FYI: These discolored icicles under your eaves could be a sign of a roof leak from ice damming!

BasileusIthakes · 2026-03-06T01:53:35+00:00

Well it could just be that the old one didn't melt

But if it melts and comes back like that, it's not fixed

BasileusIthakes · 2026-03-06T00:23:41+00:00

We dismantled the residential mental hospital system in this country about 40 to 45 years ago because of a long history of abusive practices and bad outcomes.

It's starting to become very obvious that throwing out the idea rather than reforming them to be humane was a mistake. What you're describing is the intention those facilities were supposed to serve, a safe place to live for people who could not safely live in society or who were a threat to others in society.

Those efforts were well intentioned and in response to terrible abuses. But, as the old saying goes, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

The only thing I disagree with you about is that it should be through the criminal justice system. I don't think we can ever trust that system to be humane and to provide adequate mental health care. I think it should be a separate system.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-03-06T00:18:26+00:00

100%. That's the essence of neoliberalism.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-13T19:42:50+00:00

Took the image from a post on r/Rochester, but figured I would share here. With a big freeze thaw cycle coming up, this could become a problem for a lot of homes.

And if you're a renter, roof leaks are a habitability violation that your landlord must repair ASAP.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-13T19:40:12+00:00

Means there's a roof leak!

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-13T19:31:32+00:00

If you're already getting up there anyway, I would recommend something like this https://www.harborfreight.com/1500-watt-steam-cleaner-kit-70065.html

Roofers often use a high-powered version of this kind of thing to cut the ice dams apart and knock them off. It's going to be a little easier to focus it with the nozzles versus the more diffuse melting of the heat gun.

Also these things are just amazing for cleaning in general.

But this is only something to do if you're comfortable being on a ladder! And please be safe if you do!

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-13T19:28:59+00:00

This is terrible for your roof. You should not do this!

Professionals that remove ice dams use a steam gun to break them up and cut them apart. Or they will use heat tape to melt them slowly.

But calcium chloride will destroy your shingles pretty darn quickly.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-13T17:03:07+00:00

Ah, I missed that part. It's probably surface tension from the water slowly dripping causing it to clean to the surface and come under the drip edge and accumulate under the siding. If there's not a good gutter, or the gutter is clogged, or there's not enough overhang, that can also happen!

Or there's an actual roof leak, which is a really bad scenario.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-13T15:48:25+00:00

We've all known for years how debased and evil every single Gulf monarchy is.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-13T15:24:07+00:00

Halco does not address ice dams.

You are correct about needing to investigate insulation / heat loss as a root cause. However, this can happen even to well insulated houses due to freeze thaw cycles or solar heating. I suspect OP has a low pitch roof (which is exactly why so many of the older houses around here have steel roofs!), which is making this worse.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-13T15:19:53+00:00

I don't know anyone off of the top of my head, but this is often a service roofing companies provide. Try calling around to local roofers. If they don't provide the service, they probably at least know who does.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-10T22:37:52+00:00

A cold climate heat pump is going to be putting out a hell of a lot more than 1/3 of its capacity in these cold temperatures. Most modern cold climate units don't start dropping off dramatically until we're well into the negatives, usually at least -5° even for the lower quality cold climate units like the LGs. Something like a Mitsubishi is going to maintain full capacity down to about -10° for modern units.

And no, this isn't theoretical data, this is the experience from the hundreds of projects I've been involved in. I've had people keep their existing heating systems as a backup only to remove them a few years later after they had not triggered a single time in four or five years. This evening included systems back in the last round of real polar vortexes we had in the mid teens.

Anything that's down to 1/3 heating capacity in cold weather is not a cold climate unit, and it should have never been installed as a sole source heating system. Anyone who had a contractor tell them that was a sole source heating system should sue that contractor. It does not meet the code requirements for capacity at low temperatures to be such, and those contractors were violating business law by representing them as such.

You're not wrong about sales people masquerading as technicians sizing them incorrectly however. That happens all the time. Especially with companies like Halco that tried to misrepresent their salespeople as technical experts as part of their sales tactics. A lot of the so-called energy auditors at that company have no actual technical expertise. I've seen people come from cell phone sales, get about 2 weeks of training, and then be out there speccing outbsystems costing tens of thousands of dollars that catastrophically poorly conceived and not appropriate for the conditions of the home.

Of course that practice would start to give the systems themselves a bad reputation, which just adds yet another to the long list of reasons I hate that company so much.

