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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I always wondered why we cannot find hot filled appliances in the old continent.

Also, I wonder why compressors in heatpumps are not multi-speed (basically energy consumption can be modulated). If you are an expert please let me know I'd love to talk more.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#322

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…

Overlaying outdoor temperature is also helpful. One degree HVAC change makes a lot bigger difference when it's 0F (-18C) vs 40F (4C) outside

I've seen decent reviews on the "no plumbing required" water meters. Flume has a product available in the U.S. that gets pretty good reviews (https://www.amazon.com/Flume-Smart-Water-Monitor-Detector/dp...).

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#323
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no frame of reference but I have a feeling here (usa) it's super illegal to "tamper" with any pub utilities infrastructure. Could be wrong, though, but no usb ports. That's really cool though I wish we could do that.

No doubt about the tampering comment. However, my gas, water, and electric meters are all wireless and now I want to be able to monitor them for on demand usage. We shall see.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#324
> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity…

> Socket.IO! Wow, I honestly did not expect that. Client literally needs to receive 5 numbers from the server, Socket.IO seems to be a complete overkill for this usecase.

> The client code also looks very complicated for what it does. There are at least 6 RequireJS modules, all loading dynamically through different requests of course. There is Handlebars, Backbone.js, Underscore.js

I just kept getting more incredulous throughout this article. No way someone would put in that much effort for a device like this. The laziest option is usually the most common in software development. I guess in this case, it's not.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#325
post #63

> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity... Responding with disbelief seems a little over the top. It isn't typically easy to run wires in pre-built spaces. Sounds like a resilient design to me.

I recently got into microcontrollers and one of the most surprising things to me was the low cost and small size of ESP32s with wifi. Having grown up at a time when it wasn't unusual to buy a PCI card for your desktop computer that added wifi capability I had assumed that we'd still be looking at a target large device that goes for ~$20+ to get WiFi. Explicitly thinking about the ubiquity of cheap devices with wifi around me would immediately correct this view, but I had never done that and I'm sure many others haven't either

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#326

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…

I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you. I worked at an energy supplier. I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data!

>>Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you.

I don't know if it's hilarious, more like unhelpful at best, rude at worst .

>>I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data

It wasn't "live" data though, was it? Just a breakdown of usage per-minute, but uploaded in batches, right? And which energy supplier was that? Because with Octopus you can only get live data by installing an extra(and optional) device called Octopus mini, their SMET2 meters have no such capability.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#327

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 -…

Fuses in plugs in Britain are either 3A or 13A, by regulation. 5A used to be another value, but is no longer used (though replacement 5A fuses are easily available.) I've never seen 7A or 10A fuses, and I was the kind of boy to rummage through my grandparent's workshops. ..

They are available in the sizes I mentioned, plus 2A – https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1683350.pdf – and your comment made me actually look up the regulation out of curiosity as I know I have seen some of those other sizes in the lab! The wiring regs are enforced in statute by The Plugs and Sockets (Etc) Statutory Instrument 1994 [1] which mandates the compliance of two British standards, BS 1362 and BS 1363 for fuses and plugs respectively. The exact wording of BS 1363 (at least the version of it I can access) is

> [...] all rewirable plugs shall be marked on the engagement surface with the rated current. All non-rewirable plugs shall be marked with the rated current of the fuse link fitted, which shall not exceed the value given in Table 2 for the appropriate size of flexible cord

Table 2 itself prescribes a maximum fuse rating of 3 A or "(5 A)" [see below] for a conductor cross-sectional area of 0.5 mm^2, and 13 A for all larger conductor areas (0.75, 1, 1.25, and 1.5 mm^2). It is entitled "Rated current and maximum fuse rating in normal use, and load for flexing and cord grip tests related to size of flexible cord"

> [...] The figure in brackets indicates the fuse rating when a non rewirable plug is used with certain types of equipment where the use of a 5 A fuse link is necessary because of the high instantaneous inrush current

So there we go, I think – we're all sort of right. Thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole!

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1994/1768/made

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#328

> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity… > Socket.IO! Wow, I honestly did not expect that. Client literally needs to receive 5 numbers from the server, Socket.IO seems to be a complete overkill for this usecase. > The client code also looks very complicated for w…

Laziest option would probably be the option that developer is most familiar with.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to watch the whole video but it doesn't seem like it supports the point you're trying to make. > How long does it take for your 400mA multimeter fuse to blow at 600mA? > The amazing unpredictability of fusing current ratings at low overloads. It makes a point of saying that fuses are imprecise, i.e. that a fuse likely won't blow when 600mA of current passes through a 400mA fuse for a few seconds. What R…

> 4x the rated current > That's many orders of magnitude An order of magnitude is 10 times, in my timeline.

The relationship between the amount of overload and how fast the fuse is supposed to blow is quadratic, not linear. As an example with somewhat made-up numbers, at 1x it might take hours to blow, at 2x it might take a minute or two, at 3x it shouldn't take more than a second and at 4x it should be nearly instant.

If it's supposed to blow in 0.1 seconds when overloaded by 4x, then taking 10 minutes is many orders of magnitude in my book. While that fuse is taking its sweet time, wiring or other components are being heated out of spec (16x more heat at 4x the current), potentially posing a fire hazard or damaging the device it's supposed to be protecting.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically?…

That’s not quite right. All new smart meters have the ability to report electricity usage minute-by-minute. You _currently_ have the choice to only report month-by-month, by kindly asking them to only do that. However, I agree with verisimi, and I believe that it’s only a matter of time before the government via energy suppliers can monitor your real time electricity usage. It’ll be dressed up, of course, as being in…

>>but in reality they take power away from people and consolidate it in energy suppliers.

What kind of power did you have before the introduction of smart meters, exactly?

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