Housing

#1

https://www.treehugger.com/home-today-r ... nt-6752357

The Home of Today Can Run on Direct Current
In 2015 I wrote "The Home of Tomorrow will Run on Direct Current," suggesting that you "look around your house. If you have, like me, banished incandescent bulbs, almost everything you own is running on low-voltage direct current." Today it is even more so, with cordless tools and Roomba vacuums. Only the big white goods—the fridge and oven and clothes dryer—are running on alternating current. When I wrote that post, electrical codes still demanded 14-gauge copper running to outlets every twelve feet and to light fixtures and switches.

It is a lot of copper. According to Copper.org, an average home has 195 pounds of copper wire.1 It takes a lot of ore to make a pound of copper; it is now down to 0.7% in many copper deposits, so 27,857 pounds of ore have to be processed to make your wiring, capable of carrying 1,800 watts but probably supplying an LED that draws 10 watts.2 Also, as noted in a recent post, increasing demand for copper for everything from heat pumps to electric cars to wind turbines is squeezing the supply of copper and driving up the price.

Much has changed since that 2015 post, including the electrical codes, and we are no longer talking about the home of tomorrow; it can be the home of today. Derek Cowburn is CEO of LumenCache, which designed a platform to replace 110V AC power with a standard that makes sense for our DC world. It feeds CAT5 computer wiring to LED lights, the same ones you can buy today. Except you don't need the electronics, the rectifiers, and transformers that convert the AC to DC, so the fixtures should be cheaper and last longer.

And soon, it will power more than just lighting. Cowburn tells Treehugger, "I am designing generation two now, to support up to 300 watts per channel. I can power every TV on the market, and possibly, small fan coil heat pump units. That's why I am such a huge fan of Passivhaus," because it reduces demand so much.

This is what I recently called ephemeralization, Buckminster Fuller's term for doing more with less. "Instead of trying to find enough copper to generate enough electricity to run all the motors and compressors in our cars and heat pumps, maybe we should first try to reduce demand." Cowburn has ephemeralized our electrical wiring and control systems, running both on much smaller wiring with far more sophisticated possibilities for control.

#2

That copper is valuable. Empty houses are targets of copper theft.

RTH10260 · #3

#4

The production values on Drew's videos are excellent!!!!!

#5

#6

The 6% commission on buying or selling a home is gone after Realtors association agrees to seismic settlement

The 6% commission, a standard in home purchase transactions, is no more.

In a sweeping move expected to dramatically reduce the cost of buying and selling a home, the National Association of Realtors announced Friday a settlement with groups of homesellers, agreeing to end landmark antitrust lawsuits by paying $418 million in damages and eliminating rules on commissions.

The NAR, which represents more than 1 million Realtors, also agreed to put in place a set of new rules. One prohibits agents’ compensation from being included on listings placed on local centralized listing portals known as multiple listing services, which critics say led brokers to push more expensive properties on customers. Another ends requirements that brokers subscribe to multiple listing services — many of which are owned by NAR subsidiaries — where homes are given a wide viewing in a local market. Another new rule will require buyers’ brokers to enter into written agreements with their buyers.

The agreement effectively will destroy the current homebuying and selling business model, in which sellers pay both their broker and a buyer’s broker, which critics say have driven housing prices artificially higher.

By some estimates, real estate commissions are expected to fall 25% to 50%, according to TD Cowen Insights. This will open up opportunities for alternative models of selling real estate that already exist but don’t have much market share, including flat-fee and discount brokerages.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/03/15/econ ... index.html

#7

Somebody needs to explain to me how this is advantageous for anybody.

I've always considered the 6% split between buyer and seller agent reasonable.

#8

With the inflation of real estate prices, 6% has become unreasonable. Something more in the range of 3-4.5% is where this will settle, apparently, which should lower prices 1.5-3%. Although there are some other technical changes that perhaps someone with more experience in that realm can explain that could further lower prices.

#9

Except that the agent that just lost a 10000 commission is gonna push the seller to for a higher price, and the buyer to accept it.