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 electricity than all my lights use for a month”.
I have an inverter and solar panels in my place (very common now in South Africa middle class homes due to unreliable electricity producer) and I can see a full history of electricity usage.
It’s easy for me to see where I can improve my efficiency or why my consumption was so high.
It’s still only an overall figure though, so you have to do an informed assumption as to what caused the consumption.
For example it’s obvious that the 3kw draw for about an hour or so after I shower is the geyser heating itself back up. I can see from the usage stats that my battery was depleted from the night, that the solar production is still low due to my showering in the early morning and that the energy was thus coming from the grid (the inverter records all these figures).
It is then obvious that I can very simply save money on electricity by putting a timer on my geyser so that it only heats after 10am or so, once the sun is high enough for solar production to cover the energy usage.
Now I just wish I had something as convenient for monitoring water consumption.
I agree fully, I believe that my Home Assistant energy dashboard has done more for our energy consumption than any other measure.
If you’re in the Netherland you can get something like a “slimme lezer”, plug it into the p1 port of your energy meter and it will pop up in Home Assistant with the right sensors.
The energy dashboard will give an overview of your gas and electricity usage, solar production, proportion used from grid/solar and even a home battery if present. It’s really great.
Combine it with some Aqara (zigbee but easily overloaded) or Shelly (WiFi and I find them very robust) energy monitoring power sockets and you get a very good idea of the simplest measures to take to save power. You can even add cost/kWh and M3 (gas) to the sensors in HA.
I have the same setup. I used it to make a green light go on when we have more than 500 watt excess solar production, so my wife knows she can turn on the washing machine for free.
Makes sense since you're in the netherlands, euro appliances generally get fed cold water and warm it internally, the 2kW peaks would be when it needs to warm up the cold water.
The dryer has to warm air up pretty continuously to dry the contents. At 500W I assume it's a heat pump? (IIRC condensers are usually around or above 1kW)
Ah yes, the dish and laundry washers are indeed not “hot fill”, that is hard to find here indeed.
The dryer is a heat pump yes, some years ago it was the most energy efficient one we could find. (But I guess it runs longer, relying more on tumbling than heat, and wears out cloth faster).
I always wondered why we cannot find hot filled appliances in the old continent.
Also, I wonder why compressors in heatpumps are not multi-speed (basically energy consumption can be modulated). If you are an expert please let me know I'd love to talk more.
> 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 requirement, a normal electric plug is more than sufficient in the land of 230V, this is is a similar issue to kettles basically
- they require an internal heater anyway as residential water circuits come nowhere near the high temperature cycles: 50-53C is common to avoid risks of scalding but some are set as low as 45, the standard high temp cycles for washing machines are 60 and 90, and dishwasher commonly have a heavy cycle around 65
- it makes the machines more convoluted since they needs more inlets, a mixing valve, etc...
- they're not really compatible with hot water tanks: you don't want your dishes or laundry to empty your shower water, plus hot water tanks are commonly electrical so there's no real gain given per the above the machines need a heater anyway
Also, in quite a few houses, the initial run of water out of the hot tap is cold for quite some time until the hot water has either made it round from the hot tank, or if you have a combi boiler system then after that has fired itself up, got up to temperature, and then the hot water has made it round the pipes from there. It may be that the washing machine uses so little water that most of the water it gets from the hot supply is cold, wasting all that energy.
For me indeed it takes >30 sec to get hot water in the kitchen (modern kitchens have small boilers), but the washers are near the boiler, so hot fill would be more efficient. The boiler supplies 60 deg C water though, so that is not enough for the 90 deg C program for example. And then you need a heating element anyway...
These days most washing cycles run a lot cooler. My washing powder/soap recommends 30 but I usually run at 40. I know that I need to do the occasional high temp wash too though.
Dehumidify method is an often missed part for dryer. On heat pump system, it's done by the other end of heat pump. On heater system, it's done by exhausting hot moisty air or use cold water for dehumidify. I don't know what method is used for average dryer in each country.
For most people, running a 240-volt circuit requires an (expensive) electrician. In some cases, it requires drywall work. And maybe a utility service upgrade.
American homes already have 240V circuits for large electric appliances and electric water heaters. If you want to convert one of those from gas to electric or just want an extra appliance for some reason, sure it’s going to be more expensive than just plugging it into the wall but you’re also buying a fairly large, expensive extra appliance. And many of those appliances need work done anyway: water heaters, dishwashers, and washing machines need plumbing, gas appliances need gas lines, dryers need dryer vent ducts, and ranges need range hoods which ideally also require ductwork.
Besides, it’s not like European homes actually have more heavy appliances than American homes. Americans are much more likely to own clothes dryers, despite the fact that Europeans could easily just plug one into any normal outlet.
The odds a random US plug will be 240v is essentially zero, unless you’re standing next to an electric range/stove/dryer. And those plugs typically have one outlet and it’s already in use.
Unless the prior owner was a welder anyway. Then you might have a few in the garage.
Maybe I should make the obvious reason more explicit. If you have something designed to operate on 120V and plug it into a 240V outlet, there will be safety issues. It might even catch on fire. So the two voltages have to use different outlet and plug shapes for safety reasons. An outlet is not “randomly” going to be one voltage or the other because that would be a terrible idea.
And yes, the 240V outlets are set up for heavy appliances rather than small countertop appliances. Remember, we were talking about washing machines and dishwashers, and the claim that European appliances don’t need to consume hot water because they have 230V circuits. American appliances have 240V circuits and they still consume hot water so that’s not a satisfying explanation.
It’s true that Americans don’t plug electric kettles into a 240V plug. There are a few reasons for that:
* Americans generally prefer coffee to tea. So the tea kettle is usually a lower priority in an American household compared to a British one.
* Stovetop tea kettles and microwaves are both perfectly fine at boiling water. Are they as optimal? Maybe not but it’s not a priority. (Microwaves might be just as fast actually.)
* Electric kettles work totally fine on a 120V circuit anyway. I have one. Is it as fast as it would be on a 240V circuit? No, but it’s not a priority. We probably make up the time difference by having faster dishwashers and washing machines that consume hot water in addition to using 240V power.
Upon inspection, the American Breville kettles are 1/2 the wattage with a 1 liter boil time of 4 minutes at 1500 watts.
The UK versions from the same brand are 3000 watts, but only reduces the boil time by 1 minute.
I'm not sure about efficiency one way or the other, but it's interesting to note that double the power does not yield one half boil time.
Additionally, at this elevation I would estimate my morning coffee, Americano (Italian coffee that requires boiled water), takes less time to make than it would at higher wattage at sea level. I'm only guessing.
I think it comes down to practicality more than either culture's love of tea or coffee.
> I think it comes down to practicality more than either culture's love of tea or coffee.
Yeah, come to think of it a coffee machine is solving a very similar problem to an electric kettle. Whats more, I’ve even used a drip coffee maker as a makeshift electric kettle before. So that was just a dumb argument on my part. Thanks for bailing me out with actual data on the diminishing returns of dumping more power into an electric kettle!
Could this be due to American washers being bigger? I don’t see why American washers would be designed to use more water if less water technology exists.
If water consumption isn't something the customer or government cares about, then the customer will choose on other metrics. Americans aren't generally going to buy a European washing machine that takes an hour longer to clean their clothes.
Europeans are going to look at the energy efficiency sticker that by law must be displayed with the machine, either out of altruism, to reduce the running cost, or because the machine with A must be better than the one with G. See the coloured symbols on [1] and the more detailed information if you click one, showing capacity, water use per cycle and typical annual electricity use.
Walmart's site [2] doesn't show this information anywhere.
Walmart does not sell washers, those are all resellers using the Walmart website as a platform, and almost no on would buy an appliance there.
All the energy usage and other details would be on the website of a retailer that actually sells appliances, like Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy/Costco/etc.
> A modern European washing machine uses 30-50 litres per wash, vs 75-100 for a modern American one.
Maybe we just have bigger washing machines? You need to control for washer capacity to make a fair comparison here. If you need to do twice as many loads of laundry because you can only fit half as much laundry in each load, you’ve gained nothing. And it’s not like having a bigger washing machine requires every load of laundry to use the full water capacity of the machine even if you only do small loads. On older machines you can set a dial for load size while newer ones have sensors for that.
Uh, you might want to reconsider who you’re talking to. I’ve run 40 amp 240v split phase and 3 phase in North America (permitted) for personal projects. I’m well aware.
No one installs L30R/L6-30R receptacles in the US for ‘normal’ (as in used by a human for random stuff) use as standard practice, because yes - most of the time no one needs it. Maximum power for a normal 120/20 amp branch circuit is 2.4kw, and that’s 7.2kw. The most I’ve ever actually had a use for in a residential building was 50 amp @ 240v (arc gouging), but I did setup 50 amp @ 480v for a massive CNC milling machine once.
And when someone does, it’s a special case.
Most of Europe and Asia, they have receptacles that can handle that kind of load. And many other wiring changes.
But they also don’t really use them to capacity very often either.
But it is convenient to be able to run a decent welder off a normal house outlet in Germany or Singapore if you want.
"Normal" high power portable devices in Europe are 2-3kW electric heaters (generally an expensive way to heat a house, but OK if you're heating a single room) and older and less efficient vacuum cleaners (2kW).
Maybe also a very high spec gaming PC, which here could run (monitors and all) from a single outlet. Would tripping the breaker have been a concern at a 2000s LAN party in the USA? I have no idea.
In some countries it's common to have a 400V (3 phase) socket in the garage. Excellent for car charging, but that is also OK from 230V. That is probably by far the biggest current benefit of 230V everywhere. Charge the car at a decent speed at that holiday cottage in the mountains.
> Uh, you might want to reconsider who you’re talking to. I’ve run 40 amp 240v split phase and 3 phase in North America (permitted) for personal projects. I’m well aware.
Sorry about that, but I’m not sure how you expected me to know that about you or why we’re arguing about tea kettles. I think I inferred more disagreement from context than we actually have. Do we actually disagree about anything here or are we all good? At the very least I think we’re on the same page about washing machines, which was the original point of contention here.
And yes, the point about welding is a good one; higher voltage standards are a lot more convenient for that.
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.
> 50-53C is common to avoid risks of scalding but some are set as low as 45
Wait what, isn't the minimum temperature where Legionella will die around 60°C? Are you talking of a country where they (noticeably) chlorinate the water? I thought that was very uncommon, except for Southern Spain and Italy. If you set your boiler to 45°C in a country with (nearly) unchlorinated water you'll have a nice Legionella culture after your 3 week vacation.
My water tank and hot tub had "self-cleaning" cycle that would heat up and circulate water to prevent bacteria buildup regardless of what temperature it was set to.
Oh yes, what's up with that anyway? I recently noticed laundry detergent companies making some magic "wash in 20 degrees Celsius" product, and heavily advertising it on the grounds of energy savings. I wonder how that works. I'm not sure my washing machine can even go as low as 20 degrees.
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...
From the US perspective, I have trouble understanding most of these.
> - 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
Don't you need hot lines almost everywhere anyway? Every sink, bath, and shower has both cold and hot lines. So you're simply running two extra hots...one for the washer, one for the dishwasher. But usually dishwasher supply is run off the kitchen sink supply, so the "extra" hot line is just a couple feet. Actually, there's no cold line at all to our dishwashers, only the hot, come to think of it. So there's zero extra piping for the dishwasher in the US, and yes, one extra run for the washer.
> - 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
As other comments mentioned, the US does have 220V plugs for heavy appliances. It's already standard to have 220 in the laundry room and kitchen anyway - the dryer and oven use them. So this doesn't seem to explain the difference. It would be very easy run a 220 to your washer in the US, you'd need maybe two feet of cable and an outlet. Indeed, I don't know if it's code or not, but a lot of laundry rooms especially probably have the 120 outlet the washer uses actually wired up with four conductor cable, with the extra hot unused, because the cable for the dryer is right there next to it and why run the three conductor cable from elsewhere, when it's easier to use the four conductor. So they could literally just pop in the 220 outlet and be done with zero extra work instead, if washers were on 220.
> - they require an internal heater anyway as residential water circuits come nowhere near the high temperature cycles: 50-53C is common to avoid risks of scalding but some are set as low as 45, the standard high temp cycles for washing machines are 60 and 90, and dishwasher commonly have a heavy cycle around 65.
This is incorrect. My washer doesn't have any heating element. The dishwasher does to superheat the water, since at the maximum settings it boils water. (The steam cycle.) The thermistor is set during normal non-steam operation to run at around 130F/54C, which is the temperature of my water heater heater supply, but it's true that inlet temp is not guaranteed; different people will have different settings and the pipe run entails some heat loss. Plus it does need the heating element for the dry cycle.
