Getting Started with German Genealogy

This is the second post in a series about conducting genealogical research in Germany. The earlier post is "German Genealogical Research", describing where records can be found.

Taking that first step to actually search for ancestors can be daunting. Therefore as an example, I'll walk through how research of my wife's German family began.

 

Step 1: Parent

My wife's mother, Gundela, moved from Germany to the US in 1958. We knew Gundela's birth date and that she had been born in Hannover. A bit of searching turned up the website for Standesamt Hannover, with "Urkundenservice" partway down the page leading to an order form for:

• Geburtsurkunde Standardformat (birth record)
• Registerausdruck (copy of the birth register)
• Geburtsurkunde mit Geburtszeit (birth record with time of birth)

We ordered these in late 2020, at a cost of 10 Euros each / 30 Euros total. The three documents are shown below. Needless to say this was the only Geburtsurkunde mit Geburtszeit — the one with the stork — we ever ordered.

The Geburtsurkunde Standardformat gave us the full names of her parents Karl and Hedwig. However the Registerausdruck, a copy of the original handwritten register entry, brought even more information. We knew that Gundela had been adopted by Karl, and the Registerausdruck describes the adoption in the block of text in the right margin. It gave a date of December 14, 1940. In 1940, when Gundela was six, the Standesamt updated the record with a description of the adoption in the margin.

The German handwriting in the birth register uses what is now considered an obsolete cursive lettering called Kurrentschrift. After World War II, Kurrent was replaced by a more modern cursive lettering and then by typewriters. We were able to decode most Kurrent writing with some time and the lettering chart from Wikipedia, but more recently discovered Reddit's r/Kurrent with people happy to help with more difficult transcriptions.

 

Step 2: Grandparents

With a date and full names we next ordered the marriage record for Gundela's parents Karl and Hedwig from Standesamt Hannover, costing another 10 Euros. This was a case where the Standesamt did extra work to be helpful: 14 Dec 1940 was the date of adoption, but not the date of the marriage. The Standesamt located the marriage record a few months earlier, in May 1940, and sent it to us.

More Kurrentschrift! The first page of the marriage record contains the names, birthdates, and birthplaces of the bride and groom Hedwig and Karl. The lower half of the second page lists the parents of the bride and groom, my wife's great-grandparents, including their birthdates and places.

In the upper left margin of the first page is an update that the ehefrau (Hedwig) died in 1978 and giving the record number in Hannover. These updates are hit-or-miss: Karl died in 1993 but the marriage record was not annotated for his death.

 

Step 3: Maternal Great-grandparents

The marriage record of the grandparents supplied the birthdate and birthplace for the great-grandparents, allowing us to order the next set of records. The maternal great-grandparents were born in the 1880s outside of Hannover. Their records had originally been recorded at a Standesamt, but records that old are moved to an archive.

In one of the continuing themes of genealogical research in Germany, there were several archives around Hannover: the Stadtarchiv for the city itself, and the Region Hannover archive for the towns nearby. Their records were at the Region Hannover archiv.

We've yet to find an archive with a web order form like many Standesamt use, but every archive has accepted requests through email. DeepL is very helpful in composing an email request. The practices vary substantially from one archive to another:

• Some are happy to send PDFs in email, others always send paper copies as part of their processing.
• Some will send the documents along with an invoice, trusting that it will be paid, others require payment in advance.

This is an example of an email to the Region Hannover archive to request the Geburtsurkunden for the great-grandparents:

Ich bin auf der Suche nach der folgenden Geburtsurkunden:

    Georg Heinrich August Koch
    *: 25. Feb 1884, Otternhagen
    +: unbekannt

    Minna Luise Elise Oltrogge
    *: 19. Mai 1888, Borstel
    +: 22. Jun 1976, Neustadt am Rübenberge

Meine Adresse ist:
    Denton Gentry
    123 Main Street
    Anytown, AA 12345
    USA
Aber PDF in EMail ist besser für mich.

Ich verpflichte mich, alle Tarife zu zahlen.
Ich kann Überweisungen in EUR oder SEPA senden.

