Re: Short Vectors Versus Long Vectors

On 4/29/2024 1:13 AM, Terje Mathisen wrote:

George Neuner wrote:

On Thu, 25 Apr 2024 17:49:11 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig
<tkoenig@netcologne.de> wrote:
>

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:
>

I mean, my entire house is wired for 24KW and usually runs at more
like 4KW including a heat pump that heats the house.

>
Good thing you're not living in Germany, your electricity bill
would be enormous...

>
Possibly John meant to say "4Kwh", which actually would a be a bit on
the high side for the *average* home in the US.
>
If he really meant 4Kw continuous ... wow!
>

Here in Norway we abuse our hydro power as our primary house heating source, in our previous home we used about 60K KWh per year, which corresponds to 60K/(24*365.24) = 6.84 KW average, day & night.
 This was in fact while having a heat pump to handle the main part of the heating needs.
 The new house, which is from the same era (1962 vs 1963), uses significantly less, but probably still 30-40K /year.
 Electric power used to cost just under 1 NOK (about 9 cents at current exchange rates), including both primary power cost and transmission cost, but then we started exporting too much to Denmark/Sweden/Germany which means that we also imported their sometimes much higher power prices.
 

Where I am living, much of the time winters are mild enough that one can use a desktop PC as a space heater... And fire up some computationally intensive tasks to heat the room...
The leaves and grass may turn yellow, but otherwise mostly OK. If one gets lucky enough, maybe it might snow on Christmas, because otherwise it is kinda lacking if it is just bare lawn (though, I think there is some sort of spray-foam fake-snow that some people use; not sure what it is exactly, seemingly dissolves away if it rains).
However, much of the rest of the year needs air conditioning...
I suspect most of the power use goes into running the air conditioner, but things are rather unpleasant without an air conditioner (or, I guess, it is like a heat pump, but sends the heat outside to make ones' house colder).
Except when it gets cold:
Last winter, at one point it got extra cold, and the heater in my machine shop failed (it was an electric powered furnace).
Where, say, to make heat in the winter, the furnace has a large electrical resistance element that gets hot (like in a toaster, but a lot bigger). As far as I know, this is a fairly common heating technology around here.
It was cold enough that all the flood coolant in the CNC mill froze, and most of the oils in the shop became dense and viscous.
A bucket of water also turned into a solid chunk of ice.
Almost sort of surreal, and also somewhat unpleasant to work in...
Also, in winter time, in times when it snows, the roads become rather dangerous, with cars skidding out and sliding off the road all over the place, etc. Often pretty much everything shuts down on these days.
Say, on most days, a person can stop at a traffic light, say, 50 MPH / 105 km/h to stop in, say, 50ft/15m, but like, this doesn't work on snow, and the cars are prone to slide and spin out instead, etc...
Well, and all the oversize pickup trucks and 4 wheel-drive and similar doesn't really help on snow either, ... (I am living in an area where the roads are mostly full of large pickup trucks, with sedan-style cars as a relative minority).
Bonus points if the pickup is lifted, has smoke-stack exhaust pipes, and step ladders (to allow access to the doors), ...
Though, most of the time, winter isn't cold enough to cause water to freeze solid.
Like, usually around 50F/10C or so in winter, vs ~ 90-110F / 32-44C in the summer, or say 122F / 50C on extra hot days.
Well, and also tornadoes are semi-common... But, there are siren towers that come on (and are fairly loud) whenever a tornado is in the general area.
Well, and sometimes for just strong wind, like say when wind decides to randomly pick up to 150MPH / 240km/h and knock over many of the trees and power lines and similar (and taking a lot of roofs and flipping cars and similar in the process), and like knocking out power to much of the city... Had fun times with this last year (around June).
...
Where, I guess I can note that most power transmission around here basically has the power lines on top of large wooden poles (and then for each house, wires go from the poles down into large metal pipes that stick up off the sides of houses, and then down to the power meter and circuit-breaker boxes, often mounted to the outside of the houses).
Where, say, most devices run on 115-120 VAC 60Hz, but the power coming into the house is 230-240VAC with a center "neutral" tap. But typically only specialized appliances, like stoves and clothes dryers (or the AC / Furnace), have access to 240V power.
Not really sure what everything is like in Europe.

Terje