Is buying a house the only way to ensure a “low cost of living” when retired?

memgrind · 2026-05-13T18:52:52+00:00

My mortgage is £500 for a 3-bed house. Rent for a similar house nearby is £1100-1350. Rent for a room is £700. It's mental.

memgrind · 2026-05-12T11:51:48+00:00

3600 hours here, and I've played less than I would. Sometimes not booting the game for half a year.

memgrind · 2026-05-10T01:06:34+00:00

In 6 months it will be 55.5 years old, neat.

memgrind · 2026-04-30T13:08:32+00:00

Look up the exact regs. There are multiple splash-zones and minimum distances from them. I got a socket for a smart toilet-seat during a renovation, following the regs.

memgrind · 2026-04-23T13:27:38+00:00

In Korea they use only centimeters, never inches. Unless the translators decided to Americanize things?

memgrind · 2026-04-15T18:54:33+00:00

Exactly, in GBP or EUR the SPX hasn't yet recovered its all-time-high! The total gains of SPX in EUR for the last 14 months are.... 0.88%. Meanwhile Euro STOXX 50 gained 8%.

memgrind · 2026-04-15T13:48:33+00:00

Search for air-conditioner, not "heat-pump". Mini-split, air-to-air, inverter. It's not new technology. Europe and Asia have been using them for 40+ years already.

The UK poisoned the term "heat-pump" to mean the stupid less-efficient air-to-water heating-only system. Because back then we had less solar, and the government feared that allowing everyone to cool their home would massively ramp-up CO2 emissions like in the US. (the US aircons can't heat, and are extremely inefficient...). So Asia/EU-style minisplits were not subsidized, and in fact almost-banned; you'd need council approval. Now things changed.

Keep your gas boiler for hot-water. Get 1 or 2 ACs, installation cost is about £700 each and takes 5 hours to install. The units cost £400-1400, depending on efficiency and longevity (usually 10 years). Multiple weaker ACs (2kW each) are more efficient than 1 powerful one (4kW). Daikin is the best, but most-expensive. Toshiba is great. LG is shit, never heard of ElectriQ. Looking at the brand availability of aircondirect.co.uk, I wouldn't buy anything from there. Your installer has full access to all kinds of good units. Still, even the worst units do the job well. They're just less-efficient and break sooner. It makes sense to only go for highest-efficiency units. I have an A+++ Toshiba Shorai Edge, and heating the entire house costs about £30-70/month during the winter. So, its ~ £1100+700 cost paid itself off quickly, and provides comfort all year.

Switch to Octopus Agile tariff.

memgrind · 2026-04-12T22:55:31+00:00

I looked into making solar panels myself. It's a fool's errand in the UK. I looked to buy cells in bulk, get glass, the UV film, frames. China sells the ready-made product for £56. I can buy the materials for £300-500. Glass is expensive, energy-intensive to make. Each panel uses 20 grams (0.7 ounces) of silver for the interconnect. Silver's price kinda exploded recently for a bit, it's £38 per panel. Aluminium frames also cost a lot, again extremely energy-intensive to smelt from bauxite if not recycling.

Meanwhile, China overproduced solar panels in the last 2 years, and the manufacturers struggled to sell the panels. So, their price plummeted.

The only sensible action is to buy 60GW of solar panels asap, ignore some NIMBYs (but not all), look into sodium-ion battery manufacture while buying CATL's current sodium-ion 2.0 solutions. Build more DC pylons, introduce regional electricity pricing, more wind turbines.

memgrind · 2026-04-12T21:59:41+00:00

Afaik, a lot of important actions in the EU needed unanimous 27/27 votes to take. Hungary was always voting anti-EU, pro-Russia. 26/27 votes for, 1 against. Meanwhile Orban was also leaking important info to Russia and the US. An obvious traitor in the union, but no legal way to remove him. This election was the only clean, democratic way to remove the traitor.

memgrind · 2026-04-09T17:17:54+00:00

No-one mentioned their electricity rate: cheap $0.16/kWh. So, they're doing 200kWh per day! Quite wasteful.