The invoice for an Archiv usually requires an electronic transfer to a bank account, none so far have been able to accept a credit card. We use Wise to send a SEPA transfer, an electronic check in Euros, for just a few cents in fees.

Great grandmother Minna's birth record had a note in the left margin which told quite a story: her birth had been out of wedlock, a big deal in the very Lutheran 19th century Germany. The biological father later legitimized the child by marrying the mother and updating the birth record of the child to use his own family name.

 

Step 4: Paternal Great-grandparents

The paternal grandparents were older, born before 1874 and pre-dating civil recordkeeping at Standesämter. Their birth records were in church books. This was our first venture with Archion, which holds digitized Lutheran and Evangelical Church books from much of Germany. We paid about 20 Euros for one month of access, using a credit card.

Church books can be kept for each type of record or held as sections in one book:

• Taufbuch: baptism records
• Bestattungen or Beerdigungen: burial records
• Trauungen: marriage records
• Kirchenbuch: one large book with sections for each type of record

The place of birth from the marriage record led to the correct Church book to look in, and then look for the birthdate.

95. November, der 27.- Mevert, Carl Heinrich, ehelichen Sohn des Friedrich
                       Wilhelm Mevert von Nr 1 in Beeke, und seiner ehefrau
                       Sophia Luisa geb. Heshe von Nr 10 in Luhnde, geboren
                       der sechzehnten der November.

 

It is totally possible to research one's own family genealogy in Germany, it is not necessary to pay someone else to do it. It only takes a bit of time and small amounts of money.

EVs Are More Than Their Range

We have a 2016 Kia Soul EV. It uses a 27kWh battery pack, quite small compared to other electric vehicles which commonly have 50+ kilowatt hours of capacity. We've used the Kia primarily as a city car on local roads with only the occasional highway trip. As a city car it has been fantastic, small and easy to park yet large enough to handle our typical trips like groceries and taking kids to school.

When new the car would get 80+ miles in city driving on a full charge. Its battery slowly degraded each year until a few months ago when it began dropping quite rapidly. OBD diagnostics can read the state of each individual cell in the battery pack, enough of the cells had failed for it to be replaced under warranty.

This post is not about the battery replacement process, though we are quite happy with Kia and the warranty support.

This post is about how useful we find an electric vehicle even with fairly limited range, and how little difference it made when its range suddenly increased. The first time we charged the car with its new battery pack its range estimate read 101 miles. Honestly I didn't even know it could display three digits.

We charge the car using solar production in excess of what the house is using. Where before we would charge the vehicle every day, we're now charging it mostly on weekends. It has triple the battery capacity but 5x above the reserve level we like to keep. It can go all week on our usual errands.

It seems somewhat strange to me but our use of the vehicle has not really changed with all this extra range. The new energy ecosystem was already compelling for us:

• Solar panels on the roof produce substantial extra energy during the day.
• Not having to pay for gasoline or oil changes further improves the economics.
• Most trips are short. On any given day we drive just a few miles.

When we talk about the fossil energy system we point out how damaging its emissions have been, and how the cost of that damage is completely externalized from production. All of that is true. Another aspect of the fossil energy system is how ruthlessly it pulls profits back up the supply chain, resulting in enormous profits at the top and almost nothing to the rest of the ecosystem. Gas stations make their profit from snacks, carwashes and oil changes, the gasoline sale merely brings people in while the supplier takes all of the profit. Methane pricing encourages spikes to ruinous prices for electricity distribution operators.

Distributed energy production and distributed ownership of energy production also results in more of the benefits being distributed. Our little electric car is part of a larger whole where one can capture and use the energy from the Sun without some entity in the middle siphoning off the benefits of doing so.

Update: a few weeks after publishing this, both of us parents had conflicting appointments and I had to drive the EV further than its previous battery could have managed. It was glorious. More range is certainly better. Still, our use of the car is mostly just short trips around town.

German Genealogical Research

I'd like to talk about genealogy for a bit. In the process of gradually becoming my father, who was very much interested in family history, I started researching family genealogy about four years ago. However my focus was on my wife's family, whose mother immigrated from Germany to the US in 1958.

