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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We vs I makes all the difference.

We (2 adults, 2 seniors, 2 small kids) blow thru 350-400 kWh on hot water alone. Another 500-600 kwh on car. Remaining 300-400kwh is cooking, lighting, tech, etc. Same average 1200kwh per month.

Take the car away and it's same 175kwh per month per person (summer here so no heating needed).

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#452
post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most dishwashers only have one inlet. And most also heat the water(more), even if fed hot water.

I believe the premise is, with 240V, they can heat faster. So people plumb them with cold when in 240V land, and hot when in 120V land.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#453
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.

This is not utility infrastructure. It’s a submeter connected to a set of current transformers. In general in the US, for commercial buildings, everything beyond the utility transformer secondary is the responsibility of the customer. For a residence, anything beyond the meter socket is the responsibility of the customer. I’m unfamiliar with UK utility standards though so perhaps it’s different there.

Weird. You have a meter, after the utility's meter, that you can just plug into?

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#454
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should make the obvious reason more explicit. If you have something designed to operate on 120V and plug it into a 240V outlet, there will be safety issues. It might even catch on fire. So the two voltages have to use different outlet and plug shapes for safety reasons. An outlet is not “randomly” going to be one voltage or the other because that would be a terrible idea. And yes, the 240V outlets are set up…

Uh, you might want to reconsider who you’re talking to. I’ve run 40 amp 240v split phase and 3 phase in North America (permitted) for personal projects. I’m well aware. No one installs L30R/L6-30R receptacles in the US for ‘normal’ (as in used by a human for random stuff) use as standard practice, because yes - most of the time no one needs it. Maximum power for a normal 120/20 amp branch circuit is 2.4kw, and that’s…

> Uh, you might want to reconsider who you’re talking to. I’ve run 40 amp 240v split phase and 3 phase in North America (permitted) for personal projects. I’m well aware.

Sorry about that, but I’m not sure how you expected me to know that about you or why we’re arguing about tea kettles. I think I inferred more disagreement from context than we actually have. Do we actually disagree about anything here or are we all good? At the very least I think we’re on the same page about washing machines, which was the original point of contention here.

And yes, the point about welding is a good one; higher voltage standards are a lot more convenient for that.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#456

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.

We don't want trade. We want people to reduce their carbon consumption. In any case, you could always allow trading of rations.

> We want people to reduce their carbon consumption

Remember that this isn't the end goal. What we want is not to feel the effects of releasing CO2.

A CO2 tax that costs as much as it costs to mitigate the effects of that CO2 release reduces CO2 production to exactly the amount its worth emitting. Rationing means you either get more or less CO2 than this number.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#457
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be cool to give something like that a try, but I love that we have so much technology to monitor our bodies but I'd never use anything if it required a cell phone app since you'd have to worry about who else is collected/selling that data. We need more devices that work entirely offline, but they're hard to find because companies know they can make so much more money by collecting/selling your personal data and…

I don’t mean to minimize your concerns, and you should live your life as you see fit, but since you put this out there as a comment for others to reflect on - from my perspective your feelings are like paranoia or compulsion. To me, my glucose number is completely impersonal. I wouldn’t care who knew this or not, it has little to do with my personhood, not to mention it moves so fast that no one can infer anything ti…

> To me, my glucose number is completely impersonal. I wouldn’t care who knew this or not, it has little to do with my personhood

I'm not sure how much information a continuous glucose would reveal about you since I've never tried one. How healthy your diet is probably. Does it spike in the morning? Could it indicate when you sleep and when you wake? What other things can affect it? Sickness? Stress? Drugs/alcohol? A single reading may not tell anyone much, but I imagine that over time the patterns and sudden changes to them could reveal a lot about your life.