> - it makes the machines more convoluted since they needs more inlets, a mixing valve, etc...
Dishwashers only have one inlet in the US. It's true that the washer has two, but it's not much more complexity. At least on mine, it just opens both valves at the same time, there is no "mixing valve." If you select hot it only opens the hot valve, warm opens both, and cold opens only the cold.
> - they're not really compatible with hot water tanks: you don't want your dishes or laundry to empty your shower water,
How are they "not really compatible" when it's bog standard? Your dishwasher uses a pretty minimal amount of water (mine fills with 1 gallon.) Washing machines use ~10-20 gallons. The standard hot water tank in the US is 50+ gallons. People do sometimes run out of hot water, but it's not from running the dishwasher at the same time.
It isn't code to run 120V receptacles off of a 240V circuit. That's a recipe for a fire that your insurer will not cover. You can do a shared neutral to two 120V loads in limited circumstances.
It doesn’t surprise me that it’s not code but it’s common and I’ve never heard of an insurer doing anything at all to verify your electrical isn’t a total disaster.
Either way GPs point that the lack of 240 stopped / stops US washers from having water heaters is unfounded. There’s almost always a cable with 240 not two feet away.
Another thing I didn’t think about is that a lot of people (not me) have sinks in their laundry rooms, so there’s also cold and hot run there anyway. I wonder if some Europeans aren’t running hot to all their sinks.
edit: I’m not sure it is against code? When I google it it seems to be fairly common advice and allowed under NEC.
Actually I thought of a case where this is just not just common but practically universal: welll pumps. Basically all the pumps are 240, and a 120 receptacle or light is almost always installed off the same (240) circuit.
There are 120VAC units in the U.S., but there are also 240VAC units in the U.S. You just have to get the right unit for your available power, or have the appropriate power run for your unit.
My dishwasher is European and is hot-fill. It doesn’t even have a cold water connection. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cold fill dishwasher in the US.
I personally hate dishwashers that don't heat up their water. I've been to multiple places where "hot water" stats being hot only after 5-10 minutes. It greatly reduced dishwasher efficiency.
A little while ago I've thought of just getting a few people together and filling a small container with washers that for regulatory reasons are better in the US than in Europe (I forgot the exact details, sorry).
If you happen to have ideas for how to do such a group-buy, please let me know.
The colder cycles will not work correctly (they have only one inlet and no mixing circuit), they might scale more than normally, and I wouldn't be surprised if some put themselves into a security mode.
The plastics used for some of the inlet circuitry might also age abnormally when it gets 50C water rather than the, say, 10~30C range it is designed for.
> If you’re in the Netherland you can get something like a “slimme lezer”, plug it into the p1 port of your energy meter and it will pop up in Home Assistant with the right sensors.
If only the meters had ny power nearby or offered a 5V USB port on it so you could plug in your reader and forget it. But no. Now I'd have to keep a small Li-ion battery living in -20C since the meters are typically outside and there is never any power nearby since they are in a closed cabinet. Only the people who have indoor power meters (I know zero cases of that with detached houses, I think the power companies require the meter to be outside in a cabinet they can access without access to the house.
I have no frame of reference but I have a feeling here (usa) it's super illegal to "tamper" with any pub utilities infrastructure. Could be wrong, though, but no usb ports.
That's really cool though I wish we could do that.
This is not utility infrastructure. It’s a submeter connected to a set of current transformers.
In general in the US, for commercial buildings, everything beyond the utility transformer secondary is the responsibility of the customer. For a residence, anything beyond the meter socket is the responsibility of the customer.
I’m unfamiliar with UK utility standards though so perhaps it’s different there.
The linked example only monitors one circuit, but you could buy a submeter than can monitor multiple current transformers/multiple circuits.
The utility meter is supplied by the utility and used to bill you, an optional submeter is just for your own monitoring and tracking of electrical use.
At least in the netherlands and belgium, the meter is from the utility company, but comes with a public serial port (the so called P1 port) to read the data for smart home purposes.
No doubt about the tampering comment. However, my gas, water, and electric meters are all wireless and now I want to be able to monitor them for on demand usage. We shall see.
I have a friend that is diabetic (a number of friends, actually).
He has been doing a pretty lousy job of managing his diet.
Until his doctor prescribed a monitor for a few weeks.
This is a device that looks like a big Band-Aid that you put on your arm, inserting a fine needle under the skin, and communicates with an app on the phone, reporting things like glucose levels.
Once he realized the effects of the foods he was eating, he immediately changed his diet, and has been sticking to it, since (he no longer wears the monitor).
The UI of the app was pretty good. The historical data readout is what did it for him.
I think even people who don’t have diabetes could benefit from this. Would having access to my own glucose levels throughout the day give me some insights into how what I eat influences my own mood, energy levels etc?
Might, but as a non-diabetic your body self-regulate, so you'd usually see a large increase in blood sugars followed by a large drop as insulin blood levels increase and trigger its handling.
And because the sensor needle goes through the skin it must be replaced pretty regularly, and if it's not covered by insurance it's not exactly free (the link from the sibling indicates £57, that's per fortnight).
My diabetic colleague was super happy when they got one though, the "beep" of their checking their BAC is pretty funny and it's definitely more comfortable and sanitary than having to prick their finger every time, plus the full history view is useful as point check means there are dark holes between checks and you might not see some of the opportunities for improvements.
> because the sensor needle goes through the skin it must be replaced pretty regularly
I am an MRI radiographer and get patients to take these off for their scans.
According to the link below [1] they are good for 7 days. They aren’t cheap and removing them does cause some friction so I try tie the MRI scan up with a pending monitor change and quiz diabetic patients about them at booking.
Some have gone into the scanner by accident (patients not declaring them) and they seem to survive but I emphasise that the results might not be accurate afterwards.
You absolutely can, but having a needle in you 24/7 isn't the most convenient thing, not to mention the cost when it's not covered by your health plan.
There's one theory which is that the most effective form of weight loss might be simply to always keep blood sugar below a certain level. Still just a theory, though.
It's possible that sometime in the next decade the Apple Watch might be able to monitor glucose levels non-invasively. However, it's extremely difficult technologically, so it's not clear Apple will succeed. (They seem to be working on it though.)
The biggest benefit by far in my opinion is having the opportunity to learn how to listen to one's body again. Most of us aren't very good at recognizing the signals our bodies are sending us, from low blood sugar to adrenaline. Real-time monitors can really help people listen what those more subtle feelings might mean.
You might be interested to look into a calorie tracking app / cronometer. It's a bit of a slog as you need to (somewhat) accurately input your food intake, but even a week or so is enough to gain insight into your dietary habits (caloric intake, nutrients, vitamins, minerals).
There are non-medical versions of CGMs that are available from a wide variety of companies, primarily for those who are interested in monitoring their sports performance.
Technically, you still have to get a prescription to buy them, but the companies help you with that by connecting you to online doctors for the prescription. Oh, and they tend to cost more than if you had a medical CGM prescribed for you by your endocrinologist. I guess that's why they're so profitable for the companies selling them.
This company is offering it as a service https://www.limborevolution.com/, it's expensive though. I haven't used it but the owner has had a few success. Shaq is also an investor.
It'd be cool to give something like that a try, but I love that we have so much technology to monitor our bodies but I'd never use anything if it required a cell phone app since you'd have to worry about who else is collected/selling that data. We need more devices that work entirely offline, but they're hard to find because companies know they can make so much more money by collecting/selling your personal data and pushing ads
I don’t mean to minimize your concerns, and you should live your life as you see fit, but since you put this out there as a comment for others to reflect on - from my perspective your feelings are like paranoia or compulsion.
To me, my glucose number is completely impersonal. I wouldn’t care who knew this or not, it has little to do with my personhood, not to mention it moves so fast that no one can infer anything timely. And it’s the same range for all humans.
I’m also not saying that corporations should sell it!
It’s a bit like the fear of getting robbed. We all have the right to walk down the street safely, and if someone robs us, then that’s the bad guy (no victim blaming). But if the fear of getting robbed on each corner prevents you from trying stuff in life that you are interested in, and there’s very little chance a you will actually be robbed in any given situation, then that’s kinda like a crippling paranoia
To me, you’re like a digital prepper. You have a bunker full of canned food and guns because you think “you’re gonna wake up one day and …”
So be it. The way you live your life doesn’t negatively affect me so do what you gotta do. But maybe you don’t have to prep.
Btw, rationally speaking, those who opt into monitoring their glucose are going to be much healthier by self selection bias. Not to mention that you can use the stats to improve your condition, just like the parent comment was talking about.
I understand what you mean and I agree with you that one cannot prepare for, and shouldn't worry about, every possible future scenario. But is the scenario I'm describing really that far fetched? I'm honestly not sure.
No one can predict the future. But here’s some data we can look at.
In the US currently, you cannot be barred from buying health insurance even if you are an active smoker. And we’ve known about the dangers of smoking for a long time.
So even for these people that are actively harming themselves, we have a law that says they can do this. Now think about how far things have to move before we say “you can’t buy health insurance if you eat too much”.
> To me, my glucose number is completely impersonal. I wouldn’t care who knew this or not, it has little to do with my personhood
I'm not sure how much information a continuous glucose would reveal about you since I've never tried one. How healthy your diet is probably. Does it spike in the morning? Could it indicate when you sleep and when you wake? What other things can affect it? Sickness? Stress? Drugs/alcohol? A single reading may not tell anyone much, but I imagine that over time the patterns and sudden changes to them could reveal a lot about your life.
That kind of data might be used against you in a lot of different ways. Maybe it's higher or lower than normal often enough that it triggers some threshold and your health/life insurance company raises your rates. Maybe you get in an accident one day and the person who hit your car subpoenas those records and uses it to show that you're blood sugar was a bit low allowing them to suggest that you must have been drowsy or impaired and so the accident was your fault. Maybe companies will notice that there are certain times of the day when it changes and you're more likely to be hungry or thirsty or tired or anxious. Times when you're more vulnerable to manipulation or suggestion.
Is it paranoia when they're really out to get you? The buying and selling of the most mundane aspects of our lives is a multi-billion dollar a year industry. Almost every company you interact with today involves themselves in it in one way or another and the reason every single company is so desperate to get their hands on every scrap of data they can is because it's extremely profitable. The data they collect is already making them money hand over fist, mostly at the expense of the people whose data was taken. That data lives forever. It never goes away, and all kinds of people are looking into new ways to take advantage of us using it. Corporations, politicians, extremists, scammers, employers, lawyers, advertisers, anyone willing to pay and looking for an advantage over you.
I suppose that taking even small steps to protect myself (to the extent that it's even possible) does mean that I miss out on trying some things in life. Not allowing myself to be taken advantage of by handing over vast amounts of data isn't always fun, but until we have protections under the law that make those small concessions unnecessary is it better to just try to pretend it isn't happening and hope I don't get screwed over too badly when the data I gave up inevitably comes back to bite me in the ass later?
Usually it just means a have to work harder to find more reasonable alternatives. I still turn my lights on and off and set kitchen timers, but I don't do it with smart assistants. I have to find (and sometimes build) offline options for things like security cameras or backup solutions, and I have to search harder for things like pedometers and color changing light bulbs that aren't controlled by cell phone apps. I have to search for dumb TVs and cars.
I know that kind of effort it isn't worth it for everyone. Most people never notice when the data they give up is used against them. They don't know that the price they paid is higher than the price their neighbor paid for the extract same item. They don't know they waited longer on hold because they were pushed back so someone else who called in after them could be pushed ahead to the front of the queue. They aren't ever told why they didn't get that job or apartment they wanted. They'll never know about the products, services, or opportunities that they've been algorithmically excluded from. Most of the time it's all out of sight, out of mind. I just hope that people start paying better attention to what's happening because, like you, a lot of people feel like there's very little chance that they'll be robbed, but they're actually being robbed all the time, and it's going to get a lot worse.
Your experience also points to the limits of monitoring and subsequent behavioral change, though. I mean, yeah, it might prompt you to start your washing machine a bit earlier or a bit later to align with high production by your solar panels... but how much consumption can you really move around like that, and how many energy hogs can you just decide to not use? If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you going to start eating more salads instead? Across Europe electricity meters are being replaced by smart meters and people are really hyping up the advantages of being able to continuously monitor your energy usage, but I think the jury is still out whether it'll actually lead to significant energy savings.
