OWL start charging a subscription

[ProDave]

OWL, the people that make energy monitors and smart heating controls have anounced they will start charging a subscription for the continued use of their products from 2018

 

I can't see an official anouncement, just hearsay on a forum at the moment.

 

I wonder who will be next?

[SteamyTea]

That is a good thing, it will encourage the open source movement to create a better system.

[ProDave]

I was thinking it will encourage people to just stick to conventional controls.

 

 

[SteamyTea]

It should not be too hard to create something that is suitable and accessible from a phone.

There is a lot to be said for basic controls though.

My Mother has a new heating system and she forget to take the thermostat with her when she changes room.

[ProDave]

I am a bit of an old stick in the mud. I don't see much wrong with conventional controls. I have never felt the need to turn my heating on and off remotely (and even less so in the new house that uses so little heat)

 

I once asked someone exactly why they wanted to do this. The slightly sarcastic reply went something like

 

"It allows someone with the latest phone on an expensive monthly contract, to buy the latest expensive control system, so that when the train home from their long commute to their well paid job is late, they can turn the heating off to save a few pounds of gas."

[SteamyTea]

Good reply.  Said something similar about a water softener to make the coffee taste better.

I could have done with a way to turn my heating on when I got back from Canada, I just used the fan heater instead.

 

I do like the idea of monitoring though, and to be able to access that data when the urge to play with a spreadsheet takes over would be nice.  Thing is, I use my phone for all my interwb connectivity, so would have to get another phone or reconnect the landline.  The cost of that would be add 50% to my 'energy bill'.

[Jeremy Harris]

I've long thought it was barking mad to rely on an uncertain technology, reliant on one or more third parties , to run critical functionality in your home.  Anything in a house has to have a supported design life of decades, and that just doesn't fit with things like smart phones that change every year.

 

 

As for water softeners and coffee machines, it's all a bit fraught.  All ion exchange filters, be they salt renewable or "salt free" rely on replacing calcium ions with sodium , or sometimes potassium, ions.  In fact, the ion exchange resin used in the expensive (Brita, Pozzani etc) replaceable commercial units can be regenerated with brine, in exactly the same way as the non-replaceable softness, by the simple expedient of flushing them through with brine and rinsing them out, when the cartridges will be as good as new.  Brita, Pzzani etc are careful not to reveal this basic truth, and AFAICS, they don't mention that their replaceable ion exchange columns replace calcium with sodium, just like  salt water softener.

 

The alternatives are to use potassium chloride as the ion exchange agent, which replaces calcium ions with potassium ions.  More expensive to run, and as far as I know, there is no hard and fast evidence that it's in any way healthier, or makes coffee taste better,

 

Finally, there are two other demonstrably effective systems.  The first is phosphate dosing.  This prevents scaling, but doesn't remove any calcium ions and I have doubts as to whether it makes better coffee. 

 

The creme de la creme has to be to use  a combination of a reverse osmosis unit to remove just about everything from the water, then dose the output with a balanced mineral supplement to get a near-perfect form of water for making coffee.   Not cheap, and expensive to run, but for the fanatics it's probably the best solution.

[SteamyTea]

I still think it about time that 'we' created a nationwide wireless mesh network.  It may not, with current technology, be fast enough for video or a fraught teenage girl updating instafacetwit, but could be useful for sending simple and small data messages like energy readings.

Just how hard can it be to rig up a Pi ZeroWs into a mesh and pop them in the car (we are usually not far from a car or several).

Accessing could be via Bluetooth, that is also built in.

One thing a network like that would do is force people to start thinking about bandwidth again.  I went to a website the other day and there was a massive 250mb video on the opening page.  The page would not even start until it had all downloaded.  How stupid is that.

[Mackers]

Look up the Bluetooth wireless mesh, just upgraded to 50m. Maybe in a city it would be useful to create the mesh.

 

JSHarris, whst about the coconut husk filters for water?

[dpmiller]

I acquired a Brita tap a couple of years back, to supply filtered water to the bean-to-cup. It came without any Brita gubbins- which suited fine as I didn't want tied into a specific cartridge.

