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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#231

Post by zilti »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #128

A few years ago I came to the realisation that if you want people to be more environmentally conscious or economical in terms of utility consumption, (electricity, water, gas, etc), they need far better data than a single figure per month. You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. That way people can spot things like “having my electric heater on for those couple of hours used more electr…

Corollary: people are cheap and lazy, so if you want them to not do something, make it cumbersome in a way that does not justify the cost difference, or vice versa.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#232

Post by Angostura »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #228
stdbrouw wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience also points to the limits of monitoring and subsequent behavioral change, though. I mean, yeah, it might prompt you to start your washing machine a bit earlier or a bit later to align with high production by your solar panels... but how much consumption can you really move around like that, and how many energy hogs can you just decide to not use? If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you go…

There's been a few simple experiments in the UK - where consumers have been encouraged to reduce usage at peak time that have been successful. But as you say its going to need the appliances to support it. Everything needs a "Get this done by X o'clock" whether thats a dishwasher/washing machine/car charger. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jan/23/households-gre...

I'm on Octopus Agile in the UK which offers pricing in 30 minute increments.

I'm lucky in that I have a small solar panel setup (3kW) and battery system (5kWh) to go with it. With this battery set-up you really don't need appliance support - most of the advantages are accrued by force-charging the batteries to avoid mains usage at the peak cost period (usually around 5pm-7pm).

I also have a few smart plugs which turn things on and off based on the current price and battery charge - using Home Assistant, but that's mainly me just nerding about. Handy when prices go negative, though and my electric immersion heater goes on to heat my hot water tank

Notably Octopus is working on taking much of the complexity away. There is now an opt-in service for certain battery makes where Octopus will take control of the battery charginng and discharging, to minimise your bill. It will even generate you money by doing a force charge and discharge when the grid is paying premium amounts

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#233

Post by promiseofbeans »

I relate to this a lot. As part of my job, I'm regularly given IoT devices that do similar tasks, but from different manufacturers and with varying age ranges (new last year with a raspberry pi 4 inside, to something over a decade old with custom firmware on an ancient microcontroller).

I have to figure out how they work, and somehow coerce their data into a standard format before sending it to our server.

Often, they'll have a built-in mechanism for retrieving data programmatically, but it's usually too slow and sends data in large batches, so I end up needing to reverse engineer their socket IO + handlebars web UI for closer to real-time data streaming. It's a janky nightmare, but it's so satisfying once you make it work.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#234

Post by Angostura »

gambiting wrote: post #193
failingslowly wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you want people to be more environmentally conscious [...] they need far better data This is one of the reasons all UK homes are being fitted for free with smart meters. (There are others, such as enabling better grid control.) > You want to be able to see usage to a resolution of at most 5 minutes. My one updates every few seconds and has a set of traffic light LEDs at the bottom giving a visible guide to energ…

We have one as well, but since we're on a variable rate tariff(Octopus Tracker) it's completely useless - it doesn't know the current electricity/gas price, it seems to receive rate updates from the network about once every few weeks - so the numbers it displays are just wrong. I've made my own little Raspberry Pico display that queries today's energy prices and shows those, but I have not been able to show today's e…

If you use Home Assistant on the Pi there is an Octopus integration that you might find handy. It even works with the Octopus Mini

https://bottlecapdave.github.io/HomeAssistant-OctopusEnergy/

Hope this is useful

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#236

Post by Angostura »

petepete wrote: post #167

On a related note, I had a new boiler installed last year with Vaillant's smart controls. There's a little puck shaped 'control unit' with WiFi/radio which allows the app to talk to it, and it to talk to the thermostat. Like most people in the UK, the boiler's in the garage. A brick rectangle separate from the house. Did Vaillant include an ethernet port? You bet they didn't. The support team suggested I installed Wi…

I probably would have just installed an an extender plug that extends Wifi by signalling through the mains. Cheap and works quite well

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#237

Post by Angostura »

azalemeth wrote: post #38

A fun read! I feel compelled to say that all British (type G plugs) _have_ to be fused as the ring main has a maximum current of (typically) 30A yet the plug and socket maximum is 13A. So every appliance plug is fused, and the consumer unit has an RCD on most accessible circuits in addition to a circuit breaker. Some plugs don't make the fuse obvious, but the traditional values are 1A, 3A, 5A, 7A, 10A and 13A (iirc -…

The weirdest bit for me was when he ordered a 3am fuse from Amazon, rather than just wandering down to the corner shop for a little blister pack that has 13amp, 5amp and 3amp fuses. Usually just next to the sewing kits

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#238

Post by [deleted] »

ikt wrote: post #140
inetknght wrote: post #23

> Turns out, I need a 3A fuse, so I ordered one from Amazon OP might want to watch Louis Rossmann's video about buying things from Amazon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

That's what immediately stood out to me, why the hell would you order it from Amazon instead of literally driving 5 minutes down the road to pick one up from any electronics or hardware store? what a horribly inefficient way to do things

[deleted]

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#239

Post by alphabetter »

wkat4242 wrote: post #68

> Turns out, I need a 3A fuse, so I ordered one from Amazon and installed it the next day. Ummm. 3A is 720W. If that tiny box dissipated that much, the entire closet full of them would be a literal oven. Besides there's not much point in an energy meter using that much power. It defeats the purpose. It's like testing matches :P it'll be 10W at most. Even peak inrush current would be nowhere near that high. 1A fuse wo…

The 3A fuse is due to the way the UK wiring system works rather than what is optimal for this device.

All appliances in the UK have a fuse where they connect to the building wiring, normally in the plug, but can be in a fixed fuse-holder like this device. Somewhere in the process it was recognized that having lots of different fuse values would be confusing and awkward for users, so these fuses are the same size and always one of three standard values: 13A, 5A, and 3A. As noted elsewhere, you can buy these particular fuses in UK supermarkets and convenience stores.

If 3A is too high for the appliance then what the designer has to do is to fit it with a flex rated at 3A so that is protected by the fuse at the plug-end and then add additional, lower current, protection at the device end.

The UK system is clever and has subtle details like the standard fuse values which were good at the time it was introduced. But, it is also rather over-engineered, and not optimized for modern homes that have a lot of low-current appliances.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#240

Post by dijit »

PeterisP wrote: post #159
girvo wrote: post #94

> C in IoT stands for “cost-effective” I guess I know this sounds pithy (and it is!) but you'd be surprised exactly how cheap and cost effective Wi-fi enabled SoCs are. A lot of the time we're getting Wi-Fi for free, and most of those SoC's don't have the Ethernet controller by default, so it's more cost-effective to use Wi-fi if it can fit your use-case. Other physical protocols/connection types can be supported of…

Purely from a materials perspective, 2x cheap WiFi-capable microcontrollers (e.g. esp8266) will cost the manufacturer something like $4-$5 total for both devices - which is comparable to 3m cable+connectors+cheap chips to handle the cable connection (even ignoring the cost of some person to install the cable which is far more expensive than that) so indeed I don't get why the author considers that doing the connectio…

> so indeed I don't get why the author considers that doing the connection over WiFi is somehow wasteful.

Power consumption.

Up front vs ongoing cost; the creators chose to minimise the up-front cost in favour of a marginally higher ongoing cost.

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