Ultimately the biggest wins are when big appliances and heating/cooling respond to self-production or take advantage of times when electricity is cheap (if you're on a per-hour or per-day dynamic contract), whether that's with a simple timer like the one you installed, a relay that shuts down heating when you're cooking or something fancier like a Fronius Ohmpilot [1] that tweaks heating power to exactly match PV (over)production.
> I think the jury is still out whether it'll actually lead to significant energy savings.
In Finland you can get an electricity contract that follows the hourly spot prices. Usually the hourly prices varies in the range from 5c to 20c/kWh, but sometimes it jumps up to 40c, even 80c/kWh. The record was 2€/kWh for a couple hours in one day.
People who have chosen this kind of contract, usually reduce their consumption during the ridiculously expensive hours, which usually occur when there happens both low wind energy production, and simultaneously some power plant being offline for maintenance.
You can also get a contract with a fixed price, if you want.
There are similar retailers in Australia. They even had a insurance against these super spikes such that the customers did have some fall back security. Details I'm not sure about but check https://www.amber.com.au/how-it-works
There's been a few simple experiments in the UK - where consumers have been encouraged to reduce usage at peak time that have been successful. But as you say its going to need the appliances to support it. Everything needs a "Get this done by X o'clock" whether thats a dishwasher/washing machine/car charger.
I'm on Octopus Agile in the UK which offers pricing in 30 minute increments.
I'm lucky in that I have a small solar panel setup (3kW) and battery system (5kWh) to go with it. With this battery set-up you really don't need appliance support - most of the advantages are accrued by force-charging the batteries to avoid mains usage at the peak cost period (usually around 5pm-7pm).
I also have a few smart plugs which turn things on and off based on the current price and battery charge - using Home Assistant, but that's mainly me just nerding about. Handy when prices go negative, though and my electric immersion heater goes on to heat my hot water tank
Notably Octopus is working on taking much of the complexity away. There is now an opt-in service for certain battery makes where Octopus will take control of the battery charginng and discharging, to minimise your bill. It will even generate you money by doing a force charge and discharge when the grid is paying premium amounts
Your battery usage sounds exactly like the kind of behaviour they're trying to encourage but which aren't apparent to most people without an interest in these things so you left with the energy monitor which is really just a nice bonus to the system rather but is tangible to the lay person.
Of course the very real benefits of this can be abused by the gov and there are some conspiracy types using that to push their own agenda but on the whole I'm largely positive about the smart grid stuff.
> Of course the very real benefits of this can be abused by the gov and there are some conspiracy types using that to push their own agenda but on the whole I'm largely positive about the smart grid stuff.
There is usually a bigger of truth behind conspiracy theories. In this case there may be no reason to think the initial goal is to control what people are allowed to use energy for, but smart grid initiatives do open the door for that. The same automated systems that allow individuals to reduce their carbon footprint today could be abused to control people later.
> If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you going to start eating more salads instead?
Of course, why wouldn't you? If the assumption isn't that effectively unlimited power is available on demand you adjust use accordingly.
On sunny days with excess power maybe you charge and do laundry. On a stretch of cloudy days you avoid long periods of cooking or using large tools like sellers or air compressors.
Adjusting to our environment rather that chasing convenience is a very reasonable approach to makinh a real dent in reducing our environmental impact.
>> Ultimately the biggest wins are when big appliances and heating/cooling respond to self-production
I think the parent post is pointing out that just measuring usage has limited value. The real value is when you are generating your own alternative.
Then simple changes, that you barely notice, can have z big impact.
Some are obvious, hot water, laundry, dishwasher, pool pump, etc.
Between things like cooking can come into play. Lots of dishes can be prepared in advance, and consumed later. An air-fryer uses less electricity than my oven (and despite the name functions in the same way as an oven).
In Australia there is more and more a network utilisation factor (not sure what the exact name is). In essence this is peak demand in a billing cycle does define the cost for the entire billing cycle. So if I have everything on at the same time I will draw lots of kWh, this will give me a night $/kW that I have to pay for my entire consumption.
So there is merit in keeping peak consumption low to not pay high just because of a single spike.
Never having dishwasher, washing machine and dryer on at the same time is a good starting point.
> but how much consumption can you really move around like that, and how many energy hogs can you just decide to not use? If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you going to start eating more salads instead?
There’s been some interest in this locally due to energy regulation moving to a more punishing system for peak usage. Also high electricity prices. And the topic came up that people would be encouraged to do things that are considered unsafe like washing their clothes while they are sleeping.
Things like this need to be automated. (And be safe.) Manually following fancy gadgets won’t make much of a difference.
Meanwhile we’re (or were, don’t know the current status) selling hydropower to the rest of the Europe during the fall, emptying the reservoirs before the winter so that electricity prices become unreasonable (leading to strategies like washing your clothes while you sleep or just being content to freeze while indoors).
And I have never seen a good argument for the export/import (Europe) arrangement. But I guess we can try to sideline that whole conversation by nagging people to turn off the light in the bathroom when it’s not busy.
Maybe it's because Britain introduced cheap electricity overnight in the 1970s (before I was born), but I've never thought of using the washing machine overnight as unsafe. The dishwasher too.
Trading electricity between Europe gives us lower prices overall, and a more stable and efficient grid.
However, knowing that a particular device is bad means that when I eventually need to replace it in the future, I will also factor in energy efficiency and features such as it being able to check energy prices in my purchasing decision.
About water consumption: depending on your make of water meter, there's often a small reflective wheel that turns eg. once for every liter. Sometimes these are made out of metal or even slightly magnetic. An arduino with an optical or Hall effect sensor might get you real far in real time, high resolution data collection!
Alternatively I've had success in wiring up a temperature probe directly to the incoming water line, and comparing that temperature to the ambient temperature. Where I live that works because the water arrives from underground & is always much cooler than ambient air. The time-integrated difference between the two is a proxy for how much water you use... this is much more involved to get meaningful data from, tho.
On mobile so hard to link, but memory says OpenEnergyMonitor's docs site on pulse counters has a computer vision approach too. Think it reads the numbers from the display.
Per device energy tallies also give you interesting data.
Home Assistant can do that in the Energy dashboard, and you can answer questions/learn surprising things, like how much energy my "rack" (UPS+mac mini+5 disk bay+a few other things) actually uses vs e.g my fridge or my washing machine, or my desk compute actually is quite low but boy does the screen costs a lot when active, or what does charging the electric bike costs, or what's the effect of setting thermostat to 19 instead of 20 in winter, or oh wow in summer this fan that we use a lot to make things bearable actually ends up using as much energy as our water heater!
(power measurements are done using Shelly Plug Plus S + 3EM + 4PM devices, thermal measurements using Shelly H&T Plus)
> like how much energy my "rack" (UPS+mac mini+5 disk bay+a few other things) actually uses
I find it better to remain ignorant in that regard. Jokes aside, it's also interesting seeing wall draw vs UPS draw vs PSU draw if each piece of your equipment supports that.
The Shelly stuff is also quite fun to play with (I recommend a AC adapter for H&T). I have the little black spherical sensors and the data resolution is significantly worse on battery since it tries to sleep in low power state as much as possible. It's fun to see the server cabinet (mine's enclosed) vs room vs different room temps. You can also see when the HVAC cycles on and off and when someone takes a shower (humidity spikes).
Being able to see your usage is helpful - at least, for those of us interested.
For example, I was surprised to see how much our electronics (stereo, amplifier, TV, etc.) in the living room use, even when off (some devices are older, with high standby currents). It motivated me to put everything on a timer that only turns power own in the evenings, since that's the only time they get used.
> It motivated me to put everything on a timer that only turns power own in the evenings, since that's the only time they get used.
I was surprised to learn that a timer itself also uses power. I borrowed a Kill-a-watt from the library and found that an 2 decades old timer uses 2.3W while a newer one uses 0.6W. That tells me that I should just keep the old timer for the rare occasions.
I suppose you should consider the cost of the new timer vs the cost of the electricity at that point.
If a new timer is $20, and you're paying the US National Average for electricity of $0.165 / kwh. The new one is 0.6 and the old one is 2.3, for a 1.7 watt difference.
Doing the math, $20/$0.165=121.212kwh, or 121212 watt hours / 1.7 watts per hour = 71301.2 hours / 8760 hours in a year (not counting leap hours) = ~8.1 years for the device to pay for itself in savings.
If you're worried about the environment, then it's wasteful to take a moderately efficient system and upgrade it. If you're worried about cost, then you're not saving that much money. If you're worried about overall value for your effort, there are better things to focus on.
Even if it were perfectly efficient (0 watt standby) then it would still take 6 years to pay for itself if it were $20.
Yeah we were away from home recently and it was interesting to see that with everything "off" we were still using a constant 200W or so, so even with no one home we used just over 4kWh each day. 120kWh each month just for "idle" usage definitely is not trivial amount of money, at current prices that's £20!
Half of that is fridge which at 10 quid a month is cheap. Then another 20w for wifi router which again, looking at what you pay to your ISP is nothing.
So you got 8 pounds to account for which at UKs minimum wage is about 1 hours worth of work?
That's a weird point to make - I'm just saying 120kWh a month for a house with no one in it and just some basic appliances and network equipment is a LOT - in developing countries 120kWh would be the average energy consumption of the entire house with people living in it, and we just "waste" that because I couldn't be bothered to switch off some devices in my house. It's not about whether I can afford it or not.
But in developing countries thats exactly what you would use power for - internet, minimal LED lighting and refrigeration. If you are lucky you got AC on, but that will blow thru 120kwh in a day.
For comparison, I live alone in a mid-terraced 2-bedroom house in the UK, heated with gas - and I'm currently there most of the time. My monthly electricity usage is about 180kWh a month.
I'm guessing a big chunk of the 60kWh I'm using over your baseline is the kettle! :D
Uhm. We have a 3 bed semi detached house, my consumption for November was 1267kWh of electricity. In October it was 1148kWh. And I also heat with gas(well we have a minisplit upstairs that we sometimes use for heat, but it uses like 5kWh/day max)
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.
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 heat and no air conditioning, and use about 250 kWh many months, although this jumps about 50% if we plug in an outdoor hot tub in the winter.
Our personal usage is probably dominated by an electric heat pump water heater. Do the British numbers typically include hot water, or is this usually gas? Also, what is the "multi-rate" line in the page you link, and why is this average higher? And how many people choose that?
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.)
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 storage heaters turn on simultaneously!)
Typically the cheap rate energy would be between a half and a third of the day-rate energy.
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.
"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.
We (2 adults, 2 seniors, 2 small kids) blow thru 350-400 kWh on hot water alone. Another 500-600 kwh on car. Remaining 300-400kwh is cooking, lighting, tech, etc. Same average 1200kwh per month.
Take the car away and it's same 175kwh per month per person (summer here so no heating needed).
It does indeed. Also I use gas for both hot water and cooking - and keep the ambient temperature relatively low, so the fridge and freezer aren't fighting the heating.
The consumer element is the sugar to help the masses swallow the pill. If it was just about the consumer, the unit would never report its findings back to base. But blurting back your information is integral to, well, all smart devices. That is the point.
Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.
It's the slow descent to greater tyranny, and loss of personal control. It's amazing that people put up with it, but a slight discount in the short term, or visibility of your own data, is probably enough to get most people to accept spying infrastructure in their lives forever.
> Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.
This is likely to happen and is economically awful (far better to have constant carbon taxes), but it will be done because the majority supports it, not due to some government plot against the people.
Elected officials get into office with majority support of a constituency, but that's very far away from the majority of people supporting their collective actions while in office. In the US, politicians do what money wants them to, not voters. Consent of voters is often manufactured and misinformed.
I don't understand your point - these meters only report your overal usage, not what is using the energy/water. It's letting you skip the step where you manually upload the reads every couple months or whatever, or worse, where the energy company employee has to visit your house to read them in person. Why does it matter if I upload my meter reads to my provider every month or if the device reports it automatically? The end result is the same.
(At least that's how it works in the UK - the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers, they just submit kWh reads, the live readout is local device only)
That’s not quite right. All new smart meters have the ability to report electricity usage minute-by-minute.
You _currently_ have the choice to only report month-by-month, by kindly asking them to only do that. However, I agree with verisimi, and I believe that it’s only a matter of time before the government via energy suppliers can monitor your real time electricity usage.
It’ll be dressed up, of course, as being in your best interest, but you won’t have a choice. Smart meters were sold as being beneficial for customers, but in reality they take power away from people and consolidate it in energy suppliers.
At the most basic level this is a history of when you are at home or not.
