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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#511

Post by philwelch »

Symbiote wrote: post #463
philwelch wrote: post #426

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…

I think the main speed increase of American machines compared to European ones is due to much higher water consumption. A modern European washing machine uses 30-50 litres per wash, vs 75-100 for a modern American one. That's also halved the time required to heat the necessary water, so another reason a hot water connection might not be so useful

> A modern European washing machine uses 30-50 litres per wash, vs 75-100 for a modern American one.

Maybe we just have bigger washing machines? You need to control for washer capacity to make a fair comparison here. If you need to do twice as many loads of laundry because you can only fit half as much laundry in each load, you’ve gained nothing. And it’s not like having a bigger washing machine requires every load of laundry to use the full water capacity of the machine even if you only do small loads. On older machines you can set a dial for load size while newer ones have sensors for that.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#512

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Amezarak wrote: post #494
masklinn wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

From the US perspective, I have trouble understanding most of these. > - 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 dishwashe…

It isn't code to run 120V receptacles off of a 240V circuit. That's a recipe for a fire that your insurer will not cover. You can do a shared neutral to two 120V loads in limited circumstances.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#513

Post by fulladder »

gretch wrote: post #442
autoexec wrote: post #436

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…

You're going to care when you wake up one day and find out you can't buy health insurance because of your data.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#515

Post by rrix2 »

israrkhan wrote: post #375
jimmaswell wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With the power supplies of this era, this pair of devices probably pumps 16w idle. Running 24/24 7/7, they probably consume as much as a small fridge as a whole. The LCA of the solution must be consterning as well, especially compared with few one dollard microcontrollers. At the average cost of electric in the USA this amounts to under $2/month. Seems negligible to me? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=16+watts…

$2 is median daily wage for several countries. Negligible in US but not everywhere source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income

I don't think places like that have folks in new construction with Ethernet and Android tablets in the wall. TFA uses GBP as the currency in the images.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#516

Post by bradknowles »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #512
Amezarak wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the US perspective, I have trouble understanding most of these. > - 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 dishwashe…

It isn't code to run 120V receptacles off of a 240V circuit. That's a recipe for a fire that your insurer will not cover. You can do a shared neutral to two 120V loads in limited circumstances.

There are 120VAC units in the U.S., but there are also 240VAC units in the U.S. You just have to get the right unit for your available power, or have the appropriate power run for your unit.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#517

Post by bradknowles »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #270
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…

I have a friend that is diabetic (a number of friends, actually). He has been doing a pretty lousy job of managing his diet. Until his doctor prescribed a monitor for a few weeks. This is a device that looks like a big Band-Aid that you put on your arm, inserting a fine needle under the skin, and communicates with an app on the phone, reporting things like glucose levels. Once he realized the effects of the foods he…

I have a Libre3 CGM. It works pretty well, except for the fact that it frequently loses Bluetooth connectivity to my phone.

I can confirm that being more aware of the results you get when you eat the wrong food can be a strong incentive to help you choose better food.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#518

Post by bradknowles »

wkjagt wrote: post #275
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend that is diabetic (a number of friends, actually). He has been doing a pretty lousy job of managing his diet. Until his doctor prescribed a monitor for a few weeks. This is a device that looks like a big Band-Aid that you put on your arm, inserting a fine needle under the skin, and communicates with an app on the phone, reporting things like glucose levels. Once he realized the effects of the foods he…

I think even people who don’t have diabetes could benefit from this. Would having access to my own glucose levels throughout the day give me some insights into how what I eat influences my own mood, energy levels etc?

There are non-medical versions of CGMs that are available from a wide variety of companies, primarily for those who are interested in monitoring their sports performance.

Technically, you still have to get a prescription to buy them, but the companies help you with that by connecting you to online doctors for the prescription. Oh, and they tend to cost more than if you had a medical CGM prescribed for you by your endocrinologist. I guess that's why they're so profitable for the companies selling them.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#519

Post by Amezarak »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #512
Amezarak wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the US perspective, I have trouble understanding most of these. > - 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 dishwashe…

It isn't code to run 120V receptacles off of a 240V circuit. That's a recipe for a fire that your insurer will not cover. You can do a shared neutral to two 120V loads in limited circumstances.

It doesn’t surprise me that it’s not code but it’s common and I’ve never heard of an insurer doing anything at all to verify your electrical isn’t a total disaster.

Either way GPs point that the lack of 240 stopped / stops US washers from having water heaters is unfounded. There’s almost always a cable with 240 not two feet away.

Another thing I didn’t think about is that a lot of people (not me) have sinks in their laundry rooms, so there’s also cold and hot run there anyway. I wonder if some Europeans aren’t running hot to all their sinks.

edit: I’m not sure it is against code? When I google it it seems to be fairly common advice and allowed under NEC.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#520

Post by gretch »

fulladder wrote: post #513
gretch wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're going to care when you wake up one day and find out you can't buy health insurance because of your data.

See this is the kind of thing I’m talking about.

To me, you’re like a digital prepper. You have a bunker full of canned food and guns because you think “you’re gonna wake up one day and …”

So be it. The way you live your life doesn’t negatively affect me so do what you gotta do. But maybe you don’t have to prep.

Btw, rationally speaking, those who opt into monitoring their glucose are going to be much healthier by self selection bias. Not to mention that you can use the stats to improve your condition, just like the parent comment was talking about.

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