Auditor Who Left

One thing to weigh that people leave out: the element and the thermostat usually fail together for a reason, and that reason is restricted airflow overheating them. If you replace the parts and do not fix the airflow, you will be doing this again in two years. Fix the cause and the repair is money well spent.

On new machines, the honest comparison is not 600 versus 180. A basic vented machine at 600 will use meaningfully more electricity per load than a heat pump model, but heat pump models cost roughly double and take longer per cycle. At five loads a week the running cost gap takes years to matter, so I would not use efficiency to justify buying now.

The real difference is what happens under load. The Pi transcoding sits pinned at high power and still fails, the mini PC finishes the job in seconds and drops back to idle. Energy per unit of work is the honest comparison and the Pi loses that one here.

The framing that unlocked this for me was realising that a rewrite has no downside risk. Nobody can reject a landing page you are still building. The moment you send it, the outcome becomes real, and that is the whole reason the rewrite is comfortable.

The specific Friday framing is good because it forces a deadline into the feature list itself. Anything that cannot be finished before Friday is by definition not needed for Friday.

Related tip: make the zone bigger than you think. A 100 metre geofence produces far more bouncing than a 250 metre one, and half the duplicate arrival complaints I have seen were really jitter on a tight radius rather than two people arriving.

Cold is the other half of it. A sensor on an exterior door reads lower in a cold snap and can drop out at exactly the moment you need it, then recover in the afternoon. If yours are dying in winter, the cell probably had less left than the warm reading suggested.