The power to not have someone know if you’re at home and how much electricity you’re using at any given moment - and for any given moment over an arbitrary period in the past I guess?
the "smart" meters don't report live usage back to providers
Either they can be easily upgraded to do that, or they already are and the energy company merely gives you the total every month to maintain the impression that they aren't.
If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.
I mean no offence, but you are literally just guessing and not talking about technologies that people have in their houses. The smart meters here in UK, the latest SMET2 standard ones, cannot broadcast live data back to the grid because they simply don't have the bandwidth to do so, they use low frequency communication back to the area controller and they can barely report the kWh number roughly every hour or so. The live communication with the display you have in your house is done over ZigBee and unless the energy company parks the van outside of your house to get those reads, they aren't getting them.
Like, your points about surveilance are true, sure - but they address an imaginary situation you built in your head, not the actual technical solution that exists in the real world.
>>If the meter-reader needs to visit periodically, you know with much greater certainty that they aren't gathering live data.
Yeah and I need to let them into my house, which to me personally is a far greater invasion of my privacy than my meter automatically uploading kWh numbers to the grid.
Also just as a general remark - on HN I think people are likely to divide into two groups - nerds who want ALL the data and they would gladly upload live data to an online system if they could just so they could monitor it live, and people who think any IoT functionality is a massive invasion of privacy and that it's some greater ploy by government to control you. The truth - as always - is somewhere in the middle.
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 thingy also uses the 'HAN'.
However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage. If that was all that was needed, there are much cheaper options designed for consumer self-install. Why did they go for the much more expensive and inconvenient smart meter+gprs option, if not to enable time-of-use tariffs?
> 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 refuse to get their meter upgraded to Linky "BECAUSE WAVES 5G COVID CHIPS" bullshit which doesn't have any basis in reality.
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...
Yes, that has been the main line in public discourse and court actions, people screaming that the electromagnetic waves are disturbing them (again, the meter communicates with the operator via the grid's own electric cables, so there are no more 'waves' than before). Flat-rate tariffs still exist and are the default option here in France.
>>However, it's pretty clear the policy intent isn't only to let people monitor their usage.
Of course - but I contest OP's claim that it has enough granularity to tell you that you're showering too much or that your tool shed uses too much energy - it doesn't allow that in the slightest.
You can see a UK smart meter being taken apart here [1] with the GPRS module shown at around the 2 minute mark. And you can look at meter datasheets [2] which list GPRS WAN as a feature.
Smart meters often send a reading every 30 minutes. Some energy companies will then show a breakdown on their website that purports to show how much you're spending on lighting, fridges, appliances and things like that [3].
I suspect they use a lot of guesswork to arrive at that breakdown, given the limited input data. Although it's probably fairly easy to recognise certain multi-hour-and-distinctively-large loads, like EV charging and heat pumps.
>>Hilarious that I’m sending your own words back to you.
I don't know if it's hilarious, more like unhelpful at best, rude at worst .
>>I saw minutely energy readings from customers with my own eyes. It was a lot of data
It wasn't "live" data though, was it? Just a breakdown of usage per-minute, but uploaded in batches, right? And which energy supplier was that? Because with Octopus you can only get live data by installing an extra(and optional) device called Octopus mini, their SMET2 meters have no such capability.
> Once the government has that info, it will be able to come up with bespoke taxes for you according to what it ordains as fair use. 'Your showers are too long', 'your toolshed is too big a draw on the electric' therefore 'you need to buy carbon credits to offset the environmental damage you are causing'.
I am very conflicted. Deeply share your concerns regarding misuse of such info. It will be used as a weapon. But I am totally in favour of making wasters pay up, and not just fixed amounts.
"Waster" isn't really a coherent concept when taken outside of an individual's value system. What might be waste for one person might simply be a sensible use of resources for another.
Doing for a drive to the countryside for a walk? Having a long and relaxing bath? Go-karting? Using a heated pool? Keeping the heater on a single house-level timer so they don't have to think about it rather than planning ahead what rooms they will be in later?
Everyone will have a different place they draw the "waste" vs sensible expenditure line.
The correct economic solution to this is CO2-offsetting taxes and letting each individual decide how they want to spend their resources. Trying to centrally plan for a hundred million diverse people with different things they like and care about is a recipe for unneeded misery.
Taxes just push the problem into poor people. If you want a fair solution we should have carbon/resource rationing. In fact, I'd prefer a solution in which the governments work hard (much harder than they are) to bootstrap the brave new world so everyone can benefit from a sustainable world.
Taxes don't have to push the problem onto poor people at all. For example, the proceeds can be directly given to everyone equally which will usually disproportionately benefit poor people.
So why would you say that taxes would harm poor people? I think I know why.
In practice, the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, and the media have been almost completely captured by the wealthy to disproportionately benefit themselves.
Wealth is essentially zero sum game despite what many would say. Power is certainly a zero-sum game. When you have power over another, they have less power over you. I believe wealth is another form of power, a little indirect and not perfect, but the correlation is strong enough.
This means that there is no practical solution that won't harm poor people. This includes your proposal where you would like the government to "benefit everyone".
People's desire for heavily carbon consuming things vs lightly carbon consuming things varies massively. If you're worried about the poor don't ignore the externalities of their consumption but subsidise them directly via UBI or somesuch.
Rationing is a very worst of all possible worlds solution, losing you all the benefits of trade.
Just as a thought exercise, if anything was possible:
UBI seems to work towards the goal of making sure people don't die due to lack of resources (it is a basic income, after all). It's less clear how it works towards the goal of reducing carbon emissions.
Rationing, on the other hand, has the potential: Natural resources (publicly owned ones anyways), and perhaps natural limits like how much CO2 the skies can take, are collectively owned by the people. So it could make sense to distribute those amongst the people. The people could then sell them in a free® market. This means we can work towards both goals at once: Those seeking to pollute more, could simply buy the carbon credits from their fellow people, who can now better afford to live. And, at the same time, total pollution is capped-ish, depending on the scheme.
As a fun note, UBI is just rationing out the available funds for UBI, so it would suffer from any rationing-specific failings that carbon rationing would suffer from.
A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI, but with side effects. In particular, if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production, but the price will be unrelated to the actual externality cost or mitigation cost of the marginal CO2 release. So you either get more CO2 released than you would with an externality tax or you get less CO2 released than you should given that you can mitigate against that particular CO2 release.
Ideally you'd have credits being available for purchase at prices that correspond to the costs of mitigating their externalities (CO2 emission is not in and of itself evil, its the consequences that we don't want).
> A tradeable carbon rationing is indeed equivalent to a UBI
On the contrary -- I was saying it was not equivalent, because it also works towards the goal of reducing CO2 consumption, whereas I can't imagine how a UBI would do so.
> if the market is efficient then the consumption of CO2 credits will exactly equal production
The carbon credits I am imagining would not be "produced" per se -- they would, in total, represent the total amount of carbon we as a country want to emit, to reduce climate disaster, allocated equally to each individual, who all collectively "own" that natural limit. Those individuals can then sell their "contribution ration" to companies which wish to emit more than the CO2 allocated individually to their CEO, or whatever. So ideally credits will be available for purchase by the CEO, at whatever rate the CEO's fellow people are willing to charge the CEO. Mitigations will need to be done by humanity regardless, or else.
My point was, maybe it is a single number! It's whatever We The People decide, and it doesn't vary: a ton of CO2 released into the air does the same damage no matter what released it. You could spend it saving orphans, and it wouldn't make the CO2 heat the planet any less, and it wouldn't remove the need to find a new way to save orphans that doesn't emit CO2.
Indeed, examining the quote below...
> So you either get more CO2 released than you would with an externality tax or you get less CO2 released than you should given that you can mitigate against that particular CO2 release
...it's easy to miss the point that there's no such thing as "less CO2 released than you should" because the amount we should is negative: not only should we be emitting zero (not net zero, literally zero), and then we must do the mitigations on top of that.
In short, we've tried the existing carbon credit scheme without rationing the available credits, and it hasn't worked to achieve the goal. We need to try something different now.
No CO2 emissions is not the terminal value of the human race. It is a means, not an ends. The damage of that extra ton of CO2 is not infinite.
If releasing a marginal megaton of CO2 caused climate issues that cost a thousand lives over the next 200 years but we want to release that marginal megaton because it let's us save ten thousand orphans than we should release that CO2.
It might be that in the world we live in the correct CO2 per ton tax that takes into account externalities is literally greater than the price of capturing a ton of CO2, in which case all but niche cases (antique car drivers and space launchers probably) will stop producing CO2. But I don't know that and the estimates I've seen have a CO2 tax that pays for the climate externalities at less than a quarter of the price of atmospheric carbon capture (and thats the top end of CO2 tax estimates!).
> We want people to reduce their carbon consumption
Remember that this isn't the end goal. What we want is not to feel the effects of releasing CO2.
A CO2 tax that costs as much as it costs to mitigate the effects of that CO2 release reduces CO2 production to exactly the amount its worth emitting. Rationing means you either get more or less CO2 than this number.
It’s up to individuals to decide if they are wasting their own resources. Everyone has a different perspective. Personally, I think SUVs are a waste and should be banned, but wouldn’t that be overreaching?
Individuals don’t pay for their waste when they aren’t paying for negative externalities.
That’s why a carbon tax is a better solution - it ensures people are paying the true price for a resource. Let people decide their own life after that, they’ll do a better of job of it than someone else deciding their life for them.
(You probably need more than just a carbon tax to fairly price the resource. For example, mining fossil fuels causes health issues for workers, and impacts the local environment.
It's a slippery slope for sure but you have to draw the line somewhere.
For example, if there's a water shortage and someone decides they can afford (financially) to use as much as they please, that's not going to end well.
I don't quite understand the obsession with carbon. Not everything can be mapped to carbon without some mental gymnastics.
During a water shortage, if most of the water is being taken up by few wealthy individuals, then there are negative externalities being created: people dying, falling sick, being hospitalised, protests and violence that takes policing resources, etc.
The market has failed to fully price the external effects generated by some economic activities, thus the government must step in and impose a tax on all water use so that they can correct the negative externality.
At the simplest level, the government can use the proceeds to buy the water themselves and distribute it to those in need. For example, to reduce bureaucracy during a crisis, they could pay for the first 5 litres of daily residential water use for each individual directly on their bills.
The problem is again: the resource is not being priced correctly.
We’re all (well you know) a bunch of primates who travel from single home suburbs in metal boxes in order to work in front of a screen. Going around worrying about who waters their lawn the most excessively[1] is largely a waste of time.
There are exceptions though for things like droughts. But largely this goes beyond this obsession with looking over each other’s hedges (digitally or actually).
[1] Because the agricultural lobby would like to redirect the focus from them to random suburbanites (see California).
You don't even have to worry about the government (it seems unlikely that most of us will see a "10min showers only" law anytime soon), but it's usually private companies collecting and selling the data and they're happy to use that data against you in any way that they can.
I don't think this is fair to him. He's not alleging carbon stuff is a conspiracy to control shower length, merely that moralizers will want to control everything they see as "waste".
If someone close to me said that they fear an authoritarian government because the length of their showers might be curtailed, or the power draw of their shed might be outlawed, I'd be genuinely worried about their mental health.
As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks.
I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible.
This way you don't have a situation where a device manufacturer goes out of business and the capability to monitor is lost.
>As evidenced by the article, the problem is that some of these devices within less than 10 years can become essentially bricks.
>I think these devices must be required to send the data to the utility company and the utility company must be forced to make the data easily accessible in a standard format so that independent analysis is trivially possible.
The core problem is that these devices are garbage, and nobody cares. I don't mean that scornfully, I'm saying these devices are way over-provisioned and yet are unreliable anyway because they are very carelessly designed, and nobody cares because 1) they have no economic incentive to care, and 2) in the software world it's normal for cheap devices to fail within 10 years, and the people who refuse to accept this norm have no recourse except building their own piece of electronics (i.e. take up a hobby).
Demanding they provide the data 'in a standard format' lets us put lipstick on the pig, it doesn't actually solve the core problem of the device being a piece of shit.
In the UK, there are three (or four, depending on how you count them) types of device associated with smart meters.
Electricity meters are designed to last, and contain a radio that lets them communicate use to the distributor. What type of radio depends on where in the country you are.
The Gas meter is battery powered, and tries to send data to the electricity meter every half hour, over Zigbee. This works better for some than for others.
