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DIY HVAC
An anonymous reader writes "I found this very interesting project called DIY Zoning. It allows one to add air flow balancing, temperature control, zoning, home automation, and more to an existing or new HVAC system. After getting a $200 electric bill, this sounds like a good solution for those who are getting screwed with outrageously high electric bills due to their HVAC unit especially since organizations like TVA have raised the electric rates."
My cock up your ass.
Discuss.
Good thing Hitler invented the oven so he could throw those unfunny bastards away
Some informative links:
HVAC Portal for HVAC Professionals has a lot of good info you DIY'ers might be interested in. HVAC Mall lists a lot of supplies, and HVAC City will help you avoid getting ripped off. And there's always HVAC talk if you like goofy pictures.
And don't miss HVAC Zoning Controls.
Zoning and automatic time-based management are critical if you want to keep your bills down. Running heating and cooling in one region of the house for half the night, or starting up 30 minutes before you get back from work, will save you a lot over a manually controlled system that you have to leave on whenever you're not around and awake.
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Now that I've made a sacrifice to the gods of moderation, let's get on with it: (read the parent post if you have a high threshold and I'm not in -1 oblivion yet, it's an interesting discussion on the nature of moderation)
I agree with your idea, but not with the categories you propose. It is true that the negative mods are used simply to smack down posts, and only the "flamebait" category carries any shred of meaning anymore. The positive mods have the same situation-three interchangeable mods starting with I simply cause confusion. Any Informative or Insightful post is also Interesting, so removing Interesting would help clarify the categories.
"Radical" shouldn't be -1 in the first place, I'd rather have +1 Controversial, with no karma bonus (like "Funny"). Your offtopic-I/R fits within Offtopic well enough, since I/R arguments aren't really common enough to warrant a special mod. It only helps if you're a fan of those and you want to find them. Spite is close enough to flamebait-the point of spite would be to piss people off.
In addition to Controversial, I'd add the much needed -1 Crapflood. Most of the -1 Troll/Offtopic stuff would be better classified under here. I'd also put in -1 Inaccurate for well-intentioned posts that are factually untrue. These two categories would deal with the vast majority of garbage that is unfairy lumped into Troll and Offtopic. Also, I'd remove the karma hit from Offtopic, because offtopic discussions can be the most interesting parts of articles sometimes.
Finally, I'd add +1 Sexy just to spice things up.
So we'd have:
+1 Informative, Insightful, Sexy (add karma)
+1 Funny, Controversial (no karma)
-1 Offtopic (no karma)
-1 Incorrect, Crapflood, Troll, Flamebait (lose karma)
If only they weren't written in Java. Seriously, I'm buying a multizone heated home and had thought of this project, but forgotten that it was Java based. I would consider it more if it were a hardware product and since they talk about Embedded Java, that might be a possibility in the future. Until then I won't consider bogging my server down with it.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Fuckin fags