71–80 of 147 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where does the water go?
Into the house, clearly. Hopefully their air conditioning removes humidity too.
I can find very few smart plugs that specifically advertise the ability to handle inductive loads, which makes a ton of sense of course, since I think that winds up needing relatively expensive MOSFETs and circuit design more advanced than I can really understand to be robust. I think the best recommendation I've seen is to simply not use smart plugs for inductive loads at all, and instead use other methods to either measure current or implement switching.
I'm a bit afraid to use most any of these smart plugs. I have a couple Zigbee ones that seem to work fine but I am only trusting them with relatively small resistive loads for now since it feels dicey to put anything serious on them.
Hah, this reminds me of one of the first programs I wrote for personal use. My Macbook at the time had an accelerometer or gyro of some kind. So I made a program to monitor the output from that sensor, and it would send me an email when the motion stopped. I'd run the program, set the laptop on top of my running dryer, and go upstairs. In retrospect it was probably not smart to leave a laptop on top of the dryer for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never heard of this. Doesn't the moisture just freeze in the clothes?
I think that there are two assumptions that we tend to make that causes the idea of air drying frozen clothes to be unintuitive: 1. We don't expect solids to evaporate, because it's not something we notice often (though if you think about the fact that a few inches of snow can disappear in a couple of days while the temperature remains below zero Celsius, you suddenly realize that you do observe it if you live in a c…
Although most people have a freezer that needs to be deiced occasionally.
Particularly, if they have an ice cube tray in their freezer... and, somehow, the ice cubes in the tray slowly shrink.
Mechanical kitchen timer will suffice. You usually know the duration of most used programs. Doesn't need a hundred taps in the phone to get it working. Mental effort to set the timer is lower than with phone timer. You dial it and carry in a pocket. Zero distraction when you set it up or get notified -- you won't sink into the timer scrolling for half an hour. And in the end you'll get the notification.
I love the enormous artistic effort the author put in the images.
I've wanted to do this sort of thing for a while, but I am a bit concerned about using many of the smart plugs on the market with large motors, and I assume most dryers contain a fairly large electric motor (not sure how large.) I'm in the midwest U.S., so my dryer is a gas dryer; so presumably, the only real thing being driven off the electricity is indeed a micro-controller and a fairly large motor of some kind. I…
Yeah, I keep meaning to look at clamp style measurement. That doesn't give you control, of course, but I'm mostly interested in finding out how much power larger appliances are actually using (my dryer is pure electric).
I love the enormous artistic effort the author put in the images.
I love the enormous artistic effort the author put in the images.