Then there's the in-home display, you get one with the meter but it's not required for reporting -- it's purely a display. At some point between the meter being installed and us moving in the one that goes with our house went walkabout, so we don't have one. Except we actually sort-of have two: our supplier makes a small box (with an ESP32 in it) that sends them near-realtime data (and also, happily, completes the otherwise-unreliable Zigbee mesh because the junk I have in the garage blocks the signal) and before that arrived I got a Hildebrand Glow, which talks MQTT to my Home Assistant.
The electricity meter receives the current price if it's a normal non-dynamic price, and the Glow can read that, but can also cope with Octopus Agile with its half-hourly pricing because it's able to fetch that data over the Internet.
The raw metering data isn't quite available to everyone in open formats, but there are procedures that one may go through to be able to receive data and at least one company then makes that data available to the consumer. It's not as fine-grained as the data available on the local Zigbee mesh, which is why those same companies also sell hardware that'll join said mesh. Unfortunately the mesh isn't open for use by arbitrary hardware.
You can also get random monitoring devices that sit on the consumer side of the meter and give you whatever capabilities you buy, and it sounds like the article is an example of one of those, rather than of a smart meter. The author would probably be better off with an actual smart meter, if that's an option.
At least in the EU (don't know about the UK), currently these sort of devices are installed by the government. They are replacement of the previous analog meters. In Belgium, they report the data to the (public) electricity grid company, which then forwards the data to your (private) electricity company. They are much simpler than the device in the article (no JavaScript or SSH access). They will surely last for more than 10 years given the investment the government is putting in. (I think roll-out started like 7 years ago and is expected to be finished around 2030 in Belgium.)
Same in France, the meters report via the grid to the grid operator, which is a public utility and shares your usage data with the (public or private) electricity company from which you buy your electricity. They have a local physical port with an open spec (and e.g. I have a device that connects to it and shares the usage data live over Zigbee for my Home Assistant), and there are ways of getting the data over an API from either the public utility or the electricity company which are more or less complex depending on the entity.
We have one as well, but since we're on a variable rate tariff(Octopus Tracker) it's completely useless - it doesn't know the current electricity/gas price, it seems to receive rate updates from the network about once every few weeks - so the numbers it displays are just wrong.
I've made my own little Raspberry Pico display that queries today's energy prices and shows those, but I have not been able to show today's energy consumption alongside(and therefore show the day's cost so far). Octopus provides an API to query the kWh used....but only for the last day. I even got their little Octopus Mini that broadcasts live usage to their app but I have not been able to query the live data from it from my raspberry, I don't have the necessary skills in web technologies to do that unfortunately :-(
Mine comes with a display that shows live usage by energy rather than price. The octopus app shows my usage for yesterday in £ for octopus tracker, broken down into 30m increments.
I have one here in Bucharest and, while fancy, as in it blips a red light when the power consumptions is higher than usual, it doesn't help me at all.
As in, yeah, running the washing machine is power consuming, I knew that, and the same goes for the electric oven or for the vacuum cleaner, but what am I supposed to do with that information? Not wash my clothes anymore? Not using the oven? Leaving dust all over the place for longer?
The high-voltage transmission grid is operated by National Grid, which is a British company. Distribution to end-users is operated at a regional level by one of six* Distribution Network Operators [1], three of which are British-owned.
Consumers can purchase electricity from any electricity supplier that is willing to sell to them. Naturally, since it all goes into one grid, suppliers are responsible for ensuring that they purchase from generators and sell to consumers an equal amount of electricity. EDF is one of several suppliers in the market. (There were many more until energy prices rose following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and many suppliers collapsed.)
The gas distribution system works similarly, but I'm not familiar with the details.
* It's slightly more complicated, but it rounds to six.
In my home state of Victoria Australia the government had a program to give out these powerpal[1] units for free that could measure your usage in realtime using the flashing led on our smart meters, we also require all energy grid operators (the people who own the poles and wires) to have an energy portal where users can get near realtime data to the nearest 30mins, soon to be 5 with some new legislation.
The former most people have no idea about but the powerpal has been a smashing success for consumers to understand what is using energy.
Instead of a single usage figure per month, it should be a cumulative line chart with high resolution, preferably zoomable. The customer would see long periods of almost nothing, and occasional big jumps (e.g. When the heater is on).
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).
> 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.
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
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.
As a toy project I put a raspi with a small screen in my living room that would show the temperature and humidity for the last three days as a graph. It was somewhat of an eye catcher in the living room. The data was always interesting. Even if the humidity did not change much, at the very least you could always see that it was colder during the nights, which told me it was working.
It taught me so many things.
The effect of opening the windows short vs. long on temperature and humidity.
That the sun shining into my room was way more effective then my heating.
How the temperature goes down exponentially when my heating turns off, and how the length of the of/off cycles depend on the temperature outside. Etc.
It's ridiculous we don't have unlimited free or almost free energy, the future truly sucks.
Likewise it's ridiculous devices are not automatically saving energy when unused, it's such a simple change it should be standard.
Asking the user to worry about it should not be needed. That's the goal we should strive for. For now monitoring will have to do but I think a combination of solar + iron air battery will make everybody living in a sunny-enough place independent from the grid with ample margin - and we can supply the rest with nuclear.
This problem can easily be solved without any device at all. Of course, it demands education and "intelligent behavior". If people only had the curiosity to read the specs on a heater and see "2000W" of power, and compare it to "15W" of power on the specs of the LED bulb. Same for water. One can just place a bowl under the faucet and measure the time it takes to fill up. Now you have your water consumption rate. We can choose the "device based" route, but this road end with Idiocracy and problems so "big" nobody can solve them.
If we're comparing apples to apples all the time, sure. I think it's pretty obvious to most people who care to look that a 60w conventional bulb uses more energy than a 15w LED bulb (which, for the record, is the 100w conventional equivalent). Consider, however, these questions:
If my 2000w heater is running on the 800w setting and turns on when my room has dropped below the point I consider acceptably chilly and turns off above that point, how much electricity have I used in the last hour?
If I have 3 15w LEDs on a dimmer and run them intermittently throughout the day, how much electricity have I used in the last hour?
If my TV is off, but plugged in, and accesses the Internet a few times a day automatically to check for new versions, how much power has it used today?
I think this makes the case for, at least, a kill-a-watt style device. A whole home solution with sufficient report granularity and a report interface visible in the home would be worth the extra trouble, IMHO.
Edit: For the record, these are all real-scenarios from my house.
A while ago I bought one of those plug-in power monitors, and went around measuring everything I could find around the house. It's a worthwhile exercise, I think. You can leave an appliance plugged into it for as long as you like to get an average. I was able to make a pie chart of where my electricity is used in my house, which was enlightening, and led to some useful changes.
> I think this makes the case for, at least, a kill-a-watt style device. A whole home solution with sufficient report granularity and a report interface visible in the home would be worth the extra trouble, IMHO.
You can have per circuit monitoring, you need a CT for each hot conductor and a submeter with enough CT inputs for all of the circuits in your panelboard.
If you're looking for something simple to try work it out, I bought a smart plug a few years back which could record usage for around 20USD, you can then move it between your devices getting a sense of each's usage.
Long term tracking usage of individual device energy usage is nice, but just knowing from past measurements how much a device tends to use is already very useful.
If you're going to go down this route and aren't afraid of a little DIY, then I'd highly recommend something that doesn't depend on the cloud.
Either ESPhome- or Tasmota-based plugs are great if you want fully local control (e.g. Athom, LocalBytes), or Shelly for local-first control with an option of connecting to their cloud.
Mostly everything else will lock you into the manufacturer's app & cloud. Zigbee is fully local too, but it requires additional hardware.
Do you have a conventional HWS? These are notoriously power-hungry, often poorly maintained and calibrated, and hard to monitor.
You can buy a power meter plug - that sits between appliance and socket - and work your way around almost all your appliances apart from, typically, oven, air conditioner(s), and hot water systems. For those you're going to need to experiment by turning as many things off as you can, to establish a baseline, and review your switch meter periodically for short (several minute) intervals, with and without the larger appliances turned on.
(You can get induction coil systems to report usage of these larger appliances, but they're typically onerously priced.)
If you can isolate the legs of the larger appliances, a CT clamp sensor is sufficient for an idea, and you can get those as handheld meters with screen - or something you plug into a microcontroller board and send the data to a local collection system.
On mechanical blueprints, HWS is the acronym I see used for hydronic heating, and DHW is what I see used for domestic hot water. I’m unsure what the OP meant.
Sounds pretty good as such. The worry to have these days, though, is if we can also get this without energy usage data being traded between all sorts of shady companies and/or criminal organizations.
There was a report recently that Facebook users have their data sold to 1000-5000 companies, and Facebook takes input from up to 100k companies when compiling data on people.
Supermarkets are also into the data game, exploiting the gold mine of data that is shopper loyalty cards.
Smart TVs are in the data game, selling details of what you’re watching on to other people.
Cars are recording visuals, audio, telemetry, and selling that on.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that energy companies are selling the data they’re collecting about you onto data brokers (aka shady companies and/or criminal organisations)
About monitoring water consumption, maybe using some webcam + OCR would help to recognize reading of a water meter?
Then Home Assistant would be helpful to see charts with energy consumption etc
Like you I have a solar system (Sunsynk) and it gives all sorts of wonderful stats, but I hardly bother looking at it as it is meaningless information - just wish it was more intelligent to balance battery discharge vs loadshedding schedule vs weather of the day.
I have to manually set things up for winter vs summer.
My geyser which is not on solar is on a IOT controller (Hotbot) and I set the times I want the water to be heated and it knows when there is loadshedding (3G) so it can intelligently deviate from my set times.
Corollary: people are cheap and lazy, so if you want them to not do something, make it cumbersome in a way that does not justify the cost difference, or vice versa.
SDGE started breaking down our energy usage by "type" a few months ago. Not exactly sure how but they can categorize things as laundry, lights, entertainment, computers, always on, etc.
My PGE (Bay area) does the same but I'm pretty sure it's an estimate according to house size, # of people, and a questionnaire I filled out such as "how many times do you run the dishwasher per week". Your house pulls electricity through the breaker box or doesn't.
Then again, it's possible different appliances have a specific electrical signatures like +5KWH x 1.5 hours = dishwasher.
> I'm pretty sure it's an estimate
Yeah, I (cynically) assume this utility-provided breakdown data is worthless. There's no way around circuit-level monitoring.
How does it work? Magic?
Not really. Each appliance uses electricity in a unique manner - think of it like an appliance fingerprint. We detect and extract these "fingerprints" and convert the data into useful insights and recommendations.
Realtime data is nice, especially when I can get it from the source instead of having to fiddle with individual outlets. When we upgraded to smart meters in the UK (which you actually get an account credit for doing), our power company gave us a portable touch display that read from both the gas and electricity with different breakdowns of consumption.
> Now I just wish I had something as convenient for monitoring water consumption.
You can set this up non-invasively with ultrasonic flow meters like the TUF-2000M. It isn’t cheap, but it does work quite alright if you don't want any of the risks associated with cracking open your pipes.
(There are also cheaper options if you don’t mind opening up your pipes too.)
Thanks for sharing. Does the system supply grid voltage to your home autonomously, i.e. when the grid is offline? Does it work on all three phases? In Germany, most of the systems need the grid to be online in order to work.
Unpopular opinion: shifting environmental blame to individual consumers is a form of gaslighting (pun not intended, but still good). You may use spend a fortune on solar, heating pumps and A-clsss appliances, but will never save a fraction of power consumption of a single datacenter cabinet or aluminium furnace. One large enough manufacturing plant cancels out all environmental initiatives of a medium town, including public spaces.
Also, we need to stop gaslighting people with fake solutions like "planting trees" or "deleting emails". Sure, it's good, but the scale is so small that you're actually losing focus on what really makes changes.
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 bar graph could be done with a pair of microcontrollers communicating onto some wired bus.
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.
The worst of all is that this whole mess turned into bricks probably 3 years after it was installed, maybe less.
The reason why the Mirai botnet is still at large is: Android.
From a business perspective nobody wants to pay the costly people that can do microcontroller programming. Frontend devs are dirt cheap, especially for something as simple as that interface displaying the bar charts.
From employee perspective it was my impression that EE developers tend to get lower salaries than web developers.
But it could be the case that building an android or web app for a simple UI would take less dev-months than an embedded app with similar functionality.
There is also an enormous amount of flexibility gained when, instead if designing and building your own single-purpose device, you just use a cheap, mass produced, off the shelf, general purpose device.
> within an heavily constrained terminal which cant be reused for anything else.
