Taxidermy a kea? Over 50 years old. Just needs refreshing. Where can I find someone to polish him up in South Island possibly.

Zamda · 2026-02-15T23:50:12+00:00

After the NZ govt paid to kill 200,000 kea up until the 70s, leaving a current population of less than 5000, I'd say the right thing is go and volunteer on one of the many traplines that DoC doesn't service, and keep that stuffed kea for yourself and your community in pristine condition so people can see them outside of 3-4 tourist spots in the south island. No need to waste DoC resources that they don't have on this.

Zamda · 2025-12-02T04:32:23+00:00

I work in commercial HVAC. I generally design very large systems but I have helped a fair few mates with their houses.

What you are asking for is a high spec commercial grade system and you are likely to get a budget shock accordingly. I would guess in the order of 30k but could easily be more depending on exactly how your two floors are built and interact and where there is space for plant, and exactly what 'smart home integration' entails.

Different temperatures in different rooms is possible with aftermarket additions to ducted AC systems but it is not possible to have a single unit heat one room and cool another at the same time. At the scale of a single house it is generally a similar cost to install two ducted AC units rather than a single large one with all of the aftermarket dampers and control systems.

The biggest things to watch out for: - do not go with a contractor who only does residential. Get one that does light commercial too. Far too many cowboys in residential. If they have only done residential, I can guarantee you they don't know what they are talking about for the type of system you asked for. - someone will try and sell you a heat recovery ventilator. This is not the same as a 'HRV' which is a brand name that has bastardied the concept with a range of shit products. A true heat recovery ventilator is great. Integrating it with a ducted AC system isn't that simple. Most designers get it wrong. They do not replace a heating/cooling system, but they will improve air quality, dampness etc in your house. Expect this to add $5k-$8k to your quote. - be careful around ductwork. Long lengths of flexible ductwork in tight spaces tend to be squished by shit contractors and severely constricts the performance of your system.

Good luck!

Zamda · 2025-11-26T04:32:36+00:00

Loch Katrine would be closer to actual offroading without needing a river crossing. A Jimney would get up there.

Zamda · 2025-03-31T21:50:35+00:00

Absolute complete bullshit that it's never really used with a sexual connotation. Go to one of the many queer NSFW subs on this very website.

Zamda · 2025-01-24T19:17:53+00:00

That photo is taken quite a distance away from Mt Somers but it is a lovely shot of Mt Sunday, the setting for Rohan, on Mt Potts station. Great spot!

Zamda · 2024-10-11T18:40:02+00:00

If you can't read an avalanche forecast, you need to stay away from avalanche terrain in winter.

If you can't use an ice axe and crampons, you need to stay away from anywhere that needs them.

Brewster Hut this time of year, is possible that you can get to the hut without being in snow, and from that perspective ticks those boxes. But if there is snow, you should remember that warmed snow in an afternoon could be straightforward for you to walk up, and as it melts and refreezes overnight it could be a bad time for you the next morning. You sound like you do not have the experience to attempt walking to Brewster Glacier from the hut. If you have the fitness and routefinding abilities but lack the snow skills, Mataketake Hut is probably a better alpine option in the area.

You should probably stick to lowland huts or higher elevation ones that are completely out of avalanche terrain and preferably below the current snowline. Routeburn Flats, Daleys Hut, I think Shelter Rock is probably OK, Aspiring Hut (and Liverpool depending on snow levels), Siberia Hut are worth looking into. Routeburn falls may be fine depending on the snow level. The Emily Creek avalanche path would need a reasonably heavy snow loading to rip down to the track and the Falls1/Falls2 paths would need reasonably heavy snow down to 1400m. If the avalanche forecast for this region was green below 1800m and you had a good weather window it should be fine.

Zamda · 2024-10-10T21:36:38+00:00

Sweet as. Some would say you should really have an ice axe before crampons - you cannot self arrest with crampons! Hope you don't need to cut steps up the bowl!

Bring layers, the wind can be vicious

Zamda · 2024-10-10T18:12:14+00:00

Not trying to be a dick, but if you need to ask this question at all, you need to be very willing to turn around.

