Coober Pedy, the Australian mining town where residents live underground (2020)
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Beside the curiosity of underground living, Coober Pedy is a grim place. Hot, dry, dirty. You couldn't pay me to live there. There's a lot of cheap accommodation on real estate sites as a result.
I passed through last year on an outback trip, and stopped there for my kids to dig around. Way back, there were countless places you could "go noodling" (fossicking) but best bet last time seemed to be Jewellers Shop Road: https://goo.gl/maps/3thJiKfzY1YQaxkY6 It's picked pretty clean, but we found a few chips (small pieces) with colour (as opposed to less valuable forms like "potch") - you just have to be patient and have fairly focused kids!
Not sure how active the surrounding area is these days. Mostly seems to be idle blowers (vac-based machines that bring material up from shafts) and mullock heaps. I think the heavy action has progressively moved up to other opal fields a few miles out of town.
The story I always liked was about opal showing up under UV lighting. They'd rip up material from shafts with blowers and pass it along a conveyor belt for pickers to watch with UV lights and grab at opal as it went by. Only issue was that scorpions also glowed... You can see prospectors talking about using this method here: https://www.prospectingaustralia.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?...
Probably my favourite memory was a place called Grasshopper in Mintabie. The operators would blast in an open cut mine with dynamite, and then huge grading machines would drag the leftover scraps up to an area they let the public pick over looking for smaller pieces of opal. We were like birds showing up on a lawn after it's been mown.
Another spot was Concrete/Cement Hill. My little brother (5yo at the time?) had become bored finding nothing and decided to make a cave house for a caterpillar he'd found. While the rest of us toiled with heavy tools, he mucked around with this bloody caterpillar, and found two pieces of opal worth $500-1000 in the process...
Fairly inhospitable!
Soon to be very valuable...
I think houses without a basement will drop in value in the near future.
Also all the water is trucked in, so shower stalls are often coin-fed. Works OK except when there is no warning that you're about to run out of water and your face is covered in soap. Makes it hard to find and fidget with coins.
Seems like you'd get used to it quickly.
In Chinese apartments (in Shanghai, at least), there is a small water heater dedicated to the shower. It stores a certain amount of water at a temperature you configure, and when it runs out, your shower will be cold. (You're expected to set it much hotter than you want the shower, and mix it with cold water, which is unlimited, to get the shower temperature you want.)
This means it's impossible to take a two-hour hot shower. But it also means the showering process doesn't include "step 0: wait a few minutes for hot water to start coming out of the shower". When you turn on the hot water, you get hot water. It's really soured me on the American system.
Tankless hot water systems have been available for awhile. Sounds like this is what you want to install.
Couple this with a pump/recirculation system and you'll have instant, endless hot water from any faucet or shower.
Granted, you won't have this option if you're renting and at the mercy of a landlord. But you can look for this in future apartments.
Some condo associations won't let you install them as it requires additional external piping for air intake and exhaust.
sinks too, theyre even easier. you can find kits at Home Depot.
Like most comments on HN, "American System" is a gross oversimplification of a nation of almost 400 million people and experiences.
It's not a "gross oversimplification" if it's the typical result.
To actual American citizens you might as well be characterizing France from your experience in Germany just because they're both in the EU.
It's really hard to talk about things when you can't generalize a bit.
"100 million American homes have things set up this way" - oh no, let's divert the discussion to worry about the one guy who has a fully custom setup!
In fact I just went and checked with my shower - 23 seconds. And I haven't used any hot water since last night.
In the rental house we just moved from a couple months ago, the last homeowner did several amateur projects (or hired a handyman who worked at that level). They fitted a larger, elevated water heater, but also "upgraded" the water pipes in the attic to a ridiculously large diameter. Between that and the rental property management fitting water-saving low-flow fixtures, you could turn on a hot water faucet and go boil tea on an electric kettle (or something) in the meantime. By the time you're done drinking the tea, the running water might be getting warm.
Ultimately this is just my anecdata. Maybe your story is more common than I realize.