Except for botnets and/or spying. Some of those boards already contain MEMS microphones and cameras (the box in the picture even shows the camera objective). I'd have took apart the device to take a look inside, or at least run some diagnostics to explore which hardware was installed/detected.
Not sure about cat, but if one could sneak in netcat or better ffmpeg on Android, then opening a audio/video channel to the outside could become trivial.
Pulling wires through anywhere after it's finished is an immense installation hassle though. It might be possible...or it might be completely impractical even if you can (i.e. low voltage buses and unshielded power wires don't play nice together if they're parallel).
Yeah I don't understand why he is shocked that this communicates wirelessly. He even bought a modern flat with Ethernet because he clearly knows how much pain it is to add wiring to a house. Very weird.
It's painful to add wiring to a house as a random normie user. It's not painful if you're an installer or a construction person.
Or at least this is my understanding why all construction is still done in a way that makes it near-impossible for the user/dweller to change anything without having to do general renovation of half the place. Which, again, is hard primarily because it makes no sense to buy all the hardware that makes such work easy for a single job.
> 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?
For a device with so little functionality and non-critical functionality at that, I wouldn't call $24/year negligible. My whole home Ryzen router/server idles around there. Honestly I'd bet the fuse was missing because the last tenant was an engineer, investigated this thing themselves, found it a useless waste, and pulled it.
I don't think places like that have folks in new construction with Ethernet and Android tablets in the wall. TFA uses GBP as the currency in the images.
> 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.
I really wonder why this happens. Seems penny wise & pound foolish. Perhaps they failed to hire the right developer for the right abstraction level, and ended up with "web developers" I guess.
Money. That's almost always the reason for "why would they do that?"
It's much cheaper and more sustainable for the wealthy and powerful to train individuals on very high level technologies then reuse their skills in every way they can, regardless of how feasible, the economic and ecological footprint, or any concern outside of making profit.
Electron is not some comic book villain. JavaScript is not horrible and can be the optimal choice for many software applications.
But these technologies and tools are easy to teach to many workers who may or may not: understand the computational architecture to come up with better economic efficiencies, have interest in applying their skills to properly solve a problem rather than put food on the table, and so on.
The higher level the skill is, the less interest and deep systemic understanding needed for the job: many new jobs created.
> 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…
Not surprising at all. I would expect that a lot of these are bought as retrofits, and not as a part of new construction. Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sale in front of them. And you can get a good-enough WiFi chipset for a few bucks these days.
> I need a 3A fuse [...] After installation, I checked the temperature of the fuse multiple times during the day to get at least some indication that things are not going to get worse. It worked fine for a more than a week now, but I still do not recommend experiments like this to anyone.
Probably don't need to be so worried here. If it's a 3A fuse, the entirety of your apartment's mains power is not running through it. A 3A fuse would burn out in a fraction of a second if you tried to do that.
Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well.
> A 3A fuse would burn out in a fraction of a second if you tried to do that.
he bought it on Amazon. He has every reason to be worried that it won't burn out. Louis Rossman did a video[0] where he put 8 amps through a 2 amp fuse and left the room for quite a long time, I think it was several minutes with 8a going through a 2a fuse.
In general, people have the wrong idea about how fuses work. They're not supposed to blow at their rated current, they're supposed to withstand it indefinitely, and only blow at much higher currents. Look up any datasheet from a well established manufacturer and see for yourself (like this one from littelfuse: https://littelfuse.com/products/fuses/cartridge-fuses/5x20mm... )
Indeed. There is a slight temperature dependent de-rating, but in general that is correct. To add, Littelfuse is in fact the inventor of the standard automotive blade fuses - they know their fuses if anyone does. I archived a datasheet of some of their blade fuses here [0] - you can see that a 1-amp fuse will run at 1A indefinitely, 2A for 300ms, 3A ~100ms, 4A ~60ms, 5A ~40ms etc. The same datasheet will tell you the temperature derating for their blade fuses is less than 25% at any temperatures you want your electronics to live at.
Another fun fact that is obvious from applying Ohm's Law - you can calculate the current flowing through a fuse by measuring the voltage drop. You can do the math yourself, or there are handy "fuse voltage drop charts" so you don't even have to use a calculator. Yes, this means that with a simple oscilloscope you now have a portable energy meter that requires zero rewiring. Ha, I accidentally brought us full circle :)
Just be careful with that, measuring mains is a bad idea with most oscilloscopes. The ground pin is usually connected to mains earth, so if you're not careful, you might create a short and blow up your scope. If you have one of these battery powered ones, it'll be fine, but the mains powedered ones are usually a no-no.
Ah, I was referring to automotive blade fuses (which have lovely little contacts on top for measuring.) They are only rated to 32VDC so if you are running mains through that you have other issues. Indeed I'd just use my battery-powered oscilloscope to measure mains but if I wanted to use a benchtop scope I'd use an isolation transformer.
People also have a wrong idea about how buying electronic components on Amazon/Aliexpress/eBay/etc. works. You buy a few of the same, test them, then use them if they work. Otherwise ask for refund.
Otherwise you're up for a big surprise that all your TL081's are LM356 instead, or that mosfet you bought has 3x the Rds(on) than expected, or that your fuse doesn't work.
Amazon had one of their buildings in California shut down a few months ago by the fire department when a generator started smoking. It was probably due to a bad fuse they bought off Amazon. https://signalscv.com/2023/07/fire-breaks-out-at-amazon/ That's how blinded by their avarice Amazon has become; they can't even protect their own house. Notice how the Nilight fuses (https://amzn.to/3S06G2n) are still listed, even after a YouTube video with 300,000 views demonstrated that their 2 ampere fuse takes 10 amps to blow. I even had an electrical fire in my house recently, due to components that I purchased off Amazon. I know Amazon monitors Hacker News PR closely, since they took down those ChatGPT generated listings within minutes of us posting them here. Yet they do nothing about product listings that put our lives, and their own lives, in critical danger.
> I know Amazon monitors Hacker News PR closely, since they took down those ChatGPT generated listings within minutes of us posting them here.
Like other engineers at Big Tech, Amazon Engineers also read HN and the post in question happened to be on the HN front page around the lunch break of a work day, IIRC.
It’s easy to imagine one or more Amazon engineers internally pinging the team responsible for Amazon listings hence the appearance that Amazon was able to take down/hide those ChatGPT generated listings in less than an hour of it landing here.
I'm not going to watch the whole video but it doesn't seem like it supports the point you're trying to make.
> How long does it take for your 400mA multimeter fuse to blow at 600mA?
> The amazing unpredictability of fusing current ratings at low overloads.
It makes a point of saying that fuses are imprecise, i.e. that a fuse likely won't blow when 600mA of current passes through a 400mA fuse for a few seconds.
What Rossmann discovered was that fuses from Amazon took 4x the rated current for minutes. That's many orders of magnitude out of spec.
The relationship between the amount of overload and how fast the fuse is supposed to blow is quadratic, not linear. As an example with somewhat made-up numbers, at 1x it might take hours to blow, at 2x it might take a minute or two, at 3x it shouldn't take more than a second and at 4x it should be nearly instant.
If it's supposed to blow in 0.1 seconds when overloaded by 4x, then taking 10 minutes is many orders of magnitude in my book. While that fuse is taking its sweet time, wiring or other components are being heated out of spec (16x more heat at 4x the current), potentially posing a fire hazard or damaging the device it's supposed to be protecting.
Sorry, I misread you, didn't catch you meant the time. Also good point about the possible power damage being quadratic on the current.
Thanks for the polite clarification.
Seriously, I think they would refund the fuse since you are not satisfied.
I think the only way for Amazon to stop organizing countraband would be if dozens of people die in each country and it makes a big media mess and public prosecutors finally rule that Amazon is responsible for mingling and smuggling the products in-country.
Which will impact all
marketplaces, requiring Craigslist/Leboncoin/Gumtree to asses the liability of the sellers on the marketplace.
Well yeah, there's that. My assumption about the worry the author expressed was that it was just an "I'm a little uncomfortable with mains power" type worry, not "did I buy a crappy part that's going to explode" type worry. If it was the latter, that's, well... entirely avoidable.
Also, too: Wifi has inherent galvanic isolation with a wide gap.
It isn't strictly necessary, as anyone here obviously knows, but it can be a cost-effective way to isolate the [electrical] pokey-bits from the [meat-based] pokey-bits, and to avoid loops when things go wrong.
> Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well.
As someone who was too young to be paying any attention during this time, what were some of the reasons this didn’t pan out? Java seems so dominant looking back that I’m surprised something like this wouldn’t have been a success.
The Lisp machine failed because Lisp compiler technology got better and better at targeting generic 32-bit CPU hardware, which was becoming increasingly cheap and plentiful. So the benefits of having all this custom hardware to specially execute Lisp code were nullified -- leaving only the costs.
The same thing happened to Java in hardware. It seemed like a good idea at the time because it allowed developers to target a language they were already familiar with, and present an alternative to Wintel -- especially when you realize that Java was all the rage as a sort of universal programming environment, and in particular J2ME was a big deal for proto-"smart" phones before the iPhone came along. But embedded Java didn't really pan out, memory and CPU time got cheaper, and compiler and JIT tech improved to the point where there was just no benefit to adding the hardware it took to decode Java instructions. So Jazelle was deprecated and replaced with something called ThumbEE, which was a more generic framework based on ARM's Thumb instruction set for running code for an abstract machine, providing features like automatic null-pointer checking and that. Like you could set up a ThumbEE environment for running Python or .NET code in addition to Java. Nowadays even ThumbEE is deprecated. Neither feature appears in ARMv8 processors, for instance.
I have also wondered this for years, and always was told "because JITs work better", but that felt a bit handwavy. Luckily for both of us David Chisnall just published an article on ACM about designing ISAs that properly explains the reasoning behind Jazelle and why it did not work in the long run:
> Small code is also important [for a simple single-issue in-order core]. A small microcontroller core may be as small as 10KB of SRAM (static random access memory). A small decrease in encoding efficiency can dwarf everything when considering the total area cost: If you need 20 percent more SRAM for your code, then that can be equivalent to doubling the core area. Unfortunately, this constraint almost directly contradicts the previous one [about decoder complexity]. This is why Thumb-2 and RISC-V focused on a variable length encoding that is simple to decode: They save code size without significantly increasing decoder complexity.
> This is a complex tradeoff that is made even more complicated when considering multiple languages. For example, Arm briefly supported Jazelle DBX (direct bytecode execution) on some of its mobile cores. This involved decoding Java bytecode directly, with Java VM (virtual machine) state mapped into specific registers. A Java add instruction, implemented in a software interpreter, requires at least one load to read the instruction, a conditional branch to find the right handler, and then another to perform the add. With Jazelle, the load happens via instruction fetch, and the add would add the two registers that represented the top of the Java stack. This was far more efficient than an interpreter but did not perform as well as a JIT (just-in-time) compiler, which could do a bit more analysis between Java bytecodes.
> Jazelle DBX is an interesting case study because it made sense only in the context of a specific set of source languages and microarchitectures. It provided no benefits for languages that didn't run in a Java VM. By the time devices had more than about 4MB of RAM, Jazelle was outperformed by a JIT. Within that envelope, however, it was a good design choice.
> Jazelle DBX should serve as a reminder that optimizations for one size of core can be incredibly bad choices for other cores
So: a decent JIT works better if you can afford the overhead of the JIT. Jazelle was only a good idea in a very brief period of time when this wasn't true, and even then only if you insist on running a Java VM.
>> To be honest, the whole thing was a bit scary, since I was very close to the mains
I laughed at this. Changing a fuse is… a bit scary? They literally teach this in elementary school in the U.K. - or they did. As you say, no need to fretfully check the fuse - either it blows or it doesn’t, and you’ll know when it does. At least he didn’t find the receptacle holding a dead fuse, carefully wrapped in the ceremonial aluminium shroud of eternal life and certain death, which is a crime I may have committed in my younger, more fire-prone years.
I find it interesting how uncomfortable some people are outside of their comfort zones - but then I am a person who spends his life sticking his nose in stuff he has no business with.
I don't know how old the author is, but I'm not surprised when people even 10-15 years younger than I am (I'm in my 40s) shy away from digging into the guts of how things work.
I feel like I was at the tail end of when it was ok to experiment with technology as a kid and teen. The early '00s brought much more in the way of disposable, locked-down devices. Kids growing up today (despite the educational push of orgs like the Raspberry Pi Foundation) are presented with hermetically-sealed devices that present a sanitized interface. Manufacturers explicitly don't want their customers taking things apart, discovering how they work, or tinkering with them in any way... and often even try to put legal barriers in place to keep people from doing stuff like this.
