Began my espresso journey as a Christmas present to myself and also got a Bambino. Get a great grinder and digital scale that can do flow rate...knowing that you'll be diving deep very soon 😉
I had the same thought re: air conditioners. Seems obvious to just "turn them around" (internally). I asked a friend in the HVAC business about it and apparently the issue is surface area. You need a LOT of cold outside air to extract a tiny bit of heat to pump into the house. My takeaway is that there's a minimum viable scale for it to work as a heat pump. At some level you're better off just using electric heat at 100% efficiency. But it's still darn tempting to think you could get 200% out of the same machine. Hey Elon, I have your next engineering challenge....
Modern heat pumps (which is mechanically almost the same as an AC) are very efficient and can work quite well even in pretty cold climate (they work fine here in Canada, and are very popular in Scandinavia).
In warmer places like the US, they could probably generate almost all of the heating.
Of course a tiny AC unit probably couldn't do much, but a lot of places have pretty decent-sized ACs that could generate a decent amount of heat.
I'd really like to see someone try! We looked at heat pumps but they were so expensive. This reminds me of the U-shaped air conditioner. Some smart human realized you could almost close the window between the inside and outside parts and drastically reduce the noise of the unit.
I plan to replace my AC unit with a heat pump whenever I need to replace it. Higher upfront cost, but then lower operating cost for years. I'll keep the gas furnace as auxiliary for very cold days, but the rest of the year, it'll be nice to move from gas heating to hydro-power.
I’m going out on a limb here, but there is a small chance NVDA buys a small modular reactor company. If power is the gating factor, de-gate it.
That'd be quite the curve ball!
I am Montreal based, so definitely hope to share a coffee some day!
Let me know if you're ever in the Ottawa area!
Began my espresso journey as a Christmas present to myself and also got a Bambino. Get a great grinder and digital scale that can do flow rate...knowing that you'll be diving deep very soon 😉
I have a pretty decent grinder (Baratza Encore) because we currently use an Aeropress for coffee and that takes pretty finely ground coffee.
But it’s the first I hear about flow rate on a scale! What model do you have? Any recommendations?
Timemore Black Mirror 2.0 works great for me.
Thanks!
Great edition. The information on Apple using GCP and the request for more compute was interesting and new to me. 👍🏽
Thank you for reading! Hope you are well 💚 🥃
I had the same thought re: air conditioners. Seems obvious to just "turn them around" (internally). I asked a friend in the HVAC business about it and apparently the issue is surface area. You need a LOT of cold outside air to extract a tiny bit of heat to pump into the house. My takeaway is that there's a minimum viable scale for it to work as a heat pump. At some level you're better off just using electric heat at 100% efficiency. But it's still darn tempting to think you could get 200% out of the same machine. Hey Elon, I have your next engineering challenge....
Modern heat pumps (which is mechanically almost the same as an AC) are very efficient and can work quite well even in pretty cold climate (they work fine here in Canada, and are very popular in Scandinavia).
In warmer places like the US, they could probably generate almost all of the heating.
Of course a tiny AC unit probably couldn't do much, but a lot of places have pretty decent-sized ACs that could generate a decent amount of heat.
I'd really like to see someone try! We looked at heat pumps but they were so expensive. This reminds me of the U-shaped air conditioner. Some smart human realized you could almost close the window between the inside and outside parts and drastically reduce the noise of the unit.
I plan to replace my AC unit with a heat pump whenever I need to replace it. Higher upfront cost, but then lower operating cost for years. I'll keep the gas furnace as auxiliary for very cold days, but the rest of the year, it'll be nice to move from gas heating to hydro-power.
Nice!
Here in Quebec electricity is all hydro and relatively cheap, so that also helps.
I'm really glad to have moved over to an EV too. It costs me maybe $3-4 CAD to "fill up" my battery.