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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#261

Post by michaelt »

gambiting wrote: post #223
userbinator wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers Either they can be easily upgraded to do that, or they already are and the energy company merely gives you the total every month to maintain the impression that they aren't. If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.

>>Either they can be easily upgraded to do that I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. The smart meters here in UK, the latest SMET2 standard ones, cannot broadcast live data back to the grid because they simply don't have the bandwidth to do so, they use low frequency communication back to the area controller and they can barely rep…

Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside.

The low energy 'HAN' stuff is used for the gas meter, so it can run for 10 years on a battery, allowing it to be installed without installing wired power. The electricity meter has plenty of electricity available, so it acts as a bridge. The portable screen thingy also uses the 'HAN'.

However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage. If that was all that was needed, there are much cheaper options designed for consumer self-install. Why did they go for the much more expensive and inconvenient smart meter+gprs option, if not to enable time-of-use tariffs?

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#262

Post by Symbiote »

outofmyshed wrote: post #161
zarzavat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add: Many pre-90s buildings don’t even have circuit breakers, they have fuse boxes with fuse wire (different fuse to the one being talked about). Literally just a piece of wire that burns out at a certain current and breaks the connection. You “reset” it by putting a new piece of wire in. The second fuse at the plug allows using a narrower gauge of wire in the device’s cord. Let’s say you have a lamp with a 3A fus…

My last place had a 1970s Wylex board, which at least had plug-in MCB modules that replaced the fuse wire holders and can be reset. However given you can still buy fuse wire in DIY stores there still must be installations out there that need it. Shudder.

My parents' house still has fuses with fuse wire. They had it rewired when they bought it in the 1980s, and that was the standard then.

A fuse blowing is so rare I don't think they're worried by the inconvenience. It might happen every 5 years or more.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#263

Post by kabes »

teekert wrote: post #229
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…

I agree fully, I believe that my Home Assistant energy dashboard has done more for our energy consumption than any other measure. If you’re in the Netherland you can get something like a “slimme lezer”, plug it into the p1 port of your energy meter and it will pop up in Home Assistant with the right sensors. The energy dashboard will give an overview of your gas and electricity usage, solar production, proportion use…

I have the same setup. I used it to make a green light go on when we have more than 500 watt excess solar production, so my wife knows she can turn on the washing machine for free.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#266

Post by urbandw311er »

dijit wrote: post #240
PeterisP wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’d be interested in crunching the numbers if I had time because there can’t be too much in the cost delta.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#267

Post by CPLX »

madaxe_again wrote: post #156
anigbrowl wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The landlord had no idea what this is. Golgafrincham B Ark candidate detected.

Hey, he might be an exceedingly skilled telephone sanitiser.

Which, if you recall, turned out to be a bit of a linchpin role.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#268

Post by gambiting »

michaelt wrote: post #261
gambiting wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Either they can be easily upgraded to do that I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. The smart meters here in UK, the latest SMET2 standard ones, cannot broadcast live data back to the grid because they simply don't have the bandwidth to do so, they use low frequency communication back to the area controller and they can barely rep…

Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside. The low energy 'HAN' stuff is used for the gas meter, so it can run for 10 years on a battery, allowing it to be installed without installing wired power. The electricity meter has plenty of electricity available, so it acts as a bridge. The portable screen…

Is that in the UK or somewhere else?

>>However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage.

Of course - but I contest OP's claim that it has enough granularity to tell you that you're showering too much or that your tool shed uses too much energy - it doesn't allow that in the slightest.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#269

Post by sdflhasjd »

knolan wrote: post #171
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…

Most people in the UK don’t have a garage. Almost every home I’ve lived in has had a gas boiler somewhere inside.

There's enough boilers in garages, lofts, the other side of the house, etc, once you overlap it with UK houses being brick, you get enough situations where getting WiFi from one place to another becomes a pain. A lot of the time, the WiFi AP is 30 cm from where the phone line came into the house when it was built (before the internet even existed), which is not optimally placed for coverage.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#270

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

I have a friend that is diabetic (a number of friends, actually).

He has been doing a pretty lousy job of managing his diet.

Until his doctor prescribed a monitor for a few weeks.

This is a device that looks like a big Band-Aid that you put on your arm, inserting a fine needle under the skin, and communicates with an app on the phone, reporting things like glucose levels.

Once he realized the effects of the foods he was eating, he immediately changed his diet, and has been sticking to it, since (he no longer wears the monitor).

The UI of the app was pretty good. The historical data readout is what did it for him.

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