In the disruption following WW2 her German family lost track of each other and fell out of contact. We knew the name of my wife's mother and grandparents, and one great grandmother. That was all. With four years of work we've extended her family tree in Germany to identify almost all of the 5th great grandparents back to the early 1700s.

I write this from the perspective of someone in the United States researching genealogy in Germany, trying to describe the resources I've used.

 

Publicly available records

Modern German civil recordkeeping started in about 1874, with a few portions of the country having started a bit earlier. Prior to 1874, all recordkeeping was done by the church: Lutheran being the largest denomination, but Evangelical Lutheran, Catholic, and Jewish records are all available.

Ancestry and FamilySearch have a sizable collection of German civil and church records digitized. Ancestry requires a paid account to access these records, FamilySearch requires an account to be created but it is free. Both have run character recognition on the records to make them searchable.

As a practical matter, Ancestry/FamilySearch/etc do not get yearly drops of new records from German authorities which have reached the threshold for release. Most publicly available records are those captured on microfiche by the LDS church over the last few decades; FamilySearch is owned by the LDS church. Newly released records sometimes appear but it is inconsistent and somewhat haphazard, and usually years after the privacy laws would allow release.

So one often needs to go to the source, not just rely on genealogy sites.

 

After 1874: Standesämter

A civil records office in Germany is called a Standesamt. They retain records according to the Personenstandsgesetzes (privacy laws, often abbreviated PStG):

• 110 years after a birth
• 80 years after a marriage
• 30 years after a death

After this, records are supposed to move from the Standesamt to an Archiv. Many large cities have their own archive, plus regional archives around major population centers, and then an archive at the state level like for Baden-Württemberg or Niedsersachen.

HOWEVER: in theory the documents move to an Archiv, in practice I find many documents remain at the Standesamt years or even decades beyond when they would be expected to move. I generally find the relevant Standesamt first and ask if they have the document. They will say if it has moved to an archive, and provide contact information for that archive.

• Searching for "Standesamt" plus the name of the municipality will often find it.
• Meyers Gazetteer can also be helpful in finding the Standesamt.
• If you can find a website for the Standesamt, look for "Urkundenservice" or, failing that, anything with "Urkunde" in the description. It will probably be further down on the list of options, it is much more common for people to want to register a new birth/marriage/etc with the Standesamt than it is to be looking for older documents.
• If your written German is not up to the task, use deepl.com to translate English and German. Its results are considerably more idiomatic than Google Translate.

Many Standesamt have a web order form which will allow you to pay using a credit card. If not you'll need to make the request via email, and expect to receive an invoice with an IBAN (the bank account number). You can use wise.com to transfer money from a US bank account, convert it to Euros, and send to the destination IBAN. wise.com fees are quite low.

The Standesamt will require proof of legitimate interest before releasing records earlier than the 110/80/30 years described above. Direct descendants have a legitimate interest, but may be required to prove it via a birth certificate, parents' marriage record and birth certificates, etc. English documents are usually ok for this, don't get them translated unless asked to do so. If a document does require translation I've relied on Annika Romero at https://germangeek.com/ for several such translations.

If not a direct descendant, one won't be able to order documents less than 110/80/30 years old. Older documents at the Archiv, and even if still at the Standesamt but older than the privacy laws protect, will be released upon request.

 

Standesamt Document options

The Standesamt typically offers a few options:

• A birth record is a Geburtsurkunde, marriage is a Heiratsurkunde or Eheregister, a death record is a Sterbeurkunde.
• By default an A4 paper form will be sent in the mail. This is slightly larger than US Letter sized paper.
• An A5 option means a smaller paper, with holes for mounting in a memory album called a Familienstammbuch.
• Mehrsprachiger, often labeled "International" means the form will be labeled in multiple languages. This is useful for official proceedings in countries outside of Germany, but otherwise it costs extra and I wouldn't bother with it.
• An Abschrift aus dem Register is a photocopy of the original record exactly as it is, not transcribed into a modern format.

It is often useful to order the Abschrift aus dem Register, which will be handwritten before the mid 1950s. The original registers were frequently annotated in the margins with the dates of marriages, of death, and sometimes even of the birth of children (though this is not common).

