Can't wait for them to get involved in email... looks like I don't have to!

Maybe my numbers should be 100 and 10,000, but it doesn't matter, I know when I need to turn the air exchanger on turbo and when we are back to "normal".

I have a purple air sensor outside. One day I'll get around to making the air exchanger smart enough to turn off when the smoke from fires makes the air outside worse than inside, it turn off the air exchanger when inside air is good enough, etc.

My Big Agnes is treated as if it is tissue paper where the Eureka somehow survived containing teens wrestling inside. I hope my BA lasts the rest of my life.

I will agree with the advances in materials, they are amazing - I just think we've made some amount of trade-off in durability.

When I had to fly to NY for work I felt like I couldn't get water anywhere that was worth drinking.

I'm just a homeowner with a decent size piece of land and lots of trees. The ground is glacial till/drumlin, so rocks vary from gravel, to bowling balls and table size boulders.

I have a 7,000 lb excavator and couldn't imagine using smaller for my needs, but there is a right size for everyone!

I'd love it if mine were electric. I don't use it all of the time or all day, but the smoking old diesel is not the part of it that I enjoy.

Insulation makes the house more resistance to temperature change (relative to the inside and outside).

One thing people forget is the delta is very different in the summer and winter. Lets say your thermostat is on 70 year round. If it is 100 degrees out you only have to cool 30 degrees. When it is 0 F out you have a delta of 70 degrees. So for this scenario, expect to use more energy in the winter.

Most useful was from my attic (not livable space) up in the trusses to my basement utility room. When I convinced a local WISP to use my roof for a back haul and access for the neighborhood it saved them (and me) from running wires all over the outside of my house and was a quick, clean install.

Conduit is common in commercial work here, but almost never in residential.

As someone who framed houses as a job and designed and built three of my own I disagree with your take on attics.

It is common for houses not to have an attic because builders must build cheap to compete. Attic space can be cheap square footage, but it has to be part of the plan from the beginning and is difficult to make it an option to pick.

You can indeed have an attic with "attic trusses". They are still built out of dimensional lumber and stamped connectors - the bottom chord will be much larger. I've seen them span 36', not sure what the limit is.

On one house, to do a partial attic was only $2000 extra for the trusses. Attics present other problems/expenses too, like additional stairs. (Many plans didn't have a place where extra stairs can be added as an option AND work with the truss layout.

HVAC is another issue. You either end up with a second system for the attic or need to have space in the floor below to run ducts to the attic space. Again, most of your cookie cutter plans didn't leave a space for this. When walking my HVAC guy through my house to plan ducts he asked how much of this closet he could have for ducts. I told him "as much as you need to make it work correctly". From the look on his face you'd think he won the lottery. He replied "no one ever says that!".

Attic spaces require different insulation techniques, they aren't difficult, but cookie cutters don't like different.

I've used attic trusses on 2 of 3 houses. The one where I didn't was because stairs, HVAC and I didn't need more space (full extra height basement, daylight windows - that was enough).

I haven't pulled the trigger on it, can anyone who owns it confirm or deny this?

I spoke to the forester yesterday about the plans to thin. They are all marked out now and I'm the spring it goes to auction. And IF for some reason it isn't stopped by legal action, it will get cut in the next 1-5 years!

My property borders the public land in question and we'd love to see the fire risk reduced and stronger, healthier trees remain. I can't believe how long it takes and that people might want to stop this. We can thin it and take care of it or watch it all burn.

It felt like I was fighting some AI that was sure it knew what I wanted despite my "exact phrase" search.