especially if you have old toilets so um
54:02SPEAKERstuff like that is like the kind of outside the box thinking that costs practically nothing and
54:06SPEAKERhas a massive impact it's like a lot of a lot of inefficiencies in home building built up around
54:12SPEAKERthings just being done the way they've always been done there's a lot well that seems like that seems
54:16SPEAKERlike the big impediment in a lot of cases well that and then there's also a lot of like if you're
54:21SPEAKERtalking about houses that are built in mass tracked houses are usually built by the cheap
54:26SPEAKERin the cheapest way possible sure so they don't do things like put fucking insulation in the walls
54:31SPEAKERbecause this code only requires it in the ceilings or in the attic or whatever and and you end up
54:36SPEAKERwith these houses that like cost thirty thousand dollars less than than to do it the right way
54:41SPEAKERbut they the total cost of ownership over 40 years of the 50-year lifespan of the house is
54:45SPEAKERhundreds of thousands of dollars more because we're wasting and and we're contributing to
54:49SPEAKERcarbon in the atmosphere and all sorts of other stuff yeah it's just yeah anyway have you ever
54:54SPEAKERlooked into lawn upkeep in that context like i was i was reading the other day that clover is
54:58SPEAKERis kind of a becoming a big thing in lawn management because it's very self-sustaining
55:03SPEAKERand like much lower uh water requirements and i i want to say it's like better a better ecosystem
55:09SPEAKERfor insects and stuff like that as well so the monolithic lawn is one of those things that's
55:13SPEAKERreally bad for the environment because you you replace native stuff with non-native stuff and
55:18SPEAKERthen you get rid of all the food that the bugs and the critters and stuff eat so like my gopher
55:23SPEAKERproblem is explicitly because we have a fescue lawn and it attracts a lot of grubs and the
55:27SPEAKERgophers like the grubs and then here we are um the the lawns are a shit show i mean i i if we
55:35SPEAKERdidn't have a kid i would have gotten rid of my lawn as soon as she's not interested in playing
55:38SPEAKERin the backyard we're gonna replace the lawn with stuff that is native and doesn't require watering
55:44SPEAKERbecause the water the watering is the problem as much as anything yeah what is the what is the term
55:48SPEAKERfor the type of lawn that requires zero irrigation like it's basically a dry lawn it's like kind of
55:53SPEAKERlandscape with rocks and stuff like that there's that the grass is really good now too like there's
55:58SPEAKERa word for that kind of landscaping and i can't remember what it is um i mean it's it's it's just
56:04SPEAKERarid landscaping maybe i don't know if usually the trick is all you have to do is plant native plants
56:09SPEAKERbecause the native plants know what to do here right like the other benefit is that if you plant
56:14SPEAKERthat stuff you don't have to maintain it as much so you know versus mowing the lawn twice a week in
56:18SPEAKERthe summer because you fertilize it like an asshole like i do yes then then you you are just you know
56:26SPEAKERhave stuff that's supposed to grow here and it works well and it's pretty and looks nice and
56:30SPEAKERzero escaping is the word i was looking for x-e-r-i escaping yeah that makes sense uh it's i i get
56:38SPEAKERi get the i get somebody's water bill who lives in beverly hills because they gave my email
56:44SPEAKERaddresses their email address when they signed up wow angry notifications when they go over
56:48SPEAKERtheir watering allotment every month yeah it's great really terrific that's that's good stuff
56:56SPEAKERbut yeah i think stuff like that i mean i think the thing to do is think about what the impact
56:59SPEAKERof your house is what the footprint is and doing things like insulating better reduces carbon
57:04SPEAKERemissions because you use less energy to heat and cool landscaping appropriately uses less water
57:11SPEAKERbuilding something that is sturdy and isn't going to have to be torn down in 20 years because it
57:14SPEAKERdidn't hold up to the changes in the climate and the weather that we're gonna face are is is
57:19SPEAKERimportant because like the most environmentally catastrophic thing you can do when you're building