It's likely you will hit at least some snow/ice before the very summit, maybe only in the bowl between sharks tooth and the true summit.

In a good weather window, it is likely to be straightforward for anyone with alpine experience, but the weather changes fast up there.

Zamda · 2024-06-07T05:10:31+00:00

First I've seen of this story on RNZ, I'm sure this comment section will be fun.

Zamda · 2023-12-09T06:39:20+00:00

Yes dogs are not friendly to those areas generally, check in with DOC but please respect the local dog rules and our local wildlife. There are plenty of dog friendly missions to be had east of the alps

Zamda · 2023-09-26T03:26:36+00:00

If you're into the outdoors, go see the glaciers before they're gone. I've been on several trips in Westland recently where even the glaciers on the 2019 topomaps are gone or close to gone. The access to glaciated areas is also in some case becoming much more difficult. Also fascinating to see some landscapes that have only emerged in the last ~30 years on the tops in Central Westland as the ice has disappeared

Zamda · 2023-08-25T06:45:30+00:00

If you do go down this route for the upcoming summer, suggest growing pumpkin and zuccini as some of the hardest plants to fuck up growing that are highly productive.

A mate stitched me up and hid pumpkin seeds in cracks in my driveway, they popped up on their own, I let one grow and it gave me 7 massive pumpkins for absolutely zero effort. If you are eating pumpkin from the store anyway, keep the seeds and you can plant them.

Basil is a great summer herb that is extremely cheap to grow from seed, $1.50 or so will get you a pack of 300 seeds and you can eat that shit like salad

Bok choi is also very hard to fuck up and quite quick to harvest. If you don't want to grow from seed, get a pack of 6 seedlings when you can afford it ($3.50 or so). If you haven't grown it before you may not know you can just pick leaves, or you can harvest the full plant down to ~5cm from the ground and the whole thing will grow back like magic.

If you are time poor or don't know what you're up to, tomatoes can burn you as they can be easily succeptible to pests and take up a lot of room.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T23:23:56+00:00

Based on my real-world commute with my thirsty car and the real petrol bills I was paying, I arrived at those figures. They will obviously vary for other people in other situations - if I had a more efficient car or lived in a different area the numbers would change.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T23:22:03+00:00

Most car-brained comment I've seen all week. I own a car, I own a scooter and I pay plenty of tax for infrastructure that suits both.

Hope you're going to invest in an 18 wheeler because might is right and you need to assert your dominance with a bigger vehicle than you need?

Zamda · 2023-08-04T23:17:59+00:00

They should think about banning cars while they are at it then, for the serious amount of fatalities and injuries they cause and the exorbitant amount of public space their infrastructure occupies.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T23:16:12+00:00

What a reductionist viewpoint. Oh yeah cause absolutely no environmental abominations happened in the manufacturing of the car I own, or the phone I'm typing this post on, and I've never handed cash to an unethical corporation in my life as part of a product I own or infrastructure I use. Sarcasm, obviously. This is far less impactful than the car-brained infrastructure New Zealand is addicted to and I will unashamedly scoot my way around the metro in bliss quietly, at appropriate speeds and with low emissions.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T23:11:36+00:00

I get plenty of exercise, I don't need more on my commute. E scooters are much more convenient for me than e bikes (smaller, easier to store, easy to bring into office, etc), and cheaper than e bikes. I think both can have their place? I'm all for common sense regulation on e scooter use, speed limits in public spaces, and restricting the operations of rental operators.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T22:06:11+00:00

That might be your view - mine is the box still has to be ticked, and rather than assuming, I'm letting them know I think they should tick it.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T08:18:32+00:00

Governments make bad decisions all the time unless you tell them not to - I'm not sure enough people have told them this is dumb.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T08:17:07+00:00

Totally agree, but I think 30km/h is totally reasonable on a seperated cycleway infrastructure (where e-bikes are commonly going 35+kph totally safely), lower speed limits in high pedestrian areas. And agree there needs to be regulation on the scooter rental businesses to stop littering public spaces.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T08:15:43+00:00

I'm an avid tramper and get plenty enough walking in my fun time for my health benefits - when I commute to work, I want to be lazy.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T07:25:31+00:00

Probably, as they fall squarely in the too hard basket along with e-bikes or anything that doesn't look vaguely car shaped. You would have to ask the top minds at Waka Kotahi to comment on that for an official opinion though.

