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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#351

Post by maccard »

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…

Mine comes with a display that shows live usage by energy rather than price. The octopus app shows my usage for yesterday in £ for octopus tracker, broken down into 30m increments.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#352

Post by paganel »

failingslowly wrote: post #181
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…

> 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…

I have one here in Bucharest and, while fancy, as in it blips a red light when the power consumptions is higher than usual, it doesn't help me at all.

As in, yeah, running the washing machine is power consuming, I knew that, and the same goes for the electric oven or for the vacuum cleaner, but what am I supposed to do with that information? Not wash my clothes anymore? Not using the oven? Leaving dust all over the place for longer?

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#353

Post by dijit »

gabrielhidasy wrote: post #350
dijit wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is it really a problem? An ESP8266 (which is not the most efficient thing, but is very cheap) uses about 0.5W while transmitting, much less most of the time. For reference, I have some smart outlets that I measured using a while ago, pulling about 0.05W on average from the wall, or 36Wh a month. That's about as much energy as making 500ml of coffee or charging a phone 2-3x.

not sure if its a problem in reality, radios are the second most power consuming subsystem of my laptop at idle. (first being screen due to the backlight).

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#354

Post by alanfranz »

leoedin wrote: post #184
alanfranz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don’t you use a 13A circuit breaker in UK? That’s what we do in the rest of the EU, I think. There’s a main input to the house which usually is around 15A-30A , then we’ve got multiple sublines with individual circuit breakers, typically 10A or 16A.

That seems really low. Most houses in the UK have a 60 - 100A supply. Just my stove alone can draw about 7.3kW - about 32A.

Probably depends on the country. In Italy we usually employ natural gas stoves and we use natural gas furnaces for heating, so normally you get a 3kw to 6kw max inbound power. I think you can easily get to 10kw, but above that it's quite difficult.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#355

Post by kjkjadksj »

isoprophlex wrote: post #148
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…

About water consumption: depending on your make of water meter, there's often a small reflective wheel that turns eg. once for every liter. Sometimes these are made out of metal or even slightly magnetic. An arduino with an optical or Hall effect sensor might get you real far in real time, high resolution data collection! Alternatively I've had success in wiring up a temperature probe directly to the incoming water l…

A lot of water meters these days have rfid for the water company to scan so maybe you can just abrogate that directly

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#356

Post by concordDance »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #346
concordDance wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rationing is ridiculously inefficient. People's desire for heavily carbon consuming things vs lightly carbon consuming things varies massively. If you're worried about the poor don't ignore the externalities of their consumption but subsidise them directly via UBI or somesuch. Rationing is a very worst of all possible worlds solution, losing you all the benefits of trade.

Just as a thought exercise, if anything was possible: UBI seems to work towards the goal of making sure people don't die due to lack of resources (it is a basic income, after all). It's less clear how it works towards the goal of reducing carbon emissions. Rationing, on the other hand, has the potential: Natural resources (publicly owned ones anyways), and perhaps natural limits like how much CO2 the skies can take,…

A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI, but with side effects. In particular, if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production, but the price will be unrelated to the actual externality cost or mitigation cost of the marginal CO2 release. So you either get more CO2 released than you would with an externality tax or you get less CO2 released than you should given that you can mitigate against that particular CO2 release.

Ideally you'd have credits being available for purchase at prices that correspond to the costs of mitigating their externalities (CO2 emission is not in and of itself evil, its the consequences that we don't want).

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#357

Post by marcosdumay »

PeterisP wrote: post #205
thrwwycbr wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why the Mirai botnet is still at large is: Android. From a business perspective nobody wants to pay the costly people that can do microcontroller programming. Frontend devs are dirt cheap, especially for something as simple as that interface displaying the bar charts.

From employee perspective it was my impression that EE developers tend to get lower salaries than web developers. But it could be the case that building an android or web app for a simple UI would take less dev-months than an embedded app with similar functionality.

> building an android or web app for a simple UI would take less dev-months than an embedded app with similar functionality

I'm quite sure that's correct.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#358

Post by SergeAx »

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…

Unpopular opinion: shifting environmental blame to individual consumers is a form of gaslighting (pun not intended, but still good). You may use spend a fortune on solar, heating pumps and A-clsss appliances, but will never save a fraction of power consumption of a single datacenter cabinet or aluminium furnace. One large enough manufacturing plant cancels out all environmental initiatives of a medium town, including public spaces.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#359

Post by amluto »

snickmy wrote: post #321
teekert wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My dishwasher is European and is hot-fill. It doesn’t even have a cold water connection. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cold fill dishwasher in the US.

I wonder what’s up in Europe.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#360

Post by amluto »

bloomingeek wrote: post #323
swozey wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In PG&E land, you can buy one of a handful of approved ZigBee gadgets that can read out your meter data.
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