I want to configure it myself because now I know exactly how it works. The configuration options I’ve chosen won’t change unless I change them. Disaster recovery will be easy because when I move the disks to a new machine, LVM will just start working.
A heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse. In the winter, it provides heat; summer, it provides cooling.
It's greener because it's not burning fossil fuels (directly, anyway) vs. a propane / natural gas furnace, and it's more efficient than resistive heating.
> A heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse
Is this really the correct terminology? I'd say every AC is a heat pump, whether or not it can run in reverse, because that's how it works. It pumps heat from a colder place to a warmer place.
If it has been crippled so that it can't run in reverse, that's crappy and unfortunate, but it makes it no less of a heat pump.
According to the HVAC industry it is the correct term, based on my experience.
I agree with your logic both modes of operation (heat/cool) are both pumping heat.
Cripple is a fairly strong word here. HVAC is hyper optimized for cost/simplicity at the expense of comfort and efficiency. Which kills me. The industry is also stuck in the 80s in terms of power electronics. Variable speed control on the fans and compressors are a BIG deal. Like 20k for the gear. Even though the BOM cost is dirt cheap. Look at Carrier Infinity if you are curious
MANY Megawatts worth of power would be saved if they just included a directional valve, some speed control PCB and electronic expansion valve
Until recently, they've not been as common here in the US. Fossil fuels are just so much cheaper for the end customer, and central HVAC units in homes are much more common here.
> If it has been crippled so that it can't run in reverse, that's crappy and unfortunate, but it makes it no less of a heat pump.
Yes, it pumps heat, but it's generally not referred to as a heat pump if it doesn't have a reversing valve and all the accoutrements that go with it (coil defrost heater, etc). I wouldn't say not having all those parts make it crippled, a refrigerator/freezer isn't crippled because it can't heat food, although some commercial units can be set to keep cold food cold or hot food hot because they have reversing valves.
If you have utility natural gas at reasonable prices, gas fired heat can be very economical, and it might not be forseable that you would ever use electricity for heating, in which case a reversing valve is a waste of capital.
The words "air conditioner" don't literally mean much at all. It doesn't refer to a humidifier or a hepa filter for instance, yet the term air conditioner has a distinct meaning that is silly to try to pretend not to recognize.
I view "heat pump" as a technical term describing how some heaters/coolers/dehumidifiers/clothes driers/fridges work. Wikipedia seems to somewhat agree with me, although article about heat pumps seems focused on space heaters and coolers.
> yet the term air conditioner has a distinct meaning that is silly to try to pretend not to recognize
Well, yes, in US it apparently means "heat pump based space cooler". Where I live it means "heat pump based space heater and cooler".
Its more complex to have a reversible heat pump, because in addition to the reversing valve, you also need two metering devices and a bypass for each of them.
What do you expect to run on them then? I run 3 user facing services plus their test environments plus the database on the same 8GB server, and half of the memory is free. The database takes about 10GB (growing slowly). There's also a 10GB media directory that grows slowly. Most of it is images, I think, and videos are short. But it'll be quite a while before reaching 1TB.
This sounds a lot like how Kiro works. Your requirements and design are in a .kiro directory inside the project, allowing you to commit them. The process is structured within Kiro to walk you through generating docs for each phase before beginning to write code. Ultimately, it generates a list of tasks, and you can run them one at a time and review/update between each.
This is primarily for air quality by default, but you can get temperature, humidity, etc as well. For each station, someone paid for the hardware and is sharing the data gratis.
You’ve just described Ambient Weather. What I find kinda funny about that is they still try to upsell you to get more than 1 year of data retention.
Luckily, they allow you to configure additional arbitrary locations to pump data to. I wrote a little program to drop that data into an InfluxDB database (along with PurpleAir, AirGradient, AirThings, Solar Data, and Iotawatt). The only practical use I’ve found is to look and see “When was the last time we head three days in a row that were so windy?” I suppose I could do fun stuff with Home Assistant too.