This is a far cry from when I was very young (and before I was born) when computers and kits would come with full schematics and datasheets!
> Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sale in front of them.
It also makes it more convenient to compromise the device from across the street (or across town with a directional antenna). Though of course that's not a problem if your security is up to par and the device continues to receive regular security updates, and we can only surmise that the author has discovered a rare outlier in this space where that is not the case.
> we can only surmise that the author has discovered a rare outlier in this space where that is not the case.
Exactly what I was thinking! What luck that the author found the single IoT device out there that's a cobbled together piece of bodged electronics designed by a graduate from a webdev bootcamp with a Corel Draw focus. A device that, while only ~15 years old is not only hopelessly useless, but also obsolete and insecure.
It's a good thing all other consumer IoT device manufacturers think about and prioritize security, longevity! Also, that customers nowadays are more focused on installing something fit-for-purpose and sustainable once than buying the cheapest shit possible with the blinkiest LEDs.
I shudder to think about how long they tried to get the string-and-cups based telephone to work in my building until the 1930's when they installed the copper still used today for DSL. Or how terrible the paper-straw based water system must have been up to the 1890's when they realized investing in metal pipes has advantages. So glad the days of short-term thinking are behind us.
I’m passionate about the problem of software maintenance:
- Can we solve this with some companies dedicated to maintaining simple code (1 probe, 2 charts for each IoT, or more if the IoT subscribed for more) multiplied by 10k different IoT objects over 30 years?
- How would upgrading all of them look like? Can we batch the upgrade of NPM’s package.json? Can we define a minimum toolset, say NPM+Next+React, for long-term support?
- How can we keep software engineers passionate for that software over dozens of years? Can the challenge of upgrading and migrating to newer frameworks and applying security upgrade be ever a trove of genius and a competiton of the best hacks?
For the moment, when it’s done, it’s all GitHub Actions. Released in 2018. Well, not a good start. Plus everyone has a different pile of … in their actions, it’s all custom code, nothing is standardized, and each new IoT requires a new guy writing new ones.
- Is this already done in some part of OSS (openWrt?) and how do they deal with the boredom of engineers?
Sure, but manufacturers -- as we should well know by now -- don't particularly care about that.
And for a device like this -- a rare one where it seems they sold it without any kind of online subscription service -- their goal is to sell units, and telling people they'll have to cut holes in their walls and run wires (for most people this probably means hiring someone) is certainly going to sell fewer units.
device continues to receive regular security updates
Have to reply to this, and my response was covered a bit by your statement of "security up to par".
Nothing should be considered secure. All those bug bounties are to entice black hats, into giving up juicy pre-0day vulnerabilities.
So just because a device is up to date with security updates, we all must understand, there are countless bugs unknown, needing to be patched, and often, being discovered by those that will never tell, never disclose, never report, and only use them for nefarious purposes.
This is why security is nothing without monitoring.
And why nothing is ever "safe", only likely "more safe" due to a security update.
Consider everything that is network connected as compromised. Everything.
> Consider everything that is network connected as compromised. Everything.
This doesn't seem like useful advice.
If you know something is compromised, you're going to want to stop using it and build a clean system etc. You can't just do that continuously the instant you've built the new system.
Likewise, how does monitoring even work? Every device and app wants to phone home to some random server. The connection will be encrypted and even if it wasn't it could be some arbitrary custom protocol you'd have to spend several hours to reverse engineer. You could just block them all but that will cause massive breakage and possibly impair security when the thing you're blocking is whatever thing's security update mechanism.
I agree with your first part, but not with your second. It really depends what you use, you can easily build up a while home automation system that doesn't phone home or require internet at all
Same thing as the security of the lock on our doors. We know that if somebody really want to get into our homes they will. In the case of IoT and computers add to it the automation of the attack.
What do we do with our homes? Tradeoffs.
We put some valuables in banks, we keep some at home. We insure precious items, if we do have them. We curse when burglars steal from us.
We also install curtains so people outside cannot look at us and at what we are doing at home. There are several level of protections to do the same thing for networks and devices. Of course vulnerabilities mean that they are not perfect. Curtains are not perfect too. Add to that imaging through walls with WiFi or mobile network signals, but that's still fringe at best even if you should read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469920
I think this discussion mostly comes down to how we interpret the word “secure”. Do we mean “zero risk”, “nothing can go bad”, “no potential attack, ever”?
Or do we mean “low enough risk for this thing , here, now”? I prefer the latter, even if that implies that statements like “this thing is secure” are somewhat useless due to the subjectivity.
> Probably don't need to be so worried here. If it's a 3A fuse, the entirety of your apartment's mains power is not running through it.
If it's a "3A fuse" that doesn't blow at 6A or worse, then it will get very hot (fire hazard) if/when there's a short regardless of the distance to the mains power.
If it truly is a 3A fuse, then great. If it's bought from Amazon then I doubt it's truly a 3A fuse.
Louis Rossman over at YouTube has been going over this fuses thing from Amazon. All the fuses he tried from top-results didn't blow until he put 4x or 5x the current rating through them.
Probably not. But precision is expensive. A 3A +- 0.1A fuse will be more expensive to make them a 3A +- 6A fuse. And of course a customer will be upset with a 3A - 2A = 1A fuse so they really make a 9A +- 6A fuse and sell it as 3A.
So if you are "lucky" you can pass 12A though it no problem.
1) a dead short in the circuit. Fuse will blow pretty much instantly.
2) an overload on the circuit. Fuse will blow sooner or later depending on how great the load excess is. If the fuse is rated at 3A, it's not going to be fine at 2.9A and then instantly blow at 3.1A. You'd need actual current monitoring to do that.
And some fuses are "delayed" to allow an overload for a few moments, such as when starting a motor.
None of this disputes that Amazon is well known to sell garbage, and not just limited to fuses. That's why I don't buy anything there.
> Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well.
I'd love someday to learn more about why Jazelle failed.
The first SoC I worked on almost 20 years ago was built around an ARM926EJ-S, just like in the story. It was built for Nokia, who used Symbian OS [1], and supported user-installable apps written against Java Micro Edition [2].
The utter mess of Symbian's app discovery and installation, I suspect, was a prime reason Apple created their App Store for the iPhone.
Nevertheless, the fundamental concept of HW-accelerated Java apps doesn't sound crazy. What happened? Were they just stuck with a sinking ship, Symbian?
The name of the company (Netthings) seemed familiar with me, turns out I had read an blog article regarding the hardcoded NTP servers that they used in their devices being firewalled off and therefore losing time sync.
My guess was that it probably had a time correction feature from those British radio tower integration, but this device is from 2015 (says in the article), so probably not.
> Turns out, they found out an even more innovative time sync mechanism. When you open the UI in the browser, they quickly redirect you to "/set-time/" + Date.now(). This sets a global variable in the Node.js app responsible for "now".
Could prolly take it out of access point and attach it to your network (or one you segregated from your actual network). Set up nat, dyndns, wireshark and see what happens.
I know this sounds pithy (and it is!) but you'd be surprised exactly how cheap and cost effective Wi-fi enabled SoCs are. A lot of the time we're getting Wi-Fi for free, and most of those SoC's don't have the Ethernet controller by default, so it's more cost-effective to use Wi-fi if it can fit your use-case.
Other physical protocols/connection types can be supported of course (I wonder what the longest I2C run ever is), but when you're talking about a retro-fitted client like this is, Wifi or wireless protocols in general are best.
Purely from a materials perspective, 2x cheap WiFi-capable microcontrollers (e.g. esp8266) will cost the manufacturer something like $4-$5 total for both devices - which is comparable to 3m cable+connectors+cheap chips to handle the cable connection (even ignoring the cost of some person to install the cable which is far more expensive than that) so indeed I don't get why the author considers that doing the connection over WiFi is somehow wasteful.
Is it really a problem? An ESP8266 (which is not the most efficient thing, but is very cheap) uses about 0.5W while transmitting, much less most of the time.
For reference, I have some smart outlets that I measured using a while ago, pulling about 0.05W on average from the wall, or 36Wh a month. That's about as much energy as making 500ml of coffee or charging a phone 2-3x.
not sure if its a problem in reality, radios are the second most power consuming subsystem of my laptop at idle. (first being screen due to the backlight).
ESP32s are basically universal at this point. You can have them for under a dollar if you order in any sort of bulk, and you get Wifi and Bluetooth right out of the box. At this point is more expensive to not use Wifi
FWIW I asked the OP to send me the /etc/shadow file which he tried to bruteforce with John The Ripper (unsuccessfully). And because it contains old school UNIX crypt() hashes I was able to crack the root pw in ~7 hours with hashcat on 12 x RTX 4090: the root password is Newt@rd$
Not that it's particularly useful as this device let's you gain root access via TCF anyway without authentication. But maybe this password is reused in other areas...
> Turns out, I need a 3A fuse, so I ordered one from Amazon and installed it the next day.
Ummm. 3A is 720W. If that tiny box dissipated that much, the entire closet full of them would be a literal oven. Besides there's not much point in an energy meter using that much power. It defeats the purpose. It's like testing matches :P it'll be 10W at most. Even peak inrush current would be nowhere near that high.
1A fuse would be more than enough.
> To be honest, the whole thing was a bit scary, since I was very close to the mains.
The 3A fuse is due to the way the UK wiring system works rather than what is optimal for this device.
All appliances in the UK have a fuse where they connect to the building wiring, normally in the plug, but can be in a fixed fuse-holder like this device. Somewhere in the process it was recognized that having lots of different fuse values would be confusing and awkward for users, so these fuses are the same size and always one of three standard values: 13A, 5A, and 3A. As noted elsewhere, you can buy these particular fuses in UK supermarkets and convenience stores.
If 3A is too high for the appliance then what the designer has to do is to fit it with a flex rated at 3A so that is protected by the fuse at the plug-end and then add additional, lower current, protection at the device end.
The UK system is clever and has subtle details like the standard fuse values which were good at the time it was introduced. But, it is also rather over-engineered, and not optimized for modern homes that have a lot of low-current appliances.
Oh yeah the UK system.. I lived in Ireland for a long time and it was a bit archaic sometimes.
I like the idea of fuses in every plug, mind you. Because some equipment just can't be trusted. I didn't like the switches in every outlet (even though they're not mandatory, they are very common). And the way the plugs are so huuuge and always fall with the pins up do to the design so they are a foot-piercer.
In Ireland 1A fuses were available though even in the fuse kits in Tesco. With the same size as the others. And the practice doesn't always lead to actual safety, I've seen a lot of tinfoil and paperclips. Yes, really.
But the thing I really thought was the worst was the concept of having only one tap connected to the mains water line in the house, and having all the others fed by a huge dirty water tank in the attic, full of dead insects brewing away in the summer heat (yes even there it can get hot in summer). It seems like an ecological disaster and locals were always warning me to not drink the water from the bathroom or bedrooms taps. It's also a big possible cause of leaks. Here in Spain and in my home country of Holland we just feed all taps onto the mains.
But overall I tend to prefer EU standards rather than BS. The "Schuko" does have a few serious design flaws like the ability to plug it in upside-down so neutral and phase are reversed, but the French have found a solution for that :)
I think many cold water tank system in Britain have been removed in the last 20 years or so, as people install more efficient central heating / hot water systems.
No idea about Ireland.
(Here in Denmark there are switches on sockets. I find it useful on the rice cooker, which doesn't have its own switch and would otherwise need to be unplugged. The other sockets are generally left with the switch "on".)
Depends on the fuse time rating and the inrush current for the power supply (which can sometimes be more than 10A). Some 1A fuses might occasionally blow when you turn the unit on.
Hm yreah but if it's 10A it will be really short like < 100ms. A physical melt fuse should have no issues with that. Most general-purpose fuses are really slow.
If anyone is interested in having this type of real-time usage data for their own own home, I highly recommend IoTaWatt: https://iotawatt.com
It's a completely local energy monitor that you can install into your home's circuit breaker panel, and then view dashboards or read data via an API from a local web server running on-device. You choose how many sensors you want, but you can monitor your whole home as well as individual circuits.
For example, I track and trigger automations when my various appliances (laundry, dishwasher, microwave, etc) start/stop. It's very cool. Just be warned that it does require some research, basic understanding of electricity, and comfort working with high voltage mains connections if you plan to DIY it but I found it approachable and easy to setup.