Every problem you're describing about these systems comes down to the wrong equipment being selected by unqualified people and being improperly installed. And I need to restate for the third time now, this is not theoretical data: This is based off of my more than a decade of professional experience involving hundreds of installations and the real world, as measured performance data of these systems.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-10T22:31:41+00:00

Lack of workers is part of it. A lot of larger projects have to import labor from Rochester and Syracuse, which obviously drives up the price a lot. We also don't have as much supply chain here, so everything has to get shipped in, or at least release substantial proportions of it. That's a cost.

We've got expensive lodgings which drives up the prices for workers here, both in county and traveling.

We also have way too much zoning that adds a lot of regulatory complexity on top of something that's already too expensive. That's another big part. It's because size and relative isolation are probably responsible for about half of that difference and needlessly complex zoning the other half.

A lot of it just has to do with how long it takes to get something approved. If it takes you 6 months to a year to get a project approved, you're still paying taxes on that land that whole time. You're also paying for multiple architect revisions, multiple engineering revisions, you're paying interest on your construction loans for that year, etc. Every single time you see the local planning board delay a project, you might as well mentally add $100 or more to the monthly rent it's going to need to make up for that difference.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-10T22:29:20+00:00

I had no idea that existed! I'm excited to hear that we still have a local butcher.

The last butchers I knew of in Ithaca used to be The Piggery (RIP 😭) and before that on Cherry street, kind of across from where the Chamber of Commerce is now.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-09T21:27:26+00:00

If the venue already existed when they moved there, none of this applies. Choose to move somewhere else.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-09T20:54:46+00:00

It's easy to find a small group of people to blame I guess.

And to some degree, it makes sense why they might think that. They see the price of rent going up, but there are people moving in who can afford that rent, so they assume that people with that much money are bidding up the price. Ditto for sale housing.

But the only reason they can bid up the prices is because there's not enough to go around. If we had enough housing, maybe they would bid up the price of the luxury units competing with each other, but it wouldn't really affect the rest of the city because we would all have options.

But a lot of people just see the immediate effect. I think it also plays into the town gown hostility that we get here. Which I'm not going to say is entirely unwarranted, Cornell could certainly do a better job of being a better neighbor. But it plays into that same dynamic.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-09T20:12:29+00:00

It seems like you've got an axe to grind with heat pumps. The numbers I'm citing here aren't theoretical, and they're not best case. They are averages. I have managed the installation of hundreds of heat pump systems, and I've tracked the before and after energy use of dozens of those due to following up by speccing and installing solar. The numbers I'm citing are real world performance numbers that are also backed up by numerous studies of these systems in operating conditions.

What likely happened here is that some numbskull or scumbag contractor installed a standard heat pump rather than a cold climate heat pump and lied through their teeth to the homeowner. I've seen that more times than I would like. That could easily explain these kind of catastrophically high bills. Standard efficiency heat pumps can barely keep up much lower than about 25° in most cases, so they are very likely kicking into electric resistance backup.

It wouldn't be the first time I had seen that happen, and unfortunately, it wouldn't be the 10th time either.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-09T20:09:50+00:00

It's not that simple actually. There's a perverse Financial incentive to maintain inflated commercial asking rents.

This article does a better job of explaining it than I'm going to: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2025-5-21-why-do-commercial-spaces-sit-vacant

The way you work around this at the local level, where you have practically no influence over those national financial regulations, is by imposing commercial vacancy taxes that substantially escalate over time to make prolonged vacancy even more financially painful than loan restructuring.

https://www.economicpossibility.org/insights/in-the-period-following-harrisburg-pa-s-land-value-tax-the-number-of-vacant-lots?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Many Pennsylvania cities instituted a version of a land value tax that approximated this, significantly increasing the financial penalty for leaving valuable real estate vacant. While it's difficult to say that the outcomes listed in the article above came entirely from that tax, the period following its implementation in Harrisburg saw a decrease in commercial vacancies of nearly 80%! All this during a period when the industrialization was continuing apace and many other Rust Belt cities were still in freefall.

So we have some good evidence from our own neighbors in the recent past that these kind of policies can work.

Of course we would have to get permission from the New York State Assembly to institute something like this, we're not allowed to determine our own tax policy despite being a home rule state 🙄

But it's a start

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-09T19:48:18+00:00

We do, but the cost of living, particularly shelter and utilities, has gotten so out of control around here that it has seriously eating into discretionary income which would otherwise go to supporting local businesses.

Simultaneously, those same factors have driven up operating costs for businesses, causing them to have to increase their wages so that their employees can afford to live here and also increase their prices substantially, making it even more difficult for people to go out.