57:24SPEAKERyour house is build a house right like you're cutting down trees you're making nails you're
57:29SPEAKERbuilding all this plastic to go in an insulation and all this stuff and like
57:33SPEAKERyou need to make that last as long as you can so that's why i like concrete brutalist
57:40SPEAKERyes brutalist knew what was up it tends to stick around
57:44SPEAKERi don't know if i want to live in a concrete house that was the thing yeah now you put whatever you
57:48SPEAKERwant on the inside that's true that's true um speaking of uh things that we are thankful for
57:56SPEAKERi did a lot of thinking about things i was thankful for as i was watching
58:00SPEAKERlike i said my daughter and wife play video games with voice from across the world with friends and
58:05SPEAKERfamily members and i was like this is amazing yeah you know there's a lot of things we take for
58:08SPEAKERgranted these days yeah sometimes the future is good right yes uh i'm thankful for our patrons
58:14SPEAKERyeah me too um have have been a really positive force in my life for the last year like the
58:20SPEAKERchecking in on the discord every day um has been a source of sanity and fun and and human contact
58:29SPEAKERthat it's been really nice as we've been stuck in our homes for sure um and this is the last
58:33SPEAKERepisode of the month so as always we think uh are a bunch of more patrons than normal but uh first
58:39SPEAKERlet's thank the executive producer level patrons jacob chapel andrew cotton and david allen as
58:44SPEAKERalways uh we appreciate you guys but we also appreciate our associate producers and everyone
58:49SPEAKERelse uh so thanks to tom hilton jacob wilson tarry cox arthur geese the bunny fiend ben gulmi
58:56SPEAKERdave olean dan brockman jad rita thomas shay and graham banks thank you all so much and everyone
59:04SPEAKERuh from from all levels of the discord of the of the patreon on uh if you uh want to find out how
59:12SPEAKERto get in on the discord action you can for two bucks a month at patreon.com tech pod uh i don't
59:18SPEAKERknow what we're gonna do our our patron exclusive episode about this month right now i'm sorry our
59:23SPEAKERwhat exclusive episode patron exclusive episode oh that right yes hey did you hear that i pronounced
59:29SPEAKERthe the person from denmark's name right or finland i can't remember denmark finish i believe
59:36SPEAKERfinish yes yes yes i believe yeah yes see occasionally yes once in a while um scandinavian
59:43SPEAKERyeah uh but uh you can find out it again it's patreon.com tech pod you can find out how to
59:48SPEAKERsupport the show we appreciate it if look we know that this year is brutal for everyone so if you
59:53SPEAKERcan't support the show that's also fine yeah tell your friends yeah tell your friends spread the
59:58SPEAKERword do the tweets let the people on your other discords know that there's a better discord out
1:00:02SPEAKERthere come in and be like hey man this discord blows you know what's a great desk discord
1:00:06SPEAKERthe the tech pod discord it rips it's like nine out of ten nine point nine out of ten there you
1:00:12SPEAKERgo um we had somebody come in the other day who worked at canopus in the 90s what did you not see
1:00:18SPEAKERit yesterday what you gotta go back on i am literally even i'm literally typing that word
1:00:23SPEAKERinto the search right now yeah it was good stories there what and wow man holy maybe we should start
1:00:30SPEAKERdoing member spotlights for the patreon i started i started to just quote from what they said but
1:00:35SPEAKERi don't think that's that's maybe yeah no keep people join and read it it's not like there's
1:00:39SPEAKERanything sensitive in it or not yes just looks like a oh my god yeah we have to end this podcast
1:00:44SPEAKERi have to read this conversation right now there we go crap uh we'll be back next week yeah he's
1:00:48SPEAKERgot the he's got the source code from that look man no yeah yeah it's a good discord i'm telling
1:00:55SPEAKERyou it's fun it's a good time we will be back next week with another episode uh patreon patron
1:01:00SPEAKERexclusive episode coming soon let's say maybe first of december since the yeah this month
1:01:06SPEAKERhas kind of uh happened fast yes it has we'll get it out sometime this week though yes um
1:01:12SPEAKERthanks brad it's good to talk to you as always man yep take care y'all bye everybody
1:01:38SPEAKERyou