@Bob yup, last night... hours ago

Nice.

@Bob primary heat would be a heat pump or gas or oil, depending on what people have (we have natural gas heat)...

Now just time for the cleanup? :P

@allquixotic ...ah

most people don't have whole-house heat that's pure electric because it's so expensive and inefficient

some people don't use their whole house heat, whatever it is, and save money by using localized space heaters (electric), which is definitely cheaper because you're only heating occupied areas

but yeah, in storms like this it's normal for quite a few people to experience failure of their primary heat but to have some kind of electric backup, either centralized or localized

@allquixotic We just do that the few times we actually need heating.

Which is just about never.

Cooling, on the other hand...

we used to have a heat pump (heat exchanger) when this house was built, but we replaced it with natural gas

the heat pump had electric heating coils as a backup in case the heat exchanger failed

where it heats up an element instead of sucking the warmth out of the outside air and bringing it in

we used that a couple times actually.. but it was expensive and fairly ineffective

you need something like 5 KW minimum to have an appreciable effect on whole house heating for our house when you're using centralized electric-based heating... so yeah... might've been even higher than that

I have a 750W space heater in my room, and it can't keep my room warm if the central heat is off

@allquixotic That's puny :P

My PC is enough to heat my room even with the window open in the middle of winter :-/

hmm. I might be looking at replacing yet another system with a SSD (yay!) I have a limited budget (boo :( ). Any brands/models I should avoid?

Cheapest options seem to be kingston SV300, plextor m6s (which is about 5 dollars pricier) and the sandisk SSS plus (which is 2 dollars cheaper)

Its not a high use system nor is it new so not super concerned with ultra high reliability

@PatoSáinz 91w

Avoid... Lite On SSDs.

Avoid the Kingston too.

extremetech.com/extreme/…

anandtech.com/show/7763/…

IIRC Plextor is decent.

Dunno about the SanDisk. Probably alright for light use. Low TBW but as you said that isn't an issue.

Meh, there's only two or three manufacturers left. Everyone else just uses chips made by the big 3

@PatoSáinz ugh, that's the lowest TDP of any desktop processor I've had.

6th gen.

@qasdfdsaq Yea, but the specific models will obviously differ.

(I mentioned them by brand name above, but I'm specifically talking about the models JMG mentioned - just didn't bother typing it.)

Other than the Skylake in my laptop, it's also the most efficient I've ever had

My last one was 130w.

And we have some 160w ones at work

91w is paltry in comparison

Broadwell was never sold as a mainstream desktop product.

I have just been restarted! This happens daily automatically, or when my owner restarts me. Ready for commands.

Nor was it sold as a high-end gaming product

In fact, it was barely sold at all >_<