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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a weird point to make - I'm just saying 120kWh a month for a house with no one in it and just some basic appliances and network equipment is a LOT - in developing countries 120kWh would be the average energy consumption of the entire house with people living in it, and we just "waste" that because I couldn't be bothered to switch off some devices in my house. It's not about whether I can afford it or not.

For comparison, I live alone in a mid-terraced 2-bedroom house in the UK, heated with gas - and I'm currently there most of the time. My monthly electricity usage is about 180kWh a month. I'm guessing a big chunk of the 60kWh I'm using over your baseline is the kettle! :D

Uhm. We have a 3 bed semi detached house, my consumption for November was 1267kWh of electricity. In October it was 1148kWh. And I also heat with gas(well we have a minisplit upstairs that we sometimes use for heat, but it uses like 5kWh/day max)

No idea how you use so little lol.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s very cool. Btw our dishwasher (and laundry machine) has 2 peaks at 2 kW, our dryer does 500 W continuous.

Makes sense since you're in the netherlands, euro appliances generally get fed cold water and warm it internally, the 2kW peaks would be when it needs to warm up the cold water. The dryer has to warm air up pretty continuously to dry the contents. At 500W I assume it's a heat pump? (IIRC condensers are usually around or above 1kW)

Ah yes, the dish and laundry washers are indeed not “hot fill”, that is hard to find here indeed.

The dryer is a heat pump yes, some years ago it was the most energy efficient one we could find. (But I guess it runs longer, relying more on tumbling than heat, and wears out cloth faster).

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#293
> I now have access to one of the weirdest Edge Computing platforms imaginable.

If you think that's "weird", I have a bad news for you...

Not that your intuition is bad. It's sensible and fully justified. It's just weird to call common things weird ;)

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#294
post #16

Okay, but: Did the author find the configuration for the energy cost (money and CO2) and update it, so that the touchscreen shows the proper info now?

He did! :) It was located in the `/srv/server/bin/cfg` file.

Do a follow up plan with the grafana bit. I'm intrigued

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#295

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…

Also, we need to stop gaslighting people with fake solutions like "planting trees" or "deleting emails". Sure, it's good, but the scale is so small that you're actually losing focus on what really makes changes.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A 3A fuse would burn out in a fraction of a second if you tried to do that. he bought it on Amazon. He has every reason to be worried that it won't burn out. Louis Rossman did a video[0] where he put 8 amps through a 2 amp fuse and left the room for quite a long time, I think it was several minutes with 8a going through a 2a fuse. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

In general, people have the wrong idea about how fuses work. They're not supposed to blow at their rated current, they're supposed to withstand it indefinitely , and only blow at much higher currents. Look up any datasheet from a well established manufacturer and see for yourself (like this one from littelfuse: https://littelfuse.com/products/fuses/cartridge-fuses/5x20mm... )

People also have a wrong idea about how buying electronic components on Amazon/Aliexpress/eBay/etc. works. You buy a few of the same, test them, then use them if they work. Otherwise ask for refund.

Otherwise you're up for a big surprise that all your TL081's are LM356 instead, or that mosfet you bought has 3x the Rds(on) than expected, or that your fuse doesn't work.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks. I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible. This way you don't have a situation where a device manufacturer go…

At least in the EU (don't know about the UK), currently these sort of devices are installed by the government. They are replacement of the previous analog meters. In Belgium, they report the data to the (public) electricity grid company, which then forwards the data to your (private) electricity company. They are much simpler than the device in the article (no JavaScript or SSH access). They will surely last for more…

Same in France, the meters report via the grid to the grid operator, which is a public utility and shares your usage data with the (public or private) electricity company from which you buy your electricity. They have a local physical port with an open spec (and e.g. I have a device that connects to it and shares the usage data live over Zigbee for my Home Assistant), and there are ways of getting the data over an API from either the public utility or the electricity company which are more or less complex depending on the entity.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#298

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…

> 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.

Where? In France the devices, called Linky and manufactured to a common standard by a few different companies, and mandatory, communicate via the grid itself over the CPL protocol. There are no SIM cards inside, and thankfully, lunatics have been suing to refuse to get their meter upgraded to Linky "BECAUSE WAVES 5G COVID CHIPS" bullshit which doesn't have any basis in reality.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#299

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…

> 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.

If only the meters had ny power nearby or offered a 5V USB port on it so you could plug in your reader and forget it. But no. Now I'd have to keep a small Li-ion battery living in -20C since the meters are typically outside and there is never any power nearby since they are in a closed cabinet. Only the people who have indoor power meters (I know zero cases of that with detached houses, I think the power companies require the meter to be outside in a cabinet they can access without access to the house.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sale in front of them. It also makes it more convenient to compromise the device from across the street (or across town with a directional antenna). Though of course that's not a problem if your security is up to par and the device continues to receive regular security updates, and we can only surmise that the author ha…

> we can only surmise that the author has discovered a rare outlier in this space where that is not the case. Exactly what I was thinking! What luck that the author found the single IoT device out there that's a cobbled together piece of bodged electronics designed by a graduate from a webdev bootcamp with a Corel Draw focus. A device that, while only ~15 years old is not only hopelessly useless, but also obsolete an…

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