That kind of data might be used against you in a lot of different ways. Maybe it's higher or lower than normal often enough that it triggers some threshold and your health/life insurance company raises your rates. Maybe you get in an accident one day and the person who hit your car subpoenas those records and uses it to show that you're blood sugar was a bit low allowing them to suggest that you must have been drowsy or impaired and so the accident was your fault. Maybe companies will notice that there are certain times of the day when it changes and you're more likely to be hungry or thirsty or tired or anxious. Times when you're more vulnerable to manipulation or suggestion.

Is it paranoia when they're really out to get you? The buying and selling of the most mundane aspects of our lives is a multi-billion dollar a year industry. Almost every company you interact with today involves themselves in it in one way or another and the reason every single company is so desperate to get their hands on every scrap of data they can is because it's extremely profitable. The data they collect is already making them money hand over fist, mostly at the expense of the people whose data was taken. That data lives forever. It never goes away, and all kinds of people are looking into new ways to take advantage of us using it. Corporations, politicians, extremists, scammers, employers, lawyers, advertisers, anyone willing to pay and looking for an advantage over you.

I suppose that taking even small steps to protect myself (to the extent that it's even possible) does mean that I miss out on trying some things in life. Not allowing myself to be taken advantage of by handing over vast amounts of data isn't always fun, but until we have protections under the law that make those small concessions unnecessary is it better to just try to pretend it isn't happening and hope I don't get screwed over too badly when the data I gave up inevitably comes back to bite me in the ass later?

Usually it just means a have to work harder to find more reasonable alternatives. I still turn my lights on and off and set kitchen timers, but I don't do it with smart assistants. I have to find (and sometimes build) offline options for things like security cameras or backup solutions, and I have to search harder for things like pedometers and color changing light bulbs that aren't controlled by cell phone apps. I have to search for dumb TVs and cars.

I know that kind of effort it isn't worth it for everyone. Most people never notice when the data they give up is used against them. They don't know that the price they paid is higher than the price their neighbor paid for the extract same item. They don't know they waited longer on hold because they were pushed back so someone else who called in after them could be pushed ahead to the front of the queue. They aren't ever told why they didn't get that job or apartment they wanted. They'll never know about the products, services, or opportunities that they've been algorithmically excluded from. Most of the time it's all out of sight, out of mind. I just hope that people start paying better attention to what's happening because, like you, a lot of people feel like there's very little chance that they'll be robbed, but they're actually being robbed all the time, and it's going to get a lot worse.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shou…

> A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI On the contrary -- I was saying it was not equivalent, because it also works towards the goal of reducing CO2 consumption, whereas I can't imagine how a UBI would do so. > if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production The carbon credits I am imagining would not be "produced" per se -- they would, in total, repr…

> total amount of carbon we as a country want to emit

And my point above was that this is not a single number. It varies depending on what we want to use the CO2 emitting stuff for.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#459

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, the…

Have you/employer considered sharing some of this reverse engineering work via github, indexed by IoT device model number?

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should make the obvious reason more explicit. If you have something designed to operate on 120V and plug it into a 240V outlet, there will be safety issues. It might even catch on fire. So the two voltages have to use different outlet and plug shapes for safety reasons. An outlet is not “randomly” going to be one voltage or the other because that would be a terrible idea. And yes, the 240V outlets are set up…

Upon inspection, the American Breville kettles are 1/2 the wattage with a 1 liter boil time of 4 minutes at 1500 watts. The UK versions from the same brand are 3000 watts, but only reduces the boil time by 1 minute. I'm not sure about efficiency one way or the other, but it's interesting to note that double the power does not yield one half boil time. Additionally, at this elevation I would estimate my morning coffee…

> I think it comes down to practicality more than either culture's love of tea or coffee.

Yeah, come to think of it a coffee machine is solving a very similar problem to an electric kettle. Whats more, I’ve even used a drip coffee maker as a makeshift electric kettle before. So that was just a dumb argument on my part. Thanks for bailing me out with actual data on the diminishing returns of dumping more power into an electric kettle!

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