Tesla “smart” immersion heater

[Gav_P]

Just seen this Tesla “smart” immersion... I like the idea, but £107 is a bit steep I think. 
 

 

 

[ProDave]

Before sitting through that, I would need someone to give me a simple and succinct summary of what wonderful benefits I can look forward to if I were to fit such a thing.

[SteamyTea]

@ProDave

Well you know how plumbers like to hide all the controls out of site.

This allows the same when you loose your phone, or the service is discontinued.

Edited March 9, 2021 by SteamyTea

[Gav_P]

57 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Before sitting through that, I would need someone to give me a simple and succinct summary of what wonderful benefits I can look forward to if I were to fit such a thing.

Much the same control as fitting a time switch, plus you can vary the temp. It provides  you with the actual temp of the water.  The “smart” feature, is that it ‘learns’ your hot water demands and can adjust accordingly. 

You can do it from an app on your phone. Plus you can have multiple units controlled in the one app. I guess that may be attractive to landlords? Monitoring multiple homes and water usage? 
 

Edited March 9, 2021 by Gav_P

[TonyT]

But a standard dumb immersion heater learns demands too- when hot water is used, its replaced with cold water and the thermostat activates and heats water via element.

 

I fail to understand the obsession with apps for every day items.

[SteamyTea]

19 minutes ago, TonyT said:

 

I fail to understand the obsession with apps for every day items

Me to. And the service can be cancelled at any time.

 

With stored energy, reducing parasitic losses is the name of the game.

I just boxed in my cylinder with Celotex sheets and mineral wool. Cheap and easy.

Edited March 9, 2021 by SteamyTea

[TerryE]

31 minutes ago, TonyT said:

I fail to understand the obsession with apps for every day items.

 

IMO, never use an external vendors web service to control any internal infrastructure devices.

[Gav_P]

1 hour ago, TonyT said:

I fail to understand the obsession with apps for every day items.

I think it’s just the natural progression of society and tech. We are becoming or have become a instant gratification society and want everything at our finger tips instantly with an intuitive interface, possibly with complete automation or some form of AI. 

[jfb]

5 minutes ago, Gav_P said:

We are becoming or have become a instant gratification society and want everything at our finger tips instantly with an intuitive interface, possibly with complete automation or some form of AI. 

Speak for yourself!

I shall resist all such change. I'm with those above who are skeptical of the benefits of such things. I mean I can't even understand why anyone would want google or amazon or whoever having a permanent audio/video feed from various parts of my home.

[AliG]

My wife and daughter were very against having Alexas in the house.

 

Once we started to use them we ended up with more and more of them. We have 7 now.

 

If anyone really cared what was said in our house they would no doubt bug it or tap into our phone calls and messages. I am not worried.

 

Pretty much everything you do on the internet is already tracked.

 

I do agree though, I don't need a mart immersion heater, oven or dishwasher.

 

The only useful thing I can think of is that we do have Heatmiser which means you can turn off the hot water when you go on holiday and turn it back on so it is warm for a shower as soon as you get home.

Edited March 9, 2021 by AliG

[TonyT]

I enjoy technology, just don’t want everything in the house to act like an EMP has wiped everything when the WiFi goes down!

 

[jfb]

3 minutes ago, AliG said:

Pretty much everything you do on the internet is already tracked.

Too true.

But why does it follow that we should accept being tracked in every other sphere of life?

[AliG]

8 minutes ago, jfb said:

Too true.

But why does it follow that we should accept being tracked in every other sphere of life?

Fair, although they aren't supposed to be listening all the time. They'd be sick of hearing about Meghan and Harry if they are!

 

I cannot believe how useful we find them though.

 

We have various ones with screens as well as the one with a clock/timer and just plain ones.

 

I thought the screens would be more useful, but those ones drive me crazy as they have worse microphones than the other ones. We have moved them next to beds as they are more likely to hear you.

 

In the kitchen it is used constantly for timers, reminders, weight conversions and music. It gets used multiple times every day. Try doing a weight conversion from cups to mils when your hands are dirty.

 

In the bedrooms they are used as glorified alarm clocks and to turn the lights off and on without putting in an extra switch next to the beds.

 

In the cinema room I have connected it to my Harmony remote and we can use it to turn the screen off and on and pause as well as turn the lights off and on.

 

In the gym we use it for music and to set timers.

 

They can turn the lights off and on and playing music in most of the house.

 

Other unexpected uses include answering random general knowledge questions, like if you cannot remember someone's age. It is quite variable as to whether you get an answer. One of my favourites is adding up long lists of numbers. You are almost certain to mistype one on a calculator/phone. Also things like how many days until Easter. What I find is the more you just see if it can do something and it can the more useful it becomes.

 

Oh and we use them as an internal intercom system.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 9, 2021 by AliG

[SteamyTea]

18 hours ago, AliG said:

Try doing a weight conversion from cups to mils

Why not just stick to one or the others.

A set of measuring cups is a quid.

Does Alexas warn if you are over eating? 

[SteamyTea]

There is a radio program about AI on at the moment.

Klara and the sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Probably going to end badly.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000sy2h

[TerryE]

I don't have any issue with IoT integration. I do a lot of this in my Home Automation setup; I just don'y use any cloud services here.  My concern is the additional security and 3rd party service DoS vulnerabilities using cloud services for critical internal services.  I use OK Google a lot to save typing, but its no great loss if it doesn't work; the same could be said for Alexa -- so long as I have a mobile app connecting to a local LAN based service such as Home Assistant.  I don't want my lights or heating to stop working if the Internet is down, or if some vendor decides to retire support for some 4 year old devices.

