491–500 of 576 posts
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Yeah I don't understand why he is shocked that this communicates wirelessly. He even bought a modern flat with Ethernet because he clearly knows how much pain it is to add wiring to a house. Very weird.
It's painful to add wiring to a house as a random normie user . It's not painful if you're an installer or a construction person. Or at least this is my understanding why all construction is still done in a way that makes it near-impossible for the user/dweller to change anything without having to do general renovation of half the place. Which, again, is hard primarily because it makes no sense to buy all the hardwar…
Why on earth would you do that when you can just use wireless? It would make zero sense.
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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.
That's very high. Has a neighbour plugged their car into your outside socket? Underfloor electric heating in the bathroom? Someone using that minisplit more than you think? Average monthly use a house like that in Britain is 225kWh. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/information-consumers/energy-advice...
I think the main difference is the prevalence of electric heating and cooling in different countries. We have a ~1400 sq ft old house in Vermont with wood heat and no air conditioning, and use about 250 kWh many months, although this jumps about 50% if we plug in an outdoor hot tub in the winter.
Our personal usage is probably dominated by an electric heat pump water heater. Do the British numbers typically include hot water, or is this usually gas? Also, what is the "multi-rate" line in the page you link, and why is this average higher? And how many people choose that?
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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.
> I always wondered why we cannot find hot filled appliances in the old continent. You can find them but they'll be in the semi-professional space and above (relatively expensive high-duty). They're very rare in the consumer space because - it requires running more hot water lines / extensions, historically houses are built with lots of cold water lines but hot water lines only where required - for their heating requ…
> - it requires running more hot water lines / extensions, historically houses are built with lots of cold water lines but hot water lines only where required
Don't you need hot lines almost everywhere anyway? Every sink, bath, and shower has both cold and hot lines. So you're simply running two extra hots...one for the washer, one for the dishwasher. But usually dishwasher supply is run off the kitchen sink supply, so the "extra" hot line is just a couple feet. Actually, there's no cold line at all to our dishwashers, only the hot, come to think of it. So there's zero extra piping for the dishwasher in the US, and yes, one extra run for the washer.
> - for their heating requirement, a normal electric plug is more than sufficient in the land of 230V, this is is a similar issue to kettles basically
As other comments mentioned, the US does have 220V plugs for heavy appliances. It's already standard to have 220 in the laundry room and kitchen anyway - the dryer and oven use them. So this doesn't seem to explain the difference. It would be very easy run a 220 to your washer in the US, you'd need maybe two feet of cable and an outlet. Indeed, I don't know if it's code or not, but a lot of laundry rooms especially probably have the 120 outlet the washer uses actually wired up with four conductor cable, with the extra hot unused, because the cable for the dryer is right there next to it and why run the three conductor cable from elsewhere, when it's easier to use the four conductor. So they could literally just pop in the 220 outlet and be done with zero extra work instead, if washers were on 220.
> - they require an internal heater anyway as residential water circuits come nowhere near the high temperature cycles: 50-53C is common to avoid risks of scalding but some are set as low as 45, the standard high temp cycles for washing machines are 60 and 90, and dishwasher commonly have a heavy cycle around 65.
This is incorrect. My washer doesn't have any heating element. The dishwasher does to superheat the water, since at the maximum settings it boils water. (The steam cycle.) The thermistor is set during normal non-steam operation to run at around 130F/54C, which is the temperature of my water heater heater supply, but it's true that inlet temp is not guaranteed; different people will have different settings and the pipe run entails some heat loss. Plus it does need the heating element for the dry cycle.
> - it makes the machines more convoluted since they needs more inlets, a mixing valve, etc...
Dishwashers only have one inlet in the US. It's true that the washer has two, but it's not much more complexity. At least on mine, it just opens both valves at the same time, there is no "mixing valve." If you select hot it only opens the hot valve, warm opens both, and cold opens only the cold.
> - they're not really compatible with hot water tanks: you don't want your dishes or laundry to empty your shower water,
How are they "not really compatible" when it's bog standard? Your dishwasher uses a pretty minimal amount of water (mine fills with 1 gallon.) Washing machines use ~10-20 gallons. The standard hot water tank in the US is 50+ gallons. People do sometimes run out of hot water, but it's not from running the dishwasher at the same time.
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> 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…
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…
Electricity meters are designed to last, and contain a radio that lets them communicate use to the distributor. What type of radio depends on where in the country you are.
The Gas meter is battery powered, and tries to send data to the electricity meter every half hour, over Zigbee. This works better for some than for others.
Then there's the in-home display, you get one with the meter but it's not required for reporting -- it's purely a display. At some point between the meter being installed and us moving in the one that goes with our house went walkabout, so we don't have one. Except we actually sort-of have two: our supplier makes a small box (with an ESP32 in it) that sends them near-realtime data (and also, happily, completes the otherwise-unreliable Zigbee mesh because the junk I have in the garage blocks the signal) and before that arrived I got a Hildebrand Glow, which talks MQTT to my Home Assistant.
The electricity meter receives the current price if it's a normal non-dynamic price, and the Glow can read that, but can also cope with Octopus Agile with its half-hourly pricing because it's able to fetch that data over the Internet.
The raw metering data isn't quite available to everyone in open formats, but there are procedures that one may go through to be able to receive data and at least one company then makes that data available to the consumer. It's not as fine-grained as the data available on the local Zigbee mesh, which is why those same companies also sell hardware that'll join said mesh. Unfortunately the mesh isn't open for use by arbitrary hardware.
You can also get random monitoring devices that sit on the consumer side of the meter and give you whatever capabilities you buy, and it sounds like the article is an example of one of those, rather than of a smart meter. The author would probably be better off with an actual smart meter, if that's an option.
I made this mistake
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Indeed. There is a slight temperature dependent de-rating, but in general that is correct. To add, Littelfuse is in fact the inventor of the standard automotive blade fuses - they know their fuses if anyone does. I archived a datasheet of some of their blade fuses here [0] - you can see that a 1-amp fuse will run at 1A indefinitely, 2A for 300ms, 3A ~100ms, 4A ~60ms, 5A ~40ms etc. The same datasheet will tell you the…
Just be careful with that, measuring mains is a bad idea with most oscilloscopes. The ground pin is usually connected to mains earth, so if you're not careful, you might create a short and blow up your scope. If you have one of these battery powered ones, it'll be fine, but the mains powedered ones are usually a no-no.
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Indeed. There is a slight temperature dependent de-rating, but in general that is correct. To add, Littelfuse is in fact the inventor of the standard automotive blade fuses - they know their fuses if anyone does. I archived a datasheet of some of their blade fuses here [0] - you can see that a 1-amp fuse will run at 1A indefinitely, 2A for 300ms, 3A ~100ms, 4A ~60ms, 5A ~40ms etc. The same datasheet will tell you the…
So you agree that a 2A fuse shouldn't allow 8A to pass for several minutes?
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> 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.
Indeed, examining the quote below...
> 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
...it's easy to miss the point that there's no such thing as "less CO2 released than you should" because the amount we should is negative: not only should we be emitting zero (not net zero, literally zero), and then we must do the mitigations on top of that.
In short, we've tried the existing carbon credit scheme without rationing the available credits, and it hasn't worked to achieve the goal. We need to try something different now.
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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.
See https://www.netbeheernederland.nl/_upload/Files/Slimme_meter.... I think that’s more than good enough for third parties to use.