They'd actually make economic sense where I live, the only thing that's held me from pulling the trigger is that I want to time it with when I need to have the roof inspected/replaced.
I'm aware of the arguments about how it can be that much cheaper when deployed at mass centralized scale rather than decentralized across a bunch of rooftops, however the way the electric markets are prices is based primarily on the cost to produce the marginal supply, which is usually gas.
So while the power company might flood a bunch of solar panels trying to capture the profit between cost to generate solar vs. cost to generate using gas, those profits haven't been lowering electric costs at residential rates. If anything those costs are still climbing.
It's actually not hard to get rooftop solar to pencil out in that situation, especially if you assume even moderate growth in future electricity rates or inflation. In my own tracker it would even be superior to paying down additional principle on my home mortgage!
Admittedly it would be less of a slam dunk if the net metering was less generous around here as you'd basically be required to add battery to the mix if you weren't already. But even that just prolongs the time to payoff, it still ends up having good ROI economically speaking.
Honestly they only made economic sense in my case because of government incentives. Although if the price continues to fall, they may eventually even make sense in my area without incentives.
Electricity generation in the event of a power outage was another consideration for me.
But yeah as a techy I also just enjoy having them.
I wish that were true, but I suspect more people are doing it to be trendy/appear "green" than basing it on a system lifetime ROI calculation vs. alternatives.
You should take this as a data point where your gut intuition has failed you.
It is really condescending to dismiss their choice as motivated by vanity rather than assuming that other people might have done their homework and made a rational decision. It might very well be that you have done your own homework and it doesn't make sense for your situation, but other people face different tradeoffs which make it worthwhile.
Just looking into it for my house in the UK (read, not very sunny) and it'll pay for itself in around 6 years. Seems like a no brainer for a house I'm not planning on moving out of.
You need only have read the HN front page 4 days ago to have seen one reason why 50,000 people may be motivated to get solar. Nothing trendy going on there, just poor regional planning.
I'm not the one to whom you asked the question - I can think of plenty of things, but by and large most of the home things with ROI make the most sense to invest in when you're buying a new thing anyway - e.g. solar panels when you need a new roof, EV when you need a new car, ventless dryer when you need a new dryer, heat pump when you need new heating/AC, etc.
Off the top of my head the only thing that's really doable without replacing a depreciating asset are certain kinds of insulation upgrades. (And I guess potentially ceiling fan installs.)
It's a bit difficult to use the Big Bang as time zero when the current uncertainty of when it actually happened ±0.02 billion years, which is what, a thousand times longer than all of recorded human history.
We could use the birth date of that jewish prophet, except we'd still be off by a few years. Oh well, in a few centuries no one will care, and we'll just use Unix Epoch.
> "Going metric" raises the question of whether we adopt metric measures for our existing standards (such as pipe threads) or actually adopt the ISO sizes.
You adopt ISO sizes FFS. They are international standards. You really want to invent a whole new set of incompatible 'standards'?
You think the US is the first to go through this? Australia, Canada, and the UK went metric in the 1970s (we also decimalised our currencies). Yes it was challenging for some adults but mostly pretty easy for kids. People adapted. Industries adapted. Now we hardly think about it except when dealing with Americans or in some historical contexts.
For the piping example, you have all the installed infrastructure that's in the old "IPS" (straight) and "NPT" (tapered) sizes. So now a plumber needs to carry additional fittings or carry conversion fittings. Easier to just stay with what we have.
Of course it's easier to stick with what you have in the short term. Change is difficult. You do it for the long term gain. If you had done it 50 years ago like the rest of the English-speaking world you wouldn't be in this mess.
Half of our houses were built 50 years ago. Even if we had a 'tough but fair' autocrat simply declaring we're moving all newly-installed everything to metric standards, we're going to have to have both kinds of pipes on the truck for 50 more years. That's 2x the inventory to manage for every trade that works on any kind of construction or servicing of equipment.
We can still do a better job teaching metric to kids, without needing to tear down every building to replace all the 2-by-4s with "50x100s." But yeah, that means dealing with the fact we don't have everything following the standards and our pipe threads, screws, etc. will always be different to yours.
Didn't France go metric a few centuries ago? Anyway, I suspect there are at least 10 times as many buildings, and 10000 times as many machines deployed, in 2026 America than the number you'd get by adding every European country's stats at the year they really seriously standardized metric.
You can make a better case that we were fools to not stay the course in the 1970s than a case that we should try it today. Even the 70s seem more like the very tail end of a window. 1776 would have been a great time to do it!
Exactly: the entire world has a standard, and the US is doing its own weird thing.
The long-term gain is being able to sell your stuff to the rest of the world, and being able to import stuff from the rest of the world without paying a Weird Format Tax.
Would you rather manufacture stuff for 8 billion people, or for 340 million?
You could also argue that North America should convert to 50hz 220VAC for electric services, so that one line of products could be sold to the entire world. But the switching costs would be huge and manufacturers generally have no problem making the few changes that are needed to make products for export, or when possible designing their products to accept either standard.
Cutting metric or imperial threads in a pipe fitting is a programming code change in a CNC machine, and maybe using a different cutting tool. Easily done for an order that's going to be exported.
So I don't think manufacturing is a big concern, and not the reason we've stayed with old standards in many cases.
k what's your quote on replacing every screw and bolt in America (and of course tapping new metric threads for those screws and bolts to go into). Also replace every pipe in every house.
There would need to be like a minimum 50-year transition where everything will be worse (keep both of everything in stock because both old and new need maintenance) and we'll probably have more confusion and mistakes over what units were being used during that half-century.
I love metric. I think it's awesome. But I'm not sure what anyone expects anymore. We attempted the same half-assed conversion Canada did in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter was President and people were pretty sane. We did only a little bit worse than they did[1] though. It boggles the mind to imagine a US populace as determinedly political and polarized as they are now adopting even a slightly inconvenient lifestyle change just because the government said so. Therefore, "you guys should just adopt metric" seems less than productive.
The UK continues to live on in a weird metric-imperial mash up. Beer is still measured in pints, lots of food (but not all!) is measured in pounds, distance and speed limits are sign-posted in miles, but the sizes of most things in life are in cm, mm and meters.
I was literally just about to say this. It’s similar to what a lot of really good teachers do: students use them as a “rubber duck,” and then they respond as an almost Socratic guide.
I've actually used that approach during my years teaching ESL - self-discovery often leads to the most persistent (long-term) lessons.
> The model has completely ignored Lindbergh (1927), the first England-Australia flight (1919, Alcock and Brown's Atlantic crossing),...
Which is funny to me that Claude chastises it about a fact it (Claude) gets wrong by attributing the England-Australia flight (Smith brothers) to Alcock and Brown, somehow getting there by crossing the Atlantic.
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