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To: woodbutcher1963
I've seen some of that youtube channel.

I'm uncomfortable doing that much electrical work myself. So I paid for professional install. As well as a plumber and electrician to replace my old natural gas water heater with a hybrid water heater (built in heat pump to heat the water tank). And HVAC pro to replace my old A/C and gas furnace with a variable speed heat pump and variable speed air handler, supplemented with electric heat strips for when the weather is too cold for the heat pump (even in Alabama sometimes). I did very little work myself (adding insulation, made some duct work near the water heater to draw in warm air from the attic as the intake to the water heater, and blow the cold air from the water heater into the HVAC intake during the warm half of the year).

My trade is programmer (software engineer), mainly on back-end data processing with some analysis. So for me it's more natural to focus on things like Worst Case Peak Sun Hours Per Month in my Area. And how that compares to each month's power bill / kWh pulled from the grid. Are my wife and I home enough during the day and, therefore, run our appliances during the day anyway when the sun is out? If I could set up EV charging at home. How many miles do we drive anyway (is the gas savings of an EV worth it?). Could I get a loan with all of the flexibility I wanted to buy/install these things? (Yes, HELOC). How does the interest work (fixed interest less than 4%)? How are the payments structured? (As the balance goes down, the minimum payment goes down. Count the "cost" of saving on energy as being mainly the HELOC payment, going down while the energy costs I save go up from inflation.) Tons of other stuff that'd bore all but the totally interested in weaning one off of the over-regulated energy market. Track all of that in an Excel workbook, and doing other calculations by importing the telemetry from my inverters into a SQL DB and querying it many different ways. For me it's all about the data.

63 posted on 12/15/2025 11:04:57 AM PST by Tell It Right (1 Thessalonians 5:21 -- Put everything to the test, hold fast to that which is true.)
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To: Tell It Right

I am much more a hands on guy.
Design it and build it.
Electrical is not that difficult.
The BLACK wire is the dangerous one.

Or the RED one if it is a two way circuit.


64 posted on 12/15/2025 11:24:10 AM PST by woodbutcher1963
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