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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#541

Post by Symbiote »

nkurz wrote: post #493
Symbiote wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Interesting numbers. My first instinct was that you might be reading it wrong, but you seem to be completely correct. The average use for the US is usually claimed to be about 4x that at 880kWh/month: https://www.energybot.com/blog/average-energy-consumption.ht... 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…

Most people in Britain have gas heating and water — it's been cheap since the 1970s (I think?) when it was discovered in the North Sea. Cooking is probably evenly split between gas and some sort of electric, although electric ovens are preferred even if the hob uses gas.

The remaining difference will be the result of the big European push for energy-efficient appliances, the American preference for larger appliances, that houses are smaller in Britain, and British people have less money. (All these are related.)

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#542

Post by Symbiote »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #501
nkurz wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting numbers. My first instinct was that you might be reading it wrong, but you seem to be completely correct. The average use for the US is usually claimed to be about 4x that at 880kWh/month: https://www.energybot.com/blog/average-energy-consumption.ht... 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…

Multi-rate is when energy's cheaper during off-peak hours - traditionally used with night storage heaters, which is why the average usage would be higher; it's more likely to be used where gas isn't available. "Economy 7" has existed for decades, and allows a sub-circuit of the house to be energised only between roughly midnight and 7am (with an offset for each house to avoid the grid collapsing when 10 million stora…

"Economy 7" doesn't have to be on a separate circuit; I think that's mostly seen in Scotland and North England where electric storage heaters are more common.

Where I've lived (Midlands, South East) it's just been a cheaper rate at night, so you set the dishwasher, washing machine etc to run at 4am or whatever. It's not a cost saving unless you can do this.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#543

Post by SergeAx »

miellaby wrote: post #136

I like how the author is surprised by the technological aberration that form Linux powered home appliances. A node server to power and publish over wifi a web site, an API, a web socket, while the site is being displayed by a outdated webview engine within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else. That's... the norm. All this is very common. And yet displaying a couple of digits and a ba…

On the contrary, using HTML, age-proven open tech, guarantees that even decades later, the product will be usable and easily expandable.

On the other hand, adding one more graph to the microcontroller-powered solution will probably mean redoing it from scratch.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#544

Post by BrandoElFollito »

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 had this hope when the energy companies in France installed the national "smart meter" (Linky). It was a fun story because it was linked to spying you at home, 5G, COVID and radiation.

Unfortunately this is a closed system where the energy company will not let you access the data outside of their own dashboard. I would like to think that this is against the national trend toward Open Data but it is what it is.

There are some funky solutions where you connect a board to an input of the meter and somehow get the data in Home Assistant but it is like I said "funky" (completely guerilla style, without any backing of the power company and if you have a problem it will probably be your fault).

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#545

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

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

you must be fun at parties.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#546

Post by hbossy » 

  I am not even sure how that would work, since the device does not have an internet access.
If it can act as Wi-Fi host it can most likely connect to other clients as well. It's pretty common to run small configuration page hosted on device that let's you enter your main Wi-Fi credentials. All you need to do is change wpa_supplicant setting in /etc/.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#547

Post by brianwawok »

ben_w wrote: post #539
brianwawok wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My US appliances have a tap cold setting, warms the water 0. 20F isn’t an uncommon water temperature for water coming from the city. Can even go a tad cooler in the winter.

Do you really mean "20F", or was that just a typo? Because if you really do mean F, this tells me something I didn't already know about additives to the US water supply.

C lol

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#548

Post by jaclaz »

leoedin wrote: post #538
alanfranz wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's interesting. I wonder if that's part of the reason why electric car uptake has been so low in Italy? Most houses here in the UK have enough capacity to run a 7kW charger alongside other household stuff. My house electricity supply must be 50 years old and 80A (about 18 kW) - so it's not even a recent thing. Do people in Italy never have electric showers? How much power do they run to a new house? From a decarb…

I may add that there is an additional (lesser known) issue.

The "typical" contract is 3 kW, due to air conditioners becoming more common, many people upgraded to 4.5 kW (it was also possible, cannot say if it still possible now, to make a 3 kW contract with an upgrade only during three or four months in the summer).

Very few people (and very large houses) have a 6 kW contract.

The "fixed" part ("potenza impegnata" translatable to "committed power capacity") is a non thrifling part of the monthly (or every two month) electricity bill, so eveyone historically used the smallest possible contract (usually there is a 10% or 20% more allowed for peaks).

The electrical plant needs to be made (and certified) by a licensed electrician BUT (and here is the catch) only up to 6kW the electrician can make (and certify it) without the need of a project by an authorized technician, which adds some costs.

Additionally (of course it depends on the specific area) up to 6 kW it is considered "normal" and it is rare that the distributors asks for compensation (besides the increase in the bill, and an initial "fixed amount" ) whilst when you go up, it is not uncommon that you are asked a sum as a contribution for the works needed to upgrade the distribution lines.

For increasing from 3 kW to 6 kW it would be around 70 € x 3= 210 € + around 50 € + VAT and then around 22 € x 3= 66 €/year (again + VAT).

Stepping up from 6 to 10 (besides needing the project and re-certification) is not unlikely to cost several hundreds or a few thousands Euro.

Anyway, before the issues with the power needed for re-charging, few people have the "luxury" of a parking space or garage, I would presume that this is a bigger obstacle for electric car adoption.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#549

Post by mcv »

philwelch wrote: post #344
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…

> 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 US uses a split phase system so you can combine two 120V circuits to get 240V. This is how most heavy appliances are wired.

> US uses a split phase system so you can combine two 120V circuits to get 240V. This is how most heavy appliances are wired.

So what do you do with an induction stove? For ours, we had to combine two 230V connections to get 380V.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#550

Post by twic »

ben_w wrote: post #539
brianwawok wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My US appliances have a tap cold setting, warms the water 0. 20F isn’t an uncommon water temperature for water coming from the city. Can even go a tad cooler in the winter.

Do you really mean "20F", or was that just a typo? Because if you really do mean F, this tells me something I didn't already know about additives to the US water supply.

Maybe his supply is at 800 bar.
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