What is your proportion/percentage of problem guests?

Now, I am jealous! I want to do this, but the city says we don’t have enough land to dig into the granite below. :frowning:

Back to topic: bad guests 1%.
But I’m experienced in hitting the decline button. If I would have accepted the declined ones and they were as bad as I feared then: 5-10%.

Edit: just declined another one. 4 persons. 1 night. Too many weird questions:
Can we arrive at midnight? No.
Can we use the kitchen? Not in the middle of the night.
Are we living with you together? No, read the listing’s description.

Edit2: for Faheem’s stats
hosting: 18 months
bookings: 103
reviews: 82
average stay: 2 days
declines: 14
bad guest: 1 (but not really bad)
location: germany, black forest

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I see. Again, I’ve never heard of this, but clearly it’s my ignorance.

I’ve heard of heat pumps. They get heat from the air. Is that a similar principle?

Not even close:

Yes, it is. We take advantage of the fact that at some depth you’ll find always the same temperature. It’s more effective than air heat pumps. But it’s complex. You have to dig a deep hole. Mine is about 300 Meters where you have always 15°C.

Now we pump down water and brine in pipes with a temperture of -2°C. This mixture comes up with 15°C. We cool it down to -2°C again with a heat exchanger to produce warmth. Another heat exchanger takes the warmth and gives it to our inhouse pipe system.

Hope you understand how it works. Not mother language and tech stuff is kind of difficult.

Yes, it’s clear. It sounds like it is reasonably simple in principle, but we all know that engineering is anything but simple in practice. Thank you for explaining. And I expect you had to get permission to dig the deep hole. 300 meters is really deep.

Also, I suppose that like air heat pumps, it’s cheap and energy efficient to run, because you basically get the heat for free. There is just the cost of running the pump itself.

Yes, I did.
A whole village nearby was destroyed beacuse the ground sank down 1/2m.
To keep the process running you need about 20% of the energy you would need without.

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Last off-topic.
I forgot to mention that you can use it “backwards” to cool down your house in summer :slight_smile:

This forum has a long and honorable tradition of off-topic. Frequently involving bodily functions (and fluids), for some reason. So don’t worry about it.

If it makes you happy, I could create a new question about heat pumps. I was actually thinking of purchasing a heat pump for water heating recently, so I know a little about it. It’s a fascinatingly elegant and simple approach to energy management, in my opinion. And I may have even asked about this on the forum - I don’t remember.

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This is common in South Korea … Radiant floor heating, totally eliminates the need for forced air heating. My hotel was toasty warm in 20 degree weather without the dried out sinuses, skin and eyes!

It’s apparently part of the tradition in Korea dating back thousands of years. If you visit the royal palaces, you will see that they had an entire boiler room of fires going underneath the palace rooms…

If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Apparently there are many companies and methods that provide radiant heating without having to dig anything.

I once wrote a website for such a company.

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The question was about geothermal heating which I believe requires a hole. Radiant heat is generally using power srouces that you buy off the grid. Geothermal is using heat within the earth and is considered off the grid.

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Not definitely. A friend of mine uses 2 acres of ground to have the same effect. The pipes look like radiants and are about 1,5m deep. It was much more expensive to built but he was not allowed to go deep.
It’s all about the difference of temperatures.

Wait…what? Surely I’m misreading this. You didn’t destroy a village so your home could enjoy geothermal heat did you?

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Ja, you do.
The town is called Staufen. You can google it “Staufen erdwaerme” (image search).
After this incident they introduced geo-checks whether you are allowed to dig a hole such deep. And I passed.

(Oh golly, that is tooo funny! I thought the same thing but to see it in print with your phrasing…hoo, I am weak from laughing!)

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Me too, the town sunk?
BTW that heated floor feature is really cool.

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Some of our best discussions have happened after going off the topic rails!

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Whenever one of the neighboring units at our complex in Tahoe sells, the new owners always renovate and so far five of them have put in a heated floor system.

We don’t have one. (waah!! sniffle-sniffle)

There, there. If you want one, why don’t you get one?