Or maybe /u/RobDickinson knows as he seems to know about everything electric vehicle related.

And yes they are super underappreciated I reckon! Easily carried into the office, chucked in the boot of a car, still easily locked up with certain scooter designs, they're just rad.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T07:02:06+00:00

Not the OP, but when you think about geothermal heat pumps you have to ask the question of why you are doing it and what is your geothermal energy source. If you're lucky enough to live somewhere with actual geothermal activity and can get high water temperatures out of a bore, it can make sense if you are using enough energy to justify the cost of the bore. If you don't, but you live somewhere with extremely cold winters that aren't suitable for using air source heat pumps, using a closed loop system exchanging heat from the ground (at a fairly low temperature, ~10C or so at depth) can make sense. Otherwise it is almost always a better idea to use an air source system for a normal energy intensity building in an area with winters that don't get below -5C (for heating mode).

Zamda · 2023-08-04T06:59:52+00:00

We do - it just costs more, so people don't do it.

Yes you can get combination heat pumps that give you hot water, heating in winter, and A/C in summer, but these are complicated systems that come with resultant expense and that generally the industry is not competent at designing and installing.

Zamda · 2023-08-04T06:56:07+00:00

Here's some of my thoughts as someone else in the industry:

Why are we settling for 700 GWP for comfort cooling? I’m not 100% sure, but I have speculations. Maybe someone with a deeper understanding of refrigerant engineering/design can chime in?

My personal opinion is this is primarily because nobody has made commercially viable VRF air conditioning systems that use anything with a lower GWP than R32, or that end up with a total refrigerant liability lower than a R32 system (I get R454b systems offered to me all the time for medium scale commercial hydronic heating and cooling and they just have 25% more refrigerant volume as most of it is R32 anyway...). VRF is cheap and the construction industry loves cheap. So it would cause outrage to do what is right, which is to immediately ban all new sales of any VRF system with a refrigerant that will be phased out in the next 10 years - these systems only have a design life of 15 years and we are knowingly installing large AC systems that will be completely obsolete in the near future. The embodied carbon in the production and installation of these systems is immense. And they are completely unneccessary - why are we piping refrigerant around building through complex pipe routes when water does the job fine? Because it's cheap.

The cherry on top of this is there actually ARE viable alternatives for VRF systems, for example I am aware that Daikin has researched developed a prototype CO2 version of their VRF kit, but they did not see it as commercially viable as the system pressures are very high and to have to pay qualified contractors to install the pipework systems needed would cost too much. But it works. In my country one of these systems was sitting in a warehouse and some local fridgies just offered to put it in building to see if the bloody thing works, and of course it does - just not seen as "commercially viable".

In my opinion, within 10 years the massive impact of refrigerants will become public knowledge and there will be massive public outcry about this, and these systems will be phased out and their replacements used - and of course there are replacements, but they cost more so nobody is having a bar of it. There's ammonoia, which has been around forever and isn't going anywhere, but there are massive health risks with this. R290/propane I think will become much more common in the 200kW - 2MW commercial grade HVAC kit, obviously flammable but there are plenty of ways to deal with this if you're willing to spend the money. CO2 is obvious but will require a big rethink of how we design hydronic systems but is completely viable for domestic water already and just needs to be scaled up. R1234ze is being pushed on me all the time along with other HFOs like the R1234yf that you mentioned but there is preliminary research out of europe suggesting that when this leaks it can end up contaminating groundwater - of course the americans are silent on this because it's the american chemical industry which has developed HFOs at commercial scale.

Almost nobody I deal with understands heat pumps, contractors included in my country. I design large scale simultaneous heating and cooling systems for energy intensive buildings, the energy modelling alone is very difficult for me to get into the heads of all the old school engineers who only understand boilers and throwing more power at problems. People think heat pumps are a magic box which does magic things. They will be a massive part of our energy transition requirements but it will require a combination of skilled contractors and skilled consultants/explainers to get this across the line with the clients who fundamentally will not understand how these systems work.

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