For example, on the left is a Geburtsurkunde Standard for my wife's maternal grandmother. It is very brief, only the essential details are copied out of the original register entry. A large "Kopie" appears across it because certified originals are printed on a holographic paper, scanning or copying reveals the hologram. The paper form we received in the mail does not have a visible "Kopie" on it.

On the right is an Abschrift aus dem Geburtenregister, where in the lower left one can see an annotation of her death in Hannover. It is somewhat hit-or-miss: there is no annotation of her marriage, even though it also took place in Hannover. Nonetheless these annotations can be extremely helpful in locating more documents to find further information.

 

Before 1874: Kirchenbücher

Before 1874, you'll be searching Church books called Kirchenbücher. Ancestry and FamilySearch also have a good collection of these upon which they have run character recognition to make them searchable.

Archion has an even larger collection of Lutheran and Evangelical church books, but they have not been indexed using character recognition so you cannot search for a name. If you know the place and date, Archion can be very helpful in obtaining the record. If you do not know the city and rough date, Archion will not help. Archion access is paid, typically for a month of access at a time for about 20 Euros.

Matricula has a large collection of Catholic church books. Similarly, they have not been run through character recognition and are not searchable, but they are available for free.

Records will be handwritten, and very frequently use a lettering called Kurrentschrift. One gets used to it, at least enough to recognize the family name, and Reddit's /r/Kurrent can help transcribe difficult records.

In all cases though, church or civil, the recordkeeping is distributed through towns and regions. There is no central records store, you just have to know where their records would be in order to send your inquiry to the right place. Digitizing and making the records searchable is starting to change this and make records more discoverable, but only for relatively old records which Ancestry and FamilySearch have had for a while.

 

Census data

Genealogy in the US greatly relies on the decadal census, which might not be complete nor entirely accurate but is on the whole an amazing resource to have. There is nothing like this in Germany.

There are occasional census efforts in some of the German states, but not very often and mostly not made publicly available. One of the few exceptions is the Jewish portion of the 1938/1939 census, often referred to as the Minority Census, which was made available for its historical significance and for the benefit of descendants of families persecuted during this time. The non-Jewish portions of the 1938/1939 census were collected but remain in registry offices throughout the country and are not accessible.

There is, however, the Melderegister. Where the US mostly relies on driver's license databases in each state to know where its citizens reside, Germany requires an explicit registration after moving called an Anmeldung. The collection of registrations for a city are the Melderegister, and it may contain information about marriages and children born in addition to where the family lived over the years. The Melderegister of direct ancestors can sometimes be obtained by writing to the Bürgeramt of the city, however they are not retained forever and each city determines its own policies. Archiving Melderegister entries after 55 years and destroying them some time later is a common choice.

 

DNA Matches

In the last couple decades, DNA sequencing has advanced tremendously and is commercially available from a number of providers like Ancestry and MyHeritage. We have found more DNA matches to German relatives via MyHeritage, which has a larger presence in Europe. Nonetheless we submitted DNA tests for both. Note that MyHeritage allows upload of DNA data downloaded from Ancestry, so one doesn't need to buy another test kit but does need to pay for an account with access to DNA matches.

 

Colophon

We visited Germany in July of 2024, to meet several cousins we'd found. The initial discovery was via a DNA match, but the hook to get us talking was the family tree and genealogy. The family had lost contact with each other and we're slowly rediscovering them.

Researching the family tree was also a step for my wife and our children to claim German citizenship via a declaration process called Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz (StAG) §5. Prior to 1975 citizenship was not automatically passed on by German mothers, only German fathers, but for 10 years 2021-2031 Germany is allowing descendants of German mothers to declare their citizenship by presenting sufficient proof of descent. If this process is of interest, Reddit's /r/GermanCitizenship can be a useful resource.

A subsequent blog post, Getting Started with German Genealogy, gives specific examples of how we got started with our German family research.

Heat Pump HVAC firms

We had a Mitsubishi mini-split heat pump system installed in 2019, to replace a pair of gas furnaces. We love the system, but finding an installer was more difficult than I had expected. Almost every HVAC installer wanted to install new gas furnaces and be done with it, even those which mentioned heat pumps on their site. They might have eventually been cajoled into installing what we wanted, but that wasn't the kind of vendor we wanted.

