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The article presents the empirical findings of a multi-site ethnography in two organizations in Swiss street-level bureaucracy. We examined both a municipal child welfare office and the police force of a medium-sized city. The focus was on the question as to whether and how ethnic differentiation takes place in such public agencies and what role it plays at work. The findings suggest that un/doing ethnicity follows an instrumental logic and that it is executed in manifold and ambivalent ways.

A common approach to improve self-consumption of photovoltaic (PV) generation in buildings with heat pumps (HP) is to overload the thermal storage capacities during times with surplus PV generation (hereinafter referred to as thermal overloading). The impact of battery capacity and domestic hot water (DHW) consumption on the effectiveness of this method in a single-family home (SFH) is evaluated through numerical simulations. Increased battery capacity is shown to decrease the effectiveness of thermal overloading. Regarding DHW consumption, temporal concentration is shown to have a stronger influence on the effectiveness of thermal overloading than total energy. Furthermore, the potential of photovoltaic-thermal collectors (PVT) as heat exchangers for air/brine/water heat pumps (ABWHP) is estimated. The results show that the properties of PVT collectors with high thermal conductivity are in the feasible range for application in a well-insulated SFH in Central European climate.