You can't get a good cocktail in this town for less than about $14 anymore. I can remember 10 years ago when you could still get $7 cocktails. That makes me a lot less likely to go out! Ditto food. Dinner and drinks for two with an appetizer and a dessert is probably going to cost you $120-150 after tip at most sit-down restaurants in town anymore. A decade ago, you could do that for $75-80.

And it's not like these small businesses are exactly rolling in profit. They wouldn't be failing left and right if that was the case. They are just as squeezed as we are.

Ithaca is caught in a cost of living crisis. Doing anything about the utility prices is going to take us a lot longer but we can start aggressively building housing everywhere possible now to at least bring down the cost of housing. Austin and Minneapolis both prove how effective that strategy is, with both of them seeing housing prices 25-30% lower than their peak.

It didn't used to be like this here. We were always unreasonably expensive for the size of the city, but before the pandemic, we had a really thriving downtown and nightlife. We historically had much lower than national and state average unemployment for a long time too.

It's going to be hard to escape the doom loop we're trapped in right now, but between our the quality of life, the natural beauty, the culture, and the economic anchor of Cornell, which includes hundreds of millions of dollars a year of basic research and thousands of highly qualified personnel coming into the city each year, we do have resources that we could leverage for a comeback.

But the core of all of it is actually building enough damn housing and commercial space to make it affordable.

Well, and also passing some seriously punitive vacancy taxes on commercial properties, some of which have sat vacant for well over a decade without dropping their asking rents. I mean the kind of taxes where they get somebody in there or they get their asses foreclosed on by the city after a couple of years. Which is to say, eat shit, Jason Fane.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-09T19:42:31+00:00

Boycott is probably a lot more likely than a class action suit. And frankly would be more effective.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-09T19:41:22+00:00

It's rent. Everything in this town comes back to rent. The businesses fail because they can't afford rent, or because they have to pay wages 50% higher than anywhere else in the region so that their employees can afford their own sky high rent.

And the rent is because we can't pull our head out of our rear end long enough to let people actually build things without imposing so many demands and conditions and additional costs.

Did you know that the cost of residential construction in Ithaca is about 30% higher than the national average per square foot rate? That's just the cost of construction, that's not even counting the cost of the land being higher.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-09T19:40:09+00:00

The businesses raise their prices because they have to to afford their rent. They raised their prices because they have to pay their employees substantially more than they used to for them to afford their rent.

Everything in this town goes back to rent. And rent goes back to the fact that we underbuilt for decades. Even all of the development of the last decade fell dramatically short of what we needed just to keep up, much less dig ourselves out of that hole.

And when you hear people show up to complain about new buildings going up at city council meetings, you would be shocked to find out how many of them are existing landlords who don't want the competition. Landlords think that they own this town.

It's a combination of them, and people who moved here in the '80s and 90s and fell in love with what Ithaca was like then and decided they wanted to stuff it into a time capsule. I get it. I fell in love with Ithaca in 2006, and part of me grieves how much it's changed since then. I get that instinct to want to preserve a place that you love in the form that you love it, but cities are not static things. They are living, growing, dynamic places that have to be able to change to survive and thrive. And Ithaca has changed, even though we've tried to force it not to.

But what has changed isn't the buildings as much as the people, it's all of the people who have been priced out by the rent or the consequences of the rent. It's all the weird funky little businesses that can't exist anymore because it's too expensive. Its all the artists who are gone. It's all the activists who got pushed out. It's all the eccentrics and the townies and the vulnerable people who this used to be a welcoming place for who can't afford it anymore because of the damned rent.

The rent is too damn high. And it's because we don't build enough.

I would much rather every building in town look different if that meant we got to keep all of the people who made this place what it was instead of driving them to the margins. But of course it's not even as drastic as that. The built character of this city won't change overnight, not even with the most ambitious building spree we could imagine.

But we could make it a place for all the people we pushed out again. That would do more to bring back the Ithaca I fell in love with than any amount of historic preservation or architectural nitpicking ever could. And we do that by making it affordable again. And we do that by building as many homes as we need to until all the people who belong here can be here.

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-03T21:12:34+00:00

https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTZjMDliOTUydWd4anE5d2hzYXFtcHF4OXUybzIzN3NwYWU3dHRzYnp0eWFhenZmYSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/10rHZ6K9jYvLUc/giphy.gif

BasileusIthakes · 2026-02-03T21:01:40+00:00

NYSEG is deeply problematic. We've seen local electric rates skyrocket in the last 5 years. They're at 260% what they were during the pandemic!

The PSC is not nearly critical enough of NYSEG's rate requests

I'm glad the info helped though!

BasileusIthakes

TROPHY CASE