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What's that touchscreen in my room?

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Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#551

Post by whywhywhywhy »

>Now the distance between them is actually very short - just a few meters and maybe 2-3 walls, totally reasonable setup for a cable connection ..... There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity

Dunno how someone can be so completely shocked that people would rather just do it over wireless instead of drill a cable through "2-3 walls" and have the ugly cable running up a wall and across a doorframe or whatever.

Could have been done over a non-wifi type radio, but then the tablet would need custom hardware too.

I understand the security concerns but like people will choose those over having a house with ugly wires all over the walls or having to deal with wires that get chewed through in the floors and roof.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#552

Post by TeMPOraL »

twic wrote: post #550
ben_w wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Makes sense - high pressure to minimize loss of heat in transmission. Like with high voltage lines. Though this would be like skipping the final transformer and feeding 40kV straight into your house wiring, which I don't think anyone does...

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#553

Post by robinsonb5 »

Symbiote wrote: post #542
robinsonb5 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's right - all energy used during the off-peak hours is at the cheaper rate - the Economy 7 "white meter" timeswitch was just a convenience for storage heater circuits.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#554

Post by chefandy »

Nursie wrote: post #526
chefandy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! I did support there for Proviso— the product of a startup that Micromuse had acquired not too long before the IBM acquisition. I started in between the acquisitions.

Yeah they did a few acquisitions before being swallowed by Big Blue - I joined the London folks on OMNIbus at the tail end of '05, then in 2010 moved to Australia to work with what was still effectively a Micromuse team within IBM who had originally been bought in to Micromuse as Riversoft here in Perth. Didn't have a huge amount of interaction with the US side of things though!

TNZ was one of my regular interactions. I regularly connected with some really competent, lovely folks over there. Especially compared to some (only some!) of the more "claws out" US customers, they were an absolute pleasure to work with.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#555

Post by didntcheck »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #544
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. Ther…

> It was a fun story because it was linked to spying you at home, 5G, COVID and radiation.

The first of those is a genuine concern

> In Australia debt collectors can make use of the data to know when people are at home.[63] Used as evidence in a court case in Austin, Texas, police agencies secretly collected smart meter power usage data from thousands of residences to determine which used more power than "typical" to identify marijuana growing operations.[64]

> Smart meter power data usage patterns can reveal much more than how much power is being used. Research has demonstrated that smart meters sampling power levels at two-second intervals can reliably identify when different electrical devices are in use.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter#Privacy_concerns

IIRC my smart meter in the UK lets me choose between 30m and 24h reporting, probably as a response to these fears, but you just set it as a preference on the provider website, not locally on the meter. It would be trivial for them to just be lying about that and logging data to GCHQ at the maximum precision. That may seem outlandish, but so did PRISM until it was revealed

Some people also refuse to have one so that they can't be forced onto a dynamic-priced tariff. At the moment those are opt-in, but I think their concern is a fair one too. Though if the powers that be wanted to coerce people onto them, they could simply crank the price of fixed tariffs anyway

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#556

Post by BrandoElFollito »

didntcheck wrote: post #555
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ther…

> It was a fun story because it was linked to spying you at home, 5G, COVID and radiation. The first of those is a genuine concern > In Australia debt collectors can make use of the data to know when people are at home.[63] Used as evidence in a court case in Austin, Texas, police agencies secretly collected smart meter power usage data from thousands of residences to determine which used more power than "typical" to…

This is physics. You get a power usage and you can imagine which kind of device pulls the energy. With some context you can even guess that I switched on my water boiler at 19:45 and yes, you would know that I drank tea or coffee.

As for burglars, they will know that I am away statistically during the day. Which is not only predictable, but they can get the exact moment I leave by simply watching my house.

This reminds me of a friend who was worried that someone would hack my smart lock. To what I said that I would LOVE them to hack it instead of breaking the door as they will do.

I can understand that some people are super scared about being spied on - and their consumption should be checked once a month when they have tp pay. Some people would like to measure it in 1 second intervals and they should be accommodated as well.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#557

Post by didntcheck »

sofixa wrote: post #298
michaelt wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside. The low energy 'HAN' stuff is used for the gas meter, so it can run for 10 years on a battery, allowing it to be installed without installing wired power. The electricity meter has plenty of electricity available, so it acts as a bridge. The portable screen…

> Maybe your installation is different, but usually the electricity meter uses normal GPRS to talk to the electricity company. They literally have SIM cards inside. Where? In France the devices, called Linky and manufactured to a common standard by a few different companies, and mandatory, communicate via the grid itself over the CPL protocol. There are no SIM cards inside, and thankfully, lunatics have been suing to…

> BECAUSE WAVES 5G COVID CHIPS

Is that really the main line, or is that just the media smear being used against a majority who have fair concerns, such as privacy or a move to phase out fixed-rate tariffs? This Wikipedia article has a good summary, and while the "Health" section is bullshit, the rest is mostly valid points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter#Opposition_and_con...

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#558

Post by nkurz »

mcv wrote: post #549
philwelch wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Generally there is no option to do this in a US residence. The drop to the house coming from the transformer only provides two single phase 120V to neutral circuits, which can be combined to provide 240V. Commercial and industrial sites will often have higher voltage 3-phase available.

In practice, this isn't an issue. Induction devices sold in the US for residential use simply are designed to work on 120V or 240V. The heat output for the 120V ones too limited for some purposes, but once you are up to 240V it's generally not a limiting factor.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#559

Post by nkurz »

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…

Thanks! I'm familiar with time-of-use pricing. Growing up, we did get a better electric rate by having an electric water heater that was somehow radio controlled to only operate at certain hours.

I'm not familiar with storage heaters, though. I don't think I've ever heard of one being used in the US. For others like me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_heater.

Re: What's that touchscreen in my room?

#560

Post by jdc0589 »

I'm a big fan of having energy monitors like this. I installed one (different brand) on a subpanel recently to monitor usage in my garage/shop, but honestly now I'm thinking about doing everything with them (can't just do one at only at the main panel, no one makes a reasonable 400amp mains setup i've found).

I went with an Emporia Vue. each one can do 16 circuit monitors, you can nest multiple together in their app/platform, and if you want to abandon hosted stuff there's an open source community out there that supports their hardware for now. The price is also better than most of the others I cross-shopped.

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