California to become first U.S. state mandating solar on new homes
51 replies, posted
in a lot of places especially in the south the water heaters are actually outside of the house in a closet sort of thing.
Badly managed property has forced new developments to happen a fairly long commute from jobs, so even if you build a bunch of houses people probably aren't going to be eager to buy them. There is grossly misused space in our cities, which developers would absolutely JUMP at given the chance to make beautiful and affordable housing.
People just care too much about their historical mini cupcake shops to let the property support more people.
Solar panels are nothing but a band-aid solution to a growing energy crisis. And not the good bandaids you get from your local drug store but the ones from the 99 cent store on the ghetto side of town.
You're kinda contradicting yourself, you say that the problem isn't wasteful land usage, yet you admit that the population is too spread out which is precisely a symptom of wasteful land usage.
An interesting point. Some sources to back it up would make it valid.
I personally use portable panels in my car/yard to drip feed batteries and store most of their energy.
My power bill is down about 105$ a month so I would say its worth it from personal experience.
I remember hearing installing solar is already reaching the point where it isn't any less cost prohibitive than installing regular roofing, on top of paying itself off in electric bill savings
property value is much more out of control than construction costs though. you're talking at most ten thousand added at time of construction, which is probably high, vs the hundreds of thousands the jump in land prices is. its actually considerably cheaper to install solar while the house is being built instead of retrofitting them
Every single opinion that you state is massively underdeveloped.
We usually have our heaters set closer to 90ºC. And they work just as well at night.
I already went over this, raw land doesn't matter when jobs and economic opportunity are in cities with horrible regulations forcing people to spread out way more than necessary or healthy.
I never said you can't go live a rural lifestyle if you want.
You can't have both. You want to live out in the sticks you have to deal with the nearest town...and by extension things like jobs and supplies...being a 25 minute drive away.
Getting people to have good proximity to jobs and economic opportunity runs antithetical to allowing people to enjoy a quiet rural lifestyle. You can't have both.
I don't think I implied that either. That's the tradeoff you take if you want a rural lifestyle, hence rural flight.
I've been living the rural life since 1996. I'm pretty sure I have a good handle on it. You have to go out of your way to socialize because of how spread out we are, and that's beautiful for people like me who just don't want to socialize in the first place. In fact, the forced socialization that comes inherent to suburban and urban life is about 85% of why I don't want anything to do with either lifestyle. IT's just not possible to be a hermit when your neighbors are close enough to watch your TV from the comfort of their couch...
You can avoid socializing in urban/suburban life just as well, it's just the natural tendency for healthy neurotypical people wherever they are is to be social. But true, for pure isolation I guess you would wanna go rural lol, but it's not typical.
sure you have to go out of your way to socialise in a rural environment, but that doesn't mean that in an urban environment you have to go out of your way to not socialise.
I'm referring to air sourced/ground sourced heat pumps there. They are often 300% efficient. You put 1kW of electricity in and you get 3kW of heat out of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_source_heat_pumps#Efficiency_ratings
Solar vacuum tubes can are different but they'd be amazing for most of America in the sunny months as you'd get most if not all of your hot water from them
What do you mean driving them away? Where are they going?
Other states entirely. A lot of people my age are moving to Texas, Montana, Nevada (Las Vegas has a tech center brewing).
Meanwhile in Australia we've had this for years, We have a law that states new houses must have 2 solar panels on them.
Builders pick solar hotwater as hotwater takes alot to boil and we've got plenty of heat during the summer which takes a load off the grid in summer.
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