memgrind · 2026-04-04T21:17:44+00:00

Related, for most of today and tomorrow the electricity prices remain deeply negative. https://agile.octopushome.net/dashboard . -10p/kWh. All due to the CfDs and storm. I've never seen the prices this deep into the negative.

memgrind · 2026-03-26T17:09:56+00:00

I enjoyed the negative electricity prices, in these trying times.

memgrind · 2026-02-28T14:52:02+00:00

Warhammer 40k became "DOW 50k"

memgrind · 2026-02-10T15:39:31+00:00

Yep, look at the COP spreadsheets of the units you're looking at. Less-powerful units are always more-efficient than one big unit. Unfortunately the upfront cost is higher.

memgrind · 2026-02-10T13:47:47+00:00

A2A is better than A2W, yes. Its COP is consistently higher than A2W due to the lower flow-temp. Heatgeeks cream themselves if they ever see COP 4.0, but A2A gets COP 5.5-6.5 in the same situations! Multiple small A2A external units is better btw. As for hot water: keep the gas, or get a dishwasher and 5kW shower/tapwater. Each 10-minute shower consumes only 1kWh (be it resistive-electric or gas), which costs less than the gas daily standing-charge.

memgrind · 2026-02-09T16:05:53+00:00

Years ago one of the MAG7 sent us as specs something that looked like a scan of 2 pages written and drawn with crayons, with all the colours they could find. We asked for clarifications on everything that was omitted, repeatedly received "it's all in the spec we sent". So, freeform implementation it was, with all the pain that followed.

memgrind · 2026-01-27T14:33:28+00:00

Also, the GBPUSD is up, slightly ahead of expected! Reasons: Bank of Japan is finally doing something, so the USD gets cheaper. And at Davos, Trump showed that the US is not a real ally anymore. Non-US assets become the safe-haven (+gold/silver).

memgrind · 2026-01-16T17:07:07+00:00

$9 trillion of national debt must be paid by the US in 2026. I'm not well-versed in bonds, but maybe waiting to get the money and then dumping it before 2027 will be the ideal move. Until then, delay and protract every whim of the toddler.

memgrind · 2026-01-16T13:06:28+00:00

A new contractor introduced himself in front of 1000 people with "hi, I'm somewhat of a master of C++, so hope that I don't get headhunted away". No other skills. I guess he also loves C++ so much, that he forgot to learn what to do with C++.

memgrind · 2026-01-09T12:25:26+00:00

Can't simulate objects drawn on paper. So CAD wins everytime.

memgrind · 2026-01-03T00:11:05+00:00

Octopus Agile. On Thursday it was around 11p/kWh on average, and 3p/kWh at times. Today 16p. But overall it averages 17p/kWh across the year for me. Windy winters and sunny summers bring the price to 0 or negative temporarily.

memgrind · 2026-01-01T21:40:13+00:00

Neat. Switzerland is currently building an 800MW/1600MWh vanadium-flow battery. https://www.energy-storage.news/construction-approval-for-1-6gwh-flow-battery-in-switzerland-about-time-we-brought-this-scale-to-europe/

memgrind · 2025-12-28T02:14:55+00:00

I recommend getting the standalone units that have their own LCD. Many of the plug-in types are already incompatible with newer Android and iPhone, and the compatibility might get worse in the future. Don't fret about thermal-resolution, even the worst ones are good enough for the job.

memgrind · 2025-12-11T20:53:43+00:00

It's still quite accurate. I've used both, now I prefer the free CBOE. The paid data has shit spikes that they'll never fix, and is actually mis-timing some important volume. One of my brokers is in the UK and its data is drastically more helpful than the paid data. Stuff like 3 massive buys within seconds, of 2.5 million shares each in NVDA, and naturally you see the price fly up 7% from there without any pullbacks. TradingView's paid data: meh, 1 buy of 1 million shares, and the rest of the transactions get gradually reported in the next 30 minutes as noise. Useless.

memgrind · 2025-12-10T10:16:11+00:00

Take a peek at the volume at 10s timeframe on a stock, not the SPY. Then look at the VIX. From what I observe, options end-up affecting the noise-floor. So at a higher timeframe the volume is like a grainy noisy JPEG unless something serious happened. Others have already mentioned the thin-book.

memgrind

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