We ultimately found Alternative HVAC Solutions, which specializes in heat pumps and leads with them as the solution they propose. They did a fine job and I do recommend them for anyone looking for an installer on the San Francisco peninsula.

However this morning I had to SQUEEEE with excitement at seeing another firm proudly leading with heat pumps as their preferred solution: Electric Air. I cannot speak from personal experience about their service, it is just nice to see how far we have come.

I wrote about our heat pump installation in 2019.

The Decapitated Duck Curve

California invested heavily in solar and wind starting more than a decade ago. So far in 2024 renewable sources have met 100% of the state's energy needs for at least part of the day since early March, and continuing through the time of this writing in August 2024.

Solar growth in particular has been robust enough that it started to perturb the operation of the grid nearly a decade ago, the infamous duck curve where demand seemingly drops in the middle of the day:

A great deal of solar capacity in California has been installed by property owners on their rooftops, both residential and commercial, fed directly into the electrical panel of a building. This supplies energy to the building without the grid seeing anything at all. From the perspective of the power grid the demand for electricity simply drops during summer afternoons, more every year as more solar panels are installed on more rooftops.

However California is experiencing something new in 2024: the duck no longer has a head. Or at least, the use of methane to supply power to the head of the duck has abruptly fallen.

the decapitated duck curve

The dip in the middle of the day is still there, a reduction in demand due to rooftop solar generation. However where methane power generation used to spring back up in the late afternoon as solar production falls off, in 2024 the demand only rises partway back above its low point. The head of the duck is no longer there.

The difference is that the capacity of battery storage on the grid has risen rapidly and passed a tipping point. Much of the late afternoon demand can now be supplied from solar sources, shifted in time using batteries.

California's tax incentives now aim for the installation of more battery capacity. Property owners are free to install solar panels on their rooftops to meet their own demand, but the state doesn't need more solar generation and panel prices have dropped well below the prices where tax incentives were essential. Adding more battery capacity will allow the state to continue to carve the duck, by timeshifting more of the prodigious solar power generation to be ready after the sun sets.

Like solar on the roof, batteries installed in a building appear to the grid as though demand is lower. In reality the demand for electricity is not lower, it is simply being satisfied by batteries before the electric meter sees it. Where we've already seen a reduction in gas generation, we'll begin to see a flattening of the demand curve as the buildings on the grid gradually power themselves for even more hours per day.

Germany trip 7.2024

Diverging from the usual topics: we took the whole fam to Germany this summer. We arrived in Frankfurt on July 5, and took a train to Bingen am Rhein where we boarded the Rhein In Flammen cruise.

---

We went to Köln for a few days, and toured the Dom (one of the Misters 15 for scale).

---

In Hannover we rented a Ferienhaus: a converted windmill. We visited family in Hannover.

---

I loved Berlin, it was amazing. We went to some of the big sights like the Reichstag / Brandenburger Tor / Holocaust Memorial, had some really great Turkish food, etc.

Berlin was also the site of our Crowdstrike Falcon story: we tried to go to the Monster Kabinett but they had to close the exhibits because all of the computers running the animatronics crashed and could not be recovered that day. We aren't entirely sure it was Crowdstrike related, but the timing was about right.

---

We went to Stuttgart to see P!nk in concert, as one does. We also met up with more family.

---

In the last part of the trip we toured Schloß Heidelberg, and flew back on July 22.

Rivian Updates R1 Models

Rivian’s revised R1 vehicles look really nice. They focussed strongly on production cost, to make each vehicle sale more profitable. Their recently announced R2 and R3 vehicles, smaller and with a lower MSRP, would be their way to try to reach more customers.

Passenger vehicles are not a part of the climate space that I worry about as much as other segments. EVs have several inherent advantages:

• Far fewer moving parts. Over the long term, EVs are more reliable and will be cheaper to maintain.
• ICE engines deliver about 20% of their total energy to moving the vehicle, EVs are >50%. Moving the entire energy requirements for passenger vehicles onto the electric grid would result in using substantially less total energy.

