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Comment by kirillzubovsky | Hacker News Reader

Yup. It's been a fun weekend. Everyone in the family is feeling the cabin fever, but outside (Bellevue, WA) smells like inside of a fireplace. We put a few boxed fans with HEPA filters around the house and they are now black. In hindsight, should've bought more filters, but all the stores and Amazon are sold out for the near future.

Speaking about the future, this puts planning in perspective. With the climate changing, remote work, covid and all, the way we live in the next 20 years might look somewhat different than past 50. The new "American Dream" might be a tiny condo with great AC, minimal footprint, solar energy and rain water storage...etc.

It's a good time to ponder what the real estate and living of the future could look like!

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Portland burbs here. It's been a crazy week for us. When those howling east winds started a week ago Monday (9/7) we got some smoke initially that evening as fires started flaming up immediately with that dry wind. Then we awoke on Tuesday to the pleasant surprise of blue skies as I guess the winds shifted just a bit so that the smoke missed us here, but down valley we were seeing some very apocalyptic pics. And we could look to the south and see the smoke plume. The good air stayed around till Thursday afternoon. We've had AQI up into the 400s on occasion since. Yesterday it went down a bit into the mid 300s. Today it's down to about 250 and we're just elated that it's gone from hazardous to very unhealthy. The house has been closed up since last Thursday, we're fortunate to have a HEPA filter that move to whatever room we're in at the time - but it's definitely still noticeable - scratchy throat, tight chest, headache, eyes stinging by evening. We've gone through one of the HEPA filter cartridges already.

I hadn't been out of the house from last Thursday until this afternoon when I ventured out with an N95 mask to water the garden and make a quick trip to the store - my eyes are still smarting a couple hours later. On the weekend we were told things would get better with some showers on Monday, but they never materialized. Now they're telling us it'll be Thursday or Friday before we get some significant (but not complete) clearing. I hope they're right this time - a lot of people are starting to lose hope.

Be sure to have a bypass on your rain system to flush the smoke precipitates off your roof before they get into the tank. My parents water used to taste of tar over winter when they were lighting their fire.

Good to note! One thing I definitely want to do when I have the means is built a cabin/house with the latest and greatest efficiencies. Not in a hippy-earth-loving way, but more in a curious engineer way.

Did you know there are these things called Earthships in New Mexico? It's a bit too hippy for me, but on the right track.

I sense some hippie shame (maybe I'm wrong)! IMO a lot of that feeling stems from the government and ruling class pushing back against counter-culture. They were more right about the environment (among other issues) than they even realized at the time.

Earthships are unconventional in appearance and implementation, but are great examples of the type of thinking we're going to need to overcome imminent climate issues. If we started doing more of that in the 60s and 70s we'd be in a better position today.

No, no hippie shame at all. In fact, I suppose everyone has their own view on what a hippy is, and I should not have referred to it as "hippy" to begin with. It's too generic and yet personal, and doesn't quite describe anything specifically applicable to this case. my bad!

No worries... I always react to this because I see a lot of people online parroting an "no really, I'm not a hippie" attitude without thinking about the origin of that feeling!

We have that regulatory capture of building and zoning in the USA so that even if you wanted to just go and build an earthship it would be technically illegal.

If they can’t tax it or control it = not happening.

I use these guys to have them shipped. Comes in a few days, but this is going to last a while https://www.secondnature.com/

I realize that air filters are the perfect candidate for a subscription service... but it's just insane the that every product in existence has a business prepared to ship some of it to you monthly.

As long as the markets value ARR at a 3-10x multiple, subscription businesses will continue to appear :)

It's not super easy to be in the filters subscription business. People have odd size filters (I'm one of them, it's 1" shorter than the standard size), so it's a bit labor intensive. This is the sort of thing you should really be able to subscribe to when you get your furnace.

Even with filters, it annoys me from an environmental perspective that the default flow leads you into having them ship you the exact number of filters your house needs, every two months.

Do filters have a shelf life? If not, or if it's sufficiently long, I'd rather they just send me six filters once a year, instead of one every two months, or something like that. I get that some people might not have enough storage space to pre-order like that, but it's otherwise completely unnecessary to send one at a time.

(The only plus I can think of to the one-at-a-time model is that getting a new one in the mail is a nice reminder to replace the filter. But I also have this thing called a "calendar" that I can use.)

You can totally do the six filters once a year, that's how I usually do it, but the smoke is destroying filters pretty quickly. If you want minimal brain power, getting them every 3-months (or what your normal cycle is) is fairly optimal, since getting new filter === time to change the filter.

I keep extra filters in the garage for about 6 months before they rotate into use. I'm not sure if they have a shelf life or not but we've never noticed any difference and neither have our indoor air sensors.

Smart idea. Whatever filters I picked up come with a little bluetooth chip on them and require an account with the manufacturer to get air quality information. I didn't bother for privacy reasons, but judging by 40k reviews on Apple Store, there are plenty of people who are subscribed to their air filter delivery. It makes a lot of sense.

I happened to be at Home Depot the day after the skies turned gray with ash. I noticed a ton of people down one aisle and wondered what was going on. It turned out to be the Air Filter aisle. Oh right. I was able to grab the very last air filter for my furnace size. Everything else was cleaned out.

For air filters, try McMaster-Carr. They generally sell to businesses but ship to home addresses as well.

That's actually a fantastic reminder - get commercial things when it comes to high quality products - they definitely don't come to mind at first, but it's the same for many things, from appliances to boats. Commercial grade is meant to last way more than over the counter consumer goods!

> It's a good time to ponder what the real estate and living of the future could look like!

Move to Europe :) We don’t have crazy fires, high risk of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes. That’s becoming a compelling argument!

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