You can blame the Listerine ads for that.

1 asprin […] 1 aleve …

That combination of two non-steroidal anti-inflammatories is probably knocking out more than you think.

Ditto. We went from having five channels, one snowy on a bad day, plus a bonus 6th channel when the stars aligned, to two channels at best.

The broadcasters and regulators took a basic fact about digital signals “We can get a better quality signal with less transmission power” and saw it as a challenge to set up their digital transmitters with the most conservative estimate of minimum power required. I haven’t studied well enough for my amateur radio exam to know if I’m comparing apples to oranges, but I’m still shocked to see descriptions of transmitter power go from 100kW in one case to below 20kW.

I’m surprised you haven’t found many people who meditate. There are a lot of people who follow abrabamic traditions on meditation (though they use a different word for it), and they can be found pretty much worldwide except for a few scattered spots.

I should caution you, though, the terminology used by these groups may seem quite foreign, but you’ll have to trust me – they meditate even if some of them don’t call it that.

The grow tent was mostly self-contained and humidity-controlled and monitored inside and out. It actually had to be indoors because of our short growing season, risk of germination from nearby industrial crops, and federal licensing requirements for the type of plant at the time. Regardless, the HVAC experts were here on-site and they could have opened their eyes to what I was telling them. There’s was no heat load calculation. They said “this is the unit we install for your type of house and it’s more than enough. Trust me, I’ve been doing this for…” etc. etc.

Of course condensers and evaporator coils work by pushing entropy around. I’m not sure what in my comment would have led you to believe I thought otherwise.

Short cycling would be a happy problem at this point. Over the past month the shortest cycle was on a 16 C day, when the A/C ran from 6:41am to 9:15am, and the longest were on those 32 C days when it started at roughly 7:45am and didn’t finish cooling until 5am the next day. You suggest that it won’t do anything on a hot day, but the temperature gradient indoors when the outside temperature is high is measurably lower when the system is cooling as compared to idle.

Maybe the HVAC guy was thinking I was just one of those same customers you’re complaining about. Nobody’s asking for a system ridiculously overpowered – Just properly powered. I understand the value of properly sizing a system. For instance, I know that a properly-sized furnace should run nonstop on the coldest day of the year. I also know that you don’t have an entire month’s worth of “coldest day of the year”

My house can be 60 degree warmer than the outside temperature in the winter, so I just have to point the blame somewhere when it can’t stay 10 degree cooler than the outside throughout summer. And yes, I know cooling is a lot more complex than heating, but I’m giving the A/C a 50 degree headstart.

…And that is why I think there should be a trial period for HVAC systems.

HVAC systems.

When my wife and I we had to replace our forced air furnace and central air system in the late autumn due to carbon monoxide literally the evening before our son was to be born, I felt under pressure to get something in place.

I told them I needed a more powerful air conditioner for all the unique heat-generating equipment in my basement, especially since our old system had trouble keeping up. They said that the new unit was more than enough for the square footage. I reiterated again, that air conditioners don’t cool square footage, they cool BTU’s, and the average home doesn’t have a grow op and server farm in the basement generating heat. Then, they decided to hit me with the old “I’ve been doing this for {x} decades” speech.

Needless to say, I’ve had to consolidate servers, stop indoor gardening, replace the bulbs in the house with those shitty blue-hued LED’s that can’t dim right (and dimmer switches to handle the change in load characteristics), take the weather into account when cooking indoors and clean both sets of A/C coils on a more frequent basis. The air conditioner still can’t keep up and when we have a string of hot days, we can’t always count on the cooler evenings to get the house back down to “room temperature”.

Oh, and now our old chimney drips water into the basement.