[TerryE]

As an example of this sort of vulnerability:

 

[Adsibob]

On 09/03/2021 at 17:55, AliG said:

Fair, although they aren't supposed to be listening all the time. They'd be sick of hearing about Meghan and Harry if they are!

 

I cannot believe how useful we find them though.

 

We have various ones with screens as well as the one with a clock/timer and just plain ones.

 

I thought the screens would be more useful, but those ones drive me crazy as they have worse microphones than the other ones. We have moved them next to beds as they are more likely to hear you.

 

In the kitchen it is used constantly for timers, reminders, weight conversions and music. It gets used multiple times every day. Try doing a weight conversion from cups to mils when your hands are dirty.

 

In the bedrooms they are used as glorified alarm clocks and to turn the lights off and on without putting in an extra switch next to the beds.

 

In the cinema room I have connected it to my Harmony remote and we can use it to turn the screen off and on and pause as well as turn the lights off and on.

 

In the gym we use it for music and to set timers.

 

They can turn the lights off and on and playing music in most of the house.

 

Other unexpected uses include answering random general knowledge questions, like if you cannot remember someone's age. It is quite variable as to whether you get an answer. One of my favourites is adding up long lists of numbers. You are almost certain to mistype one on a calculator/phone. Also things like how many days until Easter. What I find is the more you just see if it can do something and it can the more useful it becomes.

 

Oh and we use them as an internal intercom system.

 

 

 

 

+1 for Alexa. I also use it to call my wife when I'm out and I know she is in but won't hear her phone. We don't have a landline, but I can just "drop in" to the Alexa. Also useful for weather forecasts, telling the time (in any city), setting reminders, adding to my Ocado shop, checking my diary. It really is a personal assistant.

[Adsibob]

On 10/03/2021 at 12:18, SteamyTea said:

A set of measuring cups is a quid.

Does Alexas warn if you are over eating? 

No, but neither do the measuring cups.

[SuperJohnG]

On 09/03/2021 at 16:09, TonyT said:

 

I fail to understand the obsession with apps for every day items

Amen. 

 

The bloody toothbrushes with Bluetooth blows my mind. 

[martinwinlow]

I find myself here looking for an immersion heater that can be accessed via the internet for the simple intention of turning it on when my renewables are exporting to the grid thereby allowing *me* to use the energy rather than the grid pay me 1/10th of what its electricity costs *me*...  I appreciate the MyEnergi Eddie (probs others too) does this but it's quite a complex and expensive bit of kit for what is a very simple situation.  Ideally the device I'm looking for would have an internet-linked sensor that detects exported energy and would then command the immersion element to turn on...

As for the original post, the one (potentially) significant advantage of the Tsmart device is that you could turn off your HW when you go away on hols via the app, but more importantly, turn it on again when you are a couple of hours away from home so you have a tank full of HW without having left it on all the time you were away... It would also allow those of us keen to minimise our energy use to understand better where the energy is going and when so it could be better managed... but that's about it!

[ProDave]

10 minutes ago, martinwinlow said:

I find myself here looking for an immersion heater that can be accessed via the internet for the simple intention of turning it on when my renewables are exporting to the grid thereby allowing *me* to use the energy rather than the grid pay me 1/10th of what its electricity costs *me*...  I appreciate the MyEnergi Eddie (probs others too) does this but it's quite a complex and expensive bit of kit for what is a very simple situation.  Ideally the device I'm looking for would have an internet-linked sensor that detects exported energy and would then command the immersion element to turn on..

What you describe is one of the many "PV diverters" not an internet linked switch.

 

These diverters will send anything from a few watts to 3kW to the heater depending on how much surplus there is.  Your simple internet switch idea would be fully on or fully off, so what do you do?  Only turn it on when there is 3kW surplus?  Or turn it on when there is say 1kW surplus and then 2kW will be imported.  A very inefficient solution.

[Radian]

"[Eddi] it's quite a complex and expensive bit of kit for what is a very simple situation"

"the device I'm looking for would have an internet-linked sensor that detects exported energy and would then command the immersion element to turn on"

 

Agreed the Eddi is overpriced by a significant margin but it's providing no more functionality than what you're asking for. You're underestimating what you would actually need to make the savings you're after.

[martinwinlow]

1 hour ago, ProDave said:

What you describe is one of the many "PV diverters" not an internet linked switch.

 

These diverters will send anything from a few watts to 3kW to the heater depending on how much surplus there is.  Your simple internet switch idea would be fully on or fully off, so what do you do?  Only turn it on when there is 3kW surplus?  Or turn it on when there is say 1kW surplus and then 2kW will be imported.  A very inefficient solution.

Well, true but not if you have 3kW or more of export... any less and I'd just stick in a battery.  I'm specifically looking for a very simple internet-based (to avoid having to wire stuff together which my be very difficult/expensive to do - particularly if your renewables are a mile away!) system that really is either on or off...  I assumed these 'diverters' use some sort of 'power-transforming' system to get around the issue of not having enough power to use a basic immersion element directly (a bit like an MPPT?), hence (no doubt) their high cost... I'm just genning up on them now but, as I say, they are not really what I'm looking for.

[dpmiller]

how often will you actually have a full 3kW going spare?