---

We need more climate change work to reach this level of clear superiority over legacy methods.

• Solar energy production got there first, all of capitalism's incentives are now driving toward more solar installation.
• Concrete and steel production show exciting progress, that the resulting materials are actually superior to what came before in their durability and control over material properties.

More. We need more.

Heat Pump Water Heaters and Residential Engineering Departments

A few weeks ago the US Department of Energy finalized efficiency requirements for residential electric tank water heaters. The efficiency requirement was last updated in 2010 and is supposed to be revisited every 6 years, but was not done during the 2016-2020 Presidential term. The new requirement will take effect in 2029, and should result in substantially more effort to make heat pumps the default choice for electric homes. The regulation does not mandate heat pumps specifically but most manufacturers will decide that heat pumps, a proven technology, are the most sensible way to increase the efficiency of their product line.

The push by manufacturers is important because water heaters are frequently replaced with little time for the end user to investigate alternatives because the old unit has already failed. We replaced the water heater in our home in 2021, moving from a gas appliance to electric. We had enough time to find an installer in our area familiar with heat pump installation — emeraldECO, in our case — but not everyone will have that amount of time to make a decision.

Having manufacturers make heat pump water heaters be the default means that contractors will need to train their crews to be ready to install heat pump water heaters, or risk losing business. They have to be prepared to explain the technology to their customers, and to help navigate available in incentives and rebates for the devices. It is a way to incentivize the entire supply chain from manufacturer to distributor to contractor to end-user.

---

Revisiting an earlier topic: a more sophisticated product installed in the residence brings more complexity in operating the infrastructure. Our heat pump water heater has a Wi-fi connection. It can notify us of faults... and has. It has signaled a blocked overflow pipe as a problem, but following up showed no blockage and no sign of a problem. The design of infrastructure for residential use has to take into account that the property owner won't be knowledgeable about its operation. There won't be an engineering department.

Residences as Utility Infrastructure

The universal first troubleshooting step is to reboot. No matter what the product is, no matter what the problem is, try turning it off and back on &emdash; which is how I found myself figuring out how to reboot a solar inverter. It turns out to be difficult to power cycle something which makes its own power.

When we added solar panels to the roof in 2019 we chose a SolarEdge inverter with an integrated vehicle charger, expecting to never acquire another gasoline car. We have been happily using the SolarEdge inverter to charge the EV we subsequently acquired.

Happily charging until Saturday, that is. I boggled plugging in the car, quickly pulling the plug out and back in without fully intending to. The inverter beeped and the car's indicator lit when first plugged in, then turned off and didn't come on again. There it sat, neither charging nor disengaging no matter what I did. Left a few hours, it just sat there not charging. Plugging it in again the next morning did not change anything.

So: time to reboot the inverter.

Getting an inverter to fully reboot requires cutting power from every source that sneaky thing might use:

1. Turn the switch to disconnect from the photovoltaics.
2. Turn off the breaker where the inverter connects to the house electrical panel.
3. Pull the shutoff switch to disconnect from the grid completely. This would have powered off the whole house were there no batteries.
4. Wait for capacitance in the inverter to drain and all of its LEDs to turn off, then another 60 seconds.

---

Commercial buildings have long been responsible for substantial utility infrastructure, from boilers to electrical transformers to, sometimes, subway connections and underground steam tunnels. Residences have typically hosted much less infrastructure, and the equipment has been gradually refined so as to be simple for the homeowner. Ground fault breakers, electric starters for pilot lights, and so on have all been developed to minimize the need for a residence to have to deal with odd failures or dangerous conditions.

The clean energy transition is moving more infrastructure into residences which might once have been exclusively the domain of a service provider. Very few homes have a private gasoline station, but many will have private chargers. Very few homes have generators supplying their electricity, but many will have solar and virtual power plants using residential batteries in unison are already here.

The design of infrastructure for residential use has to take into account that the property owner won't be knowledgeable about its operation. There won't be an engineering department, there won't be anyone paying attention to it. I have on the whole been happy with the inverter and the Powerwell it connects to, but there is more to be done to handle odd cases like this.