Our water here (and in most of NI) is pretty soft but does drop a clayish particulate out forming a thin hard scale in autoclaves and blocking the sediment filters in the lab RO systems for example. So I'm running through a 5u PP sediment filter and a CTO which cleans it up without making it too "pure".

[Jeremy Harris]

9 hours ago, Mackers said:

JSHarris, whst about the coconut husk filters for water?

 

Do you mean the activated charcoal filters made from coconut husk?  If so,then they remove organic contaminants reasonably well, and improve the taste and smell of the water.  In block form they can also filter down to around 10µ or so, will tend to polish the water a bit.  Activated carbon granule filters don't really have the filtration capability but are just as effective at removing organic contaminants and making the water taste better.

 

The original Brita jug filters were nothing more than activated carbon granule filters.  Not sure where the carbon came from, but it was pretty fine, finer than the compressed coconunt husk derived granules that are often sold in bulk for pond water treatment, but which can be put into refillable water cartridges and used for tap water treatment (you can buy refillable inserts for standard and jumbo filter housings).

 

52 minutes ago, dpmiller said:

I acquired a Brita tap a couple of years back, to supply filtered water to the bean-to-cup. It came without any Brita gubbins- which suited fine as I didn't want tied into a specific cartridge.

Our water here (and in most of NI) is pretty soft but does drop a clayish particulate out forming a thin hard scale in autoclaves and blocking the sediment filters in the lab RO systems for example. So I'm running through a 5u PP sediment filter and a CTO which cleans it up without making it too "pure".

 

I have a similar set up, a jumbo carbon block filter that both removes any residual stuff from the water and filters to around 10µ plus a pleated jumbo filter that filters to 5µ.  It's probably complete overkill, but is a hang over from before I fitted the ozone injection system, when we still had a very slight trace of hydrogen sulphide in the water.  The carbon block filter was OK at removing very low concentrations of hydrogen sulphide, but not effective as the only means of removing it from our raw incoming supply.

 

If anyone wants to soften just their water for making tea or coffee, then Brita do a range of commercial ion exchange filters, at a price.  Those concerned about using water softened by ion exchange (these things are like water softeners, they just use pre-charged ion exchange resin) then they should be equally concerned about these filters, as they do as their name suggests, and exchange calcium ions in the incoming water for sodium (or perhaps potassium) ions.  They are also expensive to run, as a replacement filter cartridge is costly, and there's no good reason that I can see that the ion exchange resin in the old cartridge cannot just be regenerated for a fraction of the cost.  I have a feeling that they are sold as a sort of premium product for the coffee industry, who probably don't realise that an ordinary ion exchange softener would do the same job for a much lower running cost................

Edited November 15, 2017 by JSHarris

[SteamyTea]

23 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

premium product for the coffee industry

But they don't care, they charge £2.40 a cup (half that in Canada).

I did notice that the water was over chlorinated when I was away.  Not something that I have noticed in Cornwall or in Bucks, though the water in Bucks is so hard it comes out in lumps.

I don't know why this was as the geology in NS is pretty similar to home.

[Jeremy Harris]

17 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

But they don't care, they charge £2.40 a cup (half that in Canada).

I did notice that the water was over chlorinated when I was away.  Not something that I have noticed in Cornwall or in Bucks, though the water in Bucks is so hard it comes out in lumps.

I don't know why this was as the geology in NS is pretty similar to home.

 

I think it's a general North American thing, to over chlorinate city supplies.  I noticed it a fair bit all over Canada and the USA, and think a lot of it has to do with the custom of keeping large closed tank reservoirs of clear water, then treating it just before it enters the distribution system.  The residual chlorine levels always seem to be on the high side, and I know that there are growing concerns in the US that the resultant chloramine content of city water may well be harmful (chloramines being breakdown products from chlorination).  Rather than change the system, some places are switching to ozone treatment, as a way around the problem.  Ozone breaks down to oxygen, leaving no harmful break down products, but it only has a short life, so doesn't work as well as chlorine in keeping water in dead leg pipes disinfected.  The flip side is that ozone is very roughly 2500 times more effective than chlorine at killing all bugs, so the water downstream of any ozone disinfected system should stay disinfected, unless it somehow gets contaminated (by road works, for example).

[SteamyTea]

Gone off topic on this one a bit, Sorry Dave.