Building engineering

Washington state building code officials voted Wednesday to delay the first statewide mandate for electric heat pumps in new buildings, dealing a significant blow to restrictions on natural gas.What Is Carbon Capture? With Gizmodo’s Molly Taft | TechmodoThe Washington State Building Code Council voted 8-2 to delay the statewide building codes for 120 days, E&E News reported. The council also approved a motion to begin revising the codes to ensure that they won’t easily be overturned in the future.This came after the…

Battery-powered, self-heating insoles can help keep your feet extra toasty during winter activities, but few of us want to charge our shoes. Solecooler’s Climfeet insoles promise to not only warm your feet without the use of chemical reactions or batteries, but to also cool them when temperatures soar. Better yet, the only power source they need is your footsteps.Even the most advanced battery-powered heating insoles, whichgenerate heat as a by-product of a chemical reaction, only last for about 10 hours. That’s long…

Image: CSAIt’s been a while since we talked about Matter and how it works, but the basics haven’t changed. At a high level, Matter is an open-source standard that enables smart devices to all talk to one another, regardless of their company of origin. It works over your local network rather than relying on the cloud to ping other devices about what to do next. It’s more reliable than prior methods smart home devices would use to get online.That said, the old way of connecting things isn’t going away. The Zigbee antenna…

Gas gathering plant on a hilltop at the Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon storage facility near the Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles, in January 2017. Photo: Jae C. Hong (AP)A proposal recently passed by the California Air Resources Board has officially banned natural gas furnaces and heaters. The unanimous decision aims to phase out the sale of natural gas space and water heaters by 2030, NPR reported. California is the first state in the country to pass such a ban.“We need to take every action we…