SF Climate Week 2024 Fini

SF Climate Week is drawing to a close. For me the highlight was being in the audience for a live recording of the My Climate Journey podcast — especially the discussion with California State Senator Scott Weiner regarding SB253, a new law requiring corporate disclosure of emissions data, including Scope 3 indirect emissions.

Most emissions resulting from the activities of large companies are Scope 3, the collection of suppliers and vendors and other firms which individually are small enough to not be required to file disclosures, but whose aggregate emissions become quite large.

As with MethaneSAT, a satellite service mapping large methane sources, the mere existence of data from SB253 will lead to action. Companies will take some amount of proactive steps to reduce their emissions, but more importantly third parties will know where to target both pressure to improve and products to help with that reduction.

It was also a useful week on my own climate journey. I am seeking opportunities to work on climate change solutions, an area where I have several years experience and can bring skills from a larger number of years in Tech. I would welcome contact with hardware, software, management, or leadership opportunities in climate solutions, please reach out.

SF Climate Week 2024

This is SF Climate Week, a week of talks and events about climate change mitigation, adaptation, and solutions.

Many of the events are at 350 California Street which is the home of 9zero, a climate focused co-working space. I'll be in the city much of the week to attend a few sessions and as a volunteer to help with a few sessions.

Unwitting Salary Survey Participant

I had a call with the head of HR for a company whose mission and product look interesting, dealing with renewable energy. The head of HR is leading the search for a new VP Eng.

The first, and only, question was about the offered salary range. It is at 20% of typical for a VP role. Did I think that was too low? Would I even consider the role? The CEO thinks they can find someone at this salary. The head of HR is not convinced. We talked about compensation for a bit.

Then they ended the call, saying that I am not a fit.

Props for the hustle, I guess, avoiding paying OpenComp by sourcing some data yourselves.

Kthubernetes

Inconceivable: zero hits for "Kthubernetes" ?

Unacceptable. This will not stand.

gdaldem color-relief is my BFF

When working with geospatial data and maps, an effective way to communicate in email is to send images highlighting the specific thing one wants to point out. For example, showing areas where the dominant land cover is lichens:

gdaldem, though named for its role in processing Digital Elevation Maps, is a useful tool even for things which have nothing to do with elevation. It has a color-relief subcommand intended for color gradients of terrain but which can be used for lots of purposes. It takes a simple text file mapping pixel values in the original to colors in the output. For example, my lichen image above used:

0 black
1 grey
139 grey
140 red
141 grey
209 grey
210 black
211 grey

This means:

• pixel value of zero (NoData in the original image) should be colored black.
• water is pixel value 210 in the original image, so make it black as well.
• the land cover class for lichen in the original image is 140, so color it red.
• we set grey for 1 and 139, for 141 and 209, and for 211 because by default, gdaldem color-relief would create a gradient of colors between those specified. We want those areas to be solid grey.

The original image was:

Mini-split Heat Pump Installation

We live in a home which was built in 1963, older than we are. The structure has some great attributes and some not-so-great attributes. Among the not-so-great is the lack of air conditioning, and a pair of ancient furnaces with very high gas bills. We set out to do something about this.

• We wanted to add air conditioning.
• We wanted a much more efficient heating system.
• The ducts were 50+ years old and clearly leaky, with dirty patches in the insulation at each joint where the duct has been pulling air through for decades. They would not pass current inspections.

As essentially none of the existing HVAC would remain, we could consider options which didn't preserve any of it. We decided to go with a ductless mini-split heat pump system.

A heat pump is an idea which has been around for a while. It operates similarly to an air conditioner in that it repeatedly compresses and expands a refrigerant, circulating it in and out of the house while doing so. The difference is that where an air conditioner always compresses the refrigerant outside of the house to release heat, the heat pump can also reverse the process to release heat inside. A heat pump can either heat or cool based on where it allows the refrigerant to expand.

 

There are heat pumps which can replace a central furnace and hook up to the existing ducting, but as the ducts were in terrible shape we opted for a mini-split system. There is no central air handling nor air ducts in this system, there are individual units in each room which are connected to a compressor outside.