In such cases run the hot water in your sink it dramatically increases the flow rate. Alternatively, install a tankless water heater next to the shower.
Depends on where you are. In places I've lived in the southwest, you turn on the hot water and you immediately get hot water. You turn on the cold water, and you immediately get very warm water.
Because it's the desert. And the water comes from outside, so it assumes the ambient temperature. In the winter you might get "cold" water, but it's nothing like the cold water you get in places like Boston or Minneapolis.
At first I wondered why they have those mini fridges in japanese hotel rooms and this is why - only way to get cold water in the summer is t put it into the fridge first! :)
The cost to remodel, and permit proses, causes owners to just live with it.
The drought should make the plumbing permit free.
Too many small towns, and even rich counties, are counting on those permit fees for income.
What American systems? There's lots of different water heating setups in the US, including “small dedicated tankless heater for the shower”, whole house tankless or hybrid system, etc., etc...
The "American System" such as it is, is a byproduct of increasing efficiency. If you buy an old house, built when shower heads were 5GPM, the piping was sized to handle that load. When you switch to 2.5GPM shower heads (mandated as the maximum by federal law in 1994), or lower (1.25GPM is easy to find and what I use) then you've got 4X the amount of water setting in the pipes that needs to be slowly flushed out.
Any competent builders of new homes will minimize the size of hot water pipes to greatly reduce the amount of cold water that needs to be flushed out. Instead of 3/4 or 1/2" pipes, 3/8" or even 1/4" pipes may be adequate for a 1.8GPM (California 2018 maximum) shower, and greatly reduces the amount of cold water standing in the pipes.
The US system of using natural gas (or electric heat pumps) offers about 4X better energy efficiency than smaller resistive electric point-of-use water heaters. In warmers climates (southern US, and much of Asia) the difference can be small. And the centralized US system can be retrofitted easily enough. There are pump systems which can be installed under bathroom sinks where you just push a button and the cold water is pumped through, automatically shutting off when it becomes warm/hot.
* some of the hot water may cool while you wait so there may be a marginal amount of extra wastage at the outset.
Do you actually have the habit of taking two-hour hot showers on a running shower? How incredibly wasteful would that be?
https://www.espn.com.au/golf/story/_/id/13173734/st-andrews-...
Also it's a real "prospector town" since the massive mining companies consider it cost inefficient to mine there at scale so it's full of characters.
The town of Coober Pedy is only accessible by a small airstrip, by coach tour or private car, and via the Ghan railway line running between Darwin and Adelaide.
So... it's "only" accessible by air, automobile, or rail? Does their readership travel exclusively by steamship? Camel?
I think that might be the most rarely leaves megacities sentence I've ever read.
It _is_ a weird sentence though. I guess they wanted to say its only accessible by road?
But that's also a bit weird as that describes 98% of towns in Australia.
I read a really good blog series of articles about an american riding his touring bicycle from adelaide to darwin. He had to calculate his water and calories as towns were often over a days ride apart.
Quite a few cars and trucks on the highway though. You would only have to wait an hour at most for a stranger to drive by, stop and help in an emergency.
If you're in the USA, you can find something similar to Cappadocia in Bandolier National Monument, New Mexico. Similar geology in the carved volcanic ash/tuff, plus a nice campground within walking distance.
And the name makes it sound like a great place to host a KubeCon.
with all that going around, i laughed
The story goes, way back when, the white settlers/invaders were going around with aborigines asking them what different plants and animals were called.
The white fella pointed to a kangaroo and asked what's that called? the aboriginal said "kangaroo" which in his language translated to "i don't know", and so it was recorded and why we now called them kangaroos.
unfortunately it's not true :( kangaroo is from an aboriginal language, but it doesn't mean "i don't know"
If you go to Shoshone, California, you can wander around their abandoned cave homes. There's a bunch across the street from the Inyo County Sheriff's substation. Just go up the dirt road, around the hill, past the cemetery.
- How does the sewage system work?
- Do worms come into the living spaces?