Well in the south you might need to factor the gas cost in (vs Germany) and also the network effects of heat pump being the main form of heating in sweden.
The south of Sweden is expensive because Sweden did away with the previous single energy market and split into zones with sales abroad. Often Swedish producers sell to Germany at the same time Swedish consumers are forced to buy from German producers. It was a big thing about 'free market' and iirc Denmark was upset that Danish manufacturing could not compete with the price of energy across the straights in Sweden. The solution was to make energy more expensive in Sweden.
I know I paid about 1000EUR for an air-air heat-pump with install in Sweden, but that was a decade ago and they cost 1500-2000EUR total these days. I also have a fancy big ground-source heat-pump bigger than most residential ones and that cost under 10000EUR total. So not sure what makes them so expensive in other countries; you'd hope competition kept prices competitive.
In Germany you have very strict laws for construction of water heating. For example the need to install thermostat on any heater even for floor heating. But this implies a lot of complexity for the heat pump installation. Cheap DIY community basically removes all the thermostats and soley controls heating through water temp and flow control to the radiators.
Not many people left with single glazing unless they've been trapped by historic building rules. "Outdoor plumbing" is not a thing.
The pump is a drop in replacement unless you have 8mm "microbore" piping, at which point the lower temperature times restricted flow rate becomes a problem in terms of getting enough heat through.
Not sure about the UK. I've seen a lot of outdoor plumbing in Ireland. I lived in a place that had that. They were literally running on the outside. Our maintenance guy said they did that to make maintenance easier, but it also makes wear & tear a lot easier obiously (not to mention frost). And chipboard floors that would crack with heavy furniture. It was terrible quality. These houses were built in the mid 80s.
And a dirty tank of water in the attic to act as a "in-house water tower" because only one tap may be connected directly to the mains. Really archaic.
My parents' house in Bath is not "trapped by historic building rules" but there is no way in hell they are ever going to replace 3-4 stories of single pane glass double hungs ...
and that house still has the sewage stacks on the outside of the house, as do almost all homes in Bath and environs.
Brit here. Your first pragraph describes older housing stock, not anything built in decades. Not that the quality of our quality of our stock couldn't be improved, or that our (very real) energy standards for new builds couldn't be stricter, but things aren't quite as grim everywhere as the picture you paint.
I’ve lived in the UK for 35 years and lived in various properties built in every decade from 70s-10s. Some much older and less loved ones did have single pane windows but have never seen plumbing on the outside. Maybe on much older houses? Certainly not on anything remotely new. A lot of new builds here have solar, heat pumps and insulation has been excellent for at least 20 years.
You do relatively commonly see wastewater piping on the outside of a house in the UK, especially older stock (soil stack from the toilet, waste pipe from sink or bath running into it). This is fine in the UK climate where a normally empty pipe doesn't need insulation. I hear that it won't work in places that get extreme low winter temperatures, but the UK doesn't have winters that cold.
You don't see them on new builds, I think, probably because the pipe going from inside to outside would reduce insulation effectiveness.
Yeah it makes sense for buildings where plumbing was retrofitted.
Otherwise people try to retrofit narrow drain pipes in the walls which are prone to clogging or give you poor flushing performance. Or outside big enough pipes outside interior walls where you get to hear every flush/shower unless you build a box around that. Easier to just run it outside if you can configure your bathrooms that way.
I loved my N9. But i'm somewhat hesitant on preordering that one. I need wireless charging.. And i still dont really get if Android-apps actually work or not, i.e. swedish Bank-Id/Swish etc.
I'd actually prefer one running a normal Linux. It's a travesty that certain things in daily life require Android or iOS, and that's a fight I'll keep fighting, but the idea of a tiny Linux laptop in my pocket is just so tempting.
You should probably figure out why - unless you are ok with nobody liking you.
If _everyone_ finds you annoying or difficult being around, you most like are annoying and difficult to deal with.
How you go about figuring what bugs people is perhaps the hard part.
Slackware-current is pretty current. And sbopkg has quite a lot of packages. I run it on my homeserver (and has been for the last..10-15? years or so). Since everything that I host uses docker its easy as pie to keep it running.
ZFS via ZoL etc.
As a daily driver i use PopOs! which is very nice since the've packaged nvidiadrivers etc. and I mainly use it to play games.
Don’t get me wrong: IMHO a ZFS mirror setup sounds very tempting, but its strength lie in active data storage. Due to the rarity of bitrot I would argue it can be replaced with manual file hashing (and replacing, if needed) and used in cold storage mode for months.
What worries me more than bitrot is that consumer disks (with enclosure, SWR) do not give access to SMART values over USB via smartctl. Disk failures are real and have strong impact on available data redundancy.
Data storage activities are an exercise in paranoia management: What is truly critical data, what can be replaced, what are the failure points in my strategy?
There's no worse backup system than that which is sufficiently-tedious and complex that it never gets used, except maybe the one that is so poorly documented that it cannot be used.
With ZFS, the hashing happens at every write and the checking happens at every read. It's a built-in. (Sure, it's possible to re-implement the features of ZFS, but why bother? It exists, it works, and it's documented.)
Paranoia? Absolutely. If the disk can't be trusted (as it clearly cannot be -- the only certainty with a hard drive is that it must fail), then how can it be trusted to self-report that it is has issues? ZFS catches problems that the disks (themselves inscrutable black boxes) may or may not ever make mention of.
But even then: Anecdotally, I've got a couple of permanently-USB-connected drives attached to the system I'm writing this on. One is a WD Elements drive that I bought a few years ago, and the other is a rather old, small Intel SSD that I use as scratch space with a boring literally-off-the-shelf-at-best-buy USB-SATA adapter.
And they each report a bevy of stats with smartctl, if a person's paranoia steers them to look that way. SMART seems to work just fine with them.
(Perhaps-amusingly, according to SMART-reported stats, I've stuffed many, many terabytes through those devices. The Intel SSD in particular is at ~95TBW. There's a popular notion that using USB like this sure to bring forth Ghostbusters-level mass hysteria, especially in conjunction with such filesystems as ZFS. But because of ZFS, I can say with reasonable certainty that neither drive has ever produced a single data error. The whole contrivance is therefore verified to work just fine [for now, of course]. I would have a lot less certainty of that status if I were using a more-common filesystem.)
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