In each major room a head unit is mounted high on the wall, and contains refrigerant coils and fans. Air is circulated within the room, not drawn from nor exhausted to the outside.

 

The head unit connects to power and two refrigerant lines. This picture was taken during the installation, with the wall open and the two copper refrigerant lines not yet hooked to the head unit.

Note that there is no air duct: air is not moved through the home with a mini-split, only refrigerant. The head unit can cool or heat air drawn from the room, using the refrigerant to pump heat in or out of the house.

I emphasize the lack of ducts because it was a big mental hurdle for us. In a retrofit the heat pump units can go anywhere, placement is not constrained to where ducts currently go.

 

The head unit contains a filter in front of the fan, but the activated charcoal portion of the filter covers only a small portion of the area. We have no way to measure the effectiveness of this filter, but we are skeptical as it seems like air can flow around it easily.

---

The refrigerant connections are quite small, half inch diameter copper pipes plus insulation, so they can run between studs in the walls and under the house. They all eventually lead to an outdoor unit, which contains a fan and radiating fins like an air conditioner outdoor unit would.

The outdoor unit is available in a few capacities, rated in British Thermal Units (BTUs) like 20k - 50k. The head units inside the home are also rated in BTUs, from 9k through 24k, and one adds up the rating of the head units to determine the capacity of outdoor unit required.

Our home needed two outdoor units, a larger 50k BTU unit for the upstairs and smaller 20k unit for the lower level.

---

With a furnace or central air, a single thermostat controls the HVAC. That thermostat might be very sophisticated with multiple room sensors, but there is a single central point where control can be implemented.

With ductless mini-split systems, there is no single point of control. Each head unit implements its own local control, it can implement its own schedule, etc. The system is supplied with a handheld remote control for each head unit. It appears to be infrared, and it is not strongly paired with a given head unit. If you take it into another room and point it at a head unit in that room, it will control the head unit in the new room.

The remote is quite complicated. It can change the mode from heating to cooling to fan (and others). It can program weekly schedules. For some models of head unit, it can configure an occupancy sensor feature to aim the airflow directly at people in the room and turn off if nobody is present. Etc, etc.

We use the remote controls for all but one of the head units. For the last unit, we had reasons to not want to change how the HVAC system is operated and wanted to retain the existing themostat on the wall exactly as it was. Mitsubishi has an interface to allow this, connecting any 5-wire thermostat to control a single head unit.

---

A few things we wish we'd known at the start, in case anyone reading this is planning their own heat pump installation:

• All of the head units attached to a given outdoor unit have to be cooling or heating, not a mixture of both. We got lucky in this: we needed separate outdoor units for each level, and this matches our usage as the lower level doesn't get so warm while the upstairs needs cooling during the summer.
• The smaller outdoor units can be attached to the side of the house on a bracket. The larger outdoor units require a concrete pad to be poured. Had we known this we might have chosen to go with three smaller outdoor units and had them all mounted to the side of the house.

At the time of this writing we've had the system for five months, through our first summer. It has been great having the option to cool the house on those days which need it. We are just heading into the cooler months, and we're hoping to see a substantial reduction in the energy bill.

We're quite happy with the system. Heat pumps are also an effective means to help with global warming by improving efficiency and reducing use of methane, and are #42 on Project Drawdown's list.

---

Our system consists of:

• 3 x MSZ-FH15 15k BTU head units
• 1 x MSZ-FH12 12k BTU head unit
• 3 x MSZ-FH06 6k BTU head units
• 1 x MXZ-8C48 48k BTU outdoor unit
• 1 x MXZ-2C20 20k BTU outdoor unit
• 1 x PAC-US444CN thermostat interface
• electrical panel work to rearrange breakers and install new 40A and 25A circuits
• permits and fees
• demo and removal of old ducts and furnace equipment

The total cost was $31,665 for equipment and installation, in the SF Bay Area where the cost of living is high. Our gas bill in the winter with the old furnaces was often $400/month, which should decline substantially with an electric heat pump powered by solar panels on the roof.

The system was provided and installed by Alternative HVAC Solutions in San Carlos, CA, and we were quite pleased with their work.