> TCF seems to be closedly tied to Eclipse ecosystem. The Getting Started guide suggests several plugins for Eclipse as the main way to interact with tcf-agent. I tried installing these plugins on a new version of Eclipse and it is absolutely impossible. There are dependency issues everywhere and when you actually try to install the missing dependencies, Eclipse does not let you because they conflict with some other dependencies.
I laughed out loud at this part. Some things never changed I guess.
This is also what happens whenever I try to install anything that uses the package managers for python or perl. For some reason, these two always fail with messages about conflicting, non-existent, or failed-to-compile dependencies. I work in bioinformatics - everything is in python or perl. My life is pain.
Weird to see some micromuse thing listed as the service listed for 1534. I worked for them back in like 2006 and we got eaten by IBM/Tivoli and I don't believe they kept the name for anything? I always knew nobody really updated those but man, really nobody updates those.
1534 was the port used by the license manager (elmd - Elan license manager). The bane of many a Netcool installation until we joyfully ripped it out post IBM acquisition.
I think I was in Lowell for a few weeks helping out on some App Packs when I heard about the acquisition. Working with JFK? and another guy with a short nickname that escapes me right now. Wedge?
I know who JFK is— rad dude— but Wedge doesn’t ring a bell. I was in support though so my exposure to most of the dev crew was infrequent enough to make a lot of those memory recall threads pretty thin. I went to Dallas in 2006 to get the official Micromuse company training because we were basically still operating as Quallaby when I got hired. It was for… a week I think? Maybe two? Nice folks down there. Plus great barbecue for lunch and great tequila after work. Hard to argue with that.
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.
Awesome! I had some instances of "digging so deep into a fascinating problem that I forgot the initial reason I started digging" :)
It actually looks like a reasonable system overall. Maybe a bit bloated on the node.js side (what isn't?), but I wonder if they just had that toolchain already in place/experience with it, even though it's overkill for the system as-is. Or maybe they just googled how to do networking and copy/pasted the top Stack Overflow answer that included Socket.IO.
> 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...
Responding with disbelief seems a little over the top. It isn't typically easy to run wires in pre-built spaces. Sounds like a resilient design to me.
I recently got into microcontrollers and one of the most surprising things to me was the low cost and small size of ESP32s with wifi. Having grown up at a time when it wasn't unusual to buy a PCI card for your desktop computer that added wifi capability I had assumed that we'd still be looking at a target large device that goes for ~$20+ to get WiFi. Explicitly thinking about the ubiquity of cheap devices with wifi around me would immediately correct this view, but I had never done that and I'm sure many others haven't either
Not resiliant, because in the 10-20 year lifespan of a home electrical panel, at least one critical vulnerability is going to allow complete remote pwnage of that device. It's stupid IOT garbage that belongs in ewaste, especially with a trivial remote code execution mechanism.
Slightly surprisingly there's one still for sale. £385+VAT. "worth two code credits under the Code for Sustainable Homes." Further googling finds "The Government scrapped the Code for Sustainable Homes and the national net zero carbon homes standard in 2015".
I don't really get his point. Wifi is super cheap. You can get a full stm32 with builtin wifi for like $6 for a single one. Installing a cable would be far more expensive in labor.
He's a software engineer not a electrical engineer/electrician. Before I worked in building services I would never have imagined the astronomical price some contractors charge for labour.
Have you never assumed anything in your whole life?
I relate to this a lot. As part of my job, I'm regularly given IoT devices that do similar tasks, but from different manufacturers and with varying age ranges (new last year with a raspberry pi 4 inside, to something over a decade old with custom firmware on an ancient microcontroller).
I have to figure out how they work, and somehow coerce their data into a standard format before sending it to our server.
Often, they'll have a built-in mechanism for retrieving data programmatically, but it's usually too slow and sends data in large batches, so I end up needing to reverse engineer their socket IO + handlebars web UI for closer to real-time data streaming. It's a janky nightmare, but it's so satisfying once you make it work.
>More out of desperation than anything else, I decided to look at sshd config of the host and finally found the offending line. sshd_config had PermitRootLogin no line included, which is a very sensible security measure as long as you are not providing a full disk access to anyone on the network.
Enjoyed this article because I've wasted countless hours of my own getting into devices I bought or poking around networks I've airBnB'd at. I'm not as smart as the author but I found his whole approach relatable.
SIM cards and secure elements still use this, but it's arguably less Java than Javascript. Except that the trademark and tech (JavaCard) was owned by Sun, now Oracle. It's the basis of the claim, that gazillion devices run Java.
JavaCard is a massively trimmed down version which is more a dumbed down C (with no standardization, little documentation and no third-party tool support) which is essentially Java reduced to basic arithmetic operator, an arguably saner, much trimmed down standard library focusing on cryptography and most importantly no GC.
For a time, Java was set to be the 'everything everywhere' language, IIRC in some quarters the hype behind Java on everything was even bigger than Cloud, then Crypto, then AI.
The landlord had no idea what this is. There are no buttons or labels on the thing, just a tiny yellow light to let you know it has the power.
You move in and find a mysterious device on the wall that, at least to me, appears somewhat ominous and it's not obvious whether it may have a camera and possibly a microphone (the picture of it on the manual appears to show that it does have at least a camera)...
Roughly a year ago I moved into my new apartment.
...and you were perfectly fine with living in its presence for a year? When I saw the picture, my first thought was closer to "that's a telescreen", and I'd certainly try to find out more about it ASAP.
From what I can tell, this is an Android 5, but I am not exactly sure.
I believe those icons are from 4.1-4.3 - Lines up with the Linux kernel version being mid-2013. Android 5 was released in 2014.
As a landlord this is quite common. You buy through an estate, let through a letting agent and have very little idea what gizmos are installed. Until maybe something packs up and you have to pay for a new one.
>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.
I felt pretty bad about it, but my curiosity took over :) It was only the power for their Energy Manager though, not the power to the entire apartment!
In any case, I doubt they were actually using this Energy Manager thing anyway. The number one feature listed on websites selling these things is "Earn two code credits under the code for sustainable homes". I assume you do not need to teach people how to use the thing to earn these credits...
A fun read!
I feel compelled to say that all British (type G plugs) _have_ to be fused as the ring main has a maximum current of (typically) 30A yet the plug and socket maximum is 13A. So every appliance plug is fused, and the consumer unit has an RCD on most accessible circuits in addition to a circuit breaker.
Some plugs don't make the fuse obvious, but the traditional values are 1A, 3A, 5A, 7A, 10A and 13A (iirc -- for some reason!)
There are actually many features of the British and European wiring system that I think are really quite good. The device is closely related to a "smart meter", which are being slowly rolled out -- the UI is similar to those rolled out nationally, but it's a bit different.
Fuses in plugs in Britain are either 3A or 13A, by regulation. 5A used to be another value, but is no longer used (though replacement 5A fuses are easily available.)
I've never seen 7A or 10A fuses, and I was the kind of boy to rummage through my grandparent's workshops. ..
They are available in the sizes I mentioned, plus 2A – https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1683350.pdf – and your comment made me actually look up the regulation out of curiosity as I know I have seen some of those other sizes in the lab! The wiring regs are enforced in statute by The Plugs and Sockets (Etc) Statutory Instrument 1994 [1] which mandates the compliance of two British standards, BS 1362 and BS 1363 for fuses and plugs respectively. The exact wording of BS 1363 (at least the version of it I can access) is
> [...] all rewirable plugs shall be marked on the engagement surface with the rated current. All non-rewirable plugs shall be marked with the rated current of the fuse link fitted, which shall not exceed the value given in Table 2 for the appropriate size of flexible cord
Table 2 itself prescribes a maximum fuse rating of 3 A or "(5 A)" [see below] for a conductor cross-sectional area of 0.5 mm^2, and 13 A for all larger conductor areas (0.75, 1, 1.25, and 1.5 mm^2). It is entitled "Rated current and maximum fuse rating in normal use, and load for flexing and cord grip tests related to size of flexible cord"
> [...] The figure in brackets indicates the fuse rating when a non rewirable plug is used with certain types of equipment where the use
of a 5 A fuse link is necessary because of the high instantaneous inrush current
So there we go, I think – we're all sort of right. Thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole!
Ring circuits may have made sense in the past, but they really don't any more. It's basically impossible to test a ring circuit in place - you have to break the connection somewhere to ensure the ring is complete. That's a huge downside. They were conceived at a time when circuit breakers were expensive and wire was in short supply - neither is true now, yet people are still installing them.
The weirdest bit for me was when he ordered a 3am fuse from Amazon, rather than just wandering down to the corner shop for a little blister pack that has 13amp, 5amp and 3amp fuses. Usually just next to the sewing kits
Why don’t you use a 13A circuit breaker in UK? That’s what we do in the rest of the EU, I think.
There’s a main input to the house which usually is around 15A-30A , then we’ve got multiple sublines with individual circuit breakers, typically 10A or 16A.
I just read up about radial vs ring circuits; I had seen ring circuits only in industrial contexts here in Italy, so the fused approach makes sense I suppose.
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 decarbonisation point of view it's a real challenge - the only current path to low carbon living is through electrification of heating, cooking and transport.
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.
Yes! I started taking some notes when I was halfway through, that helped a lot with the thought reconstruction. There is no chance I would find these TCF links organically again
Ah, it's not just me that does this. I also start taking notes from the beginning now, otherwise when I go back to write it up for others I sometimes can't even replicate the starting conditions.
After reading this (very entertaining) article, I think I can guess why the fuse on his machine was missing. This is exactly what I would do, if I was met with this monstrosity!
Even if this device (presumably with known vulnerabilities) isn't directly reachable via the Internet, could the device be bumped off the WiFi and onto an impersonating AP, where the device can be taken over?
The photo on the retail box has a tablet camera hole. Does this particular unit have a camera and mic, placed in a living area?
> 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…
> Socket.IO! Wow, I honestly did not expect that. Client literally needs to receive 5 numbers from the server, Socket.IO seems to be a complete overkill for this usecase.
> The client code also looks very complicated for what it does. There are at least 6 RequireJS modules, all loading dynamically through different requests of course. There is Handlebars, Backbone.js, Underscore.js
I just kept getting more incredulous throughout this article. No way someone would put in that much effort for a device like this. The laziest option is usually the most common in software development. I guess in this case, it's not.
The bit about how this device gets it's "Always accurate time" is the best part:
The device itself does not seem to be connected to the internet at all.
Actually, the time on the device itself is entirely incorrect, somewhere in 2015. But when I open the web UI, it now shows the correct time, even without an initial 15 minute delay.
Turns out, they found out an even more innovative time sync mechanism. When you open the UI in the browser, they quickly redirect you to "/set-time/" + Date.now(). This sets a global variable in the Node.js app responsible for "now".
On a related note, I had a new boiler installed last year with Vaillant's smart controls. There's a little puck shaped 'control unit' with WiFi/radio which allows the app to talk to it, and it to talk to the thermostat.
Like most people in the UK, the boiler's in the garage. A brick rectangle separate from the house. Did Vaillant include an ethernet port? You bet they didn't. The support team suggested I installed WiFi in my garage, which definitely wasn't going to happen.
I had to get the installer back and he ran the cable through the wall so it's now inside and working fine - but how did this ever make it to market? No wonder the reviews are all terrible.
There's enough boilers in garages, lofts, the other side of the house, etc, once you overlap it with UK houses being brick, you get enough situations where getting WiFi from one place to another becomes a pain. A lot of the time, the WiFi AP is 30 cm from where the phone line came into the house when it was built (before the internet even existed), which is not optimally placed for coverage.
Fair. But I strongly suspect nearly every house with a garage has the boiler in it.
Edit. So having done a little research this probably isn't the case. Maybe it's a regional thing, all the (mostly suburban) houses I've lived in and visited, in the north west of England, are set up that way.
In the midlands the boiler would preferably be in the utility room (laundry room). The slight waste heat is appreciated there.
In London it's wherever the landlord's plumber can fit it, as he illegally subdivides the house into several flats. At least going by my experience as a student. Kitchen, bathroom, garage, outside wall...
I totally could have run a cable through the wall and installed an extra access point - I was planning on running the cable anyway to connect the control unit via ethernet, until I found that it didn't have one (yeah, I should have checked, I assumed it would).
I didn't really like the idea of having an access point in the garage just to service my boiler. Seems very wasteful.
As someone who works in IoT, I very much enjoyed your disbelief.
I'd place this right about in the middle in terms of useless complexity. There's a lot worse and a lot better.
A lot better usually only comes from bigger vendors that can afford dev teams with possible rotations.
As a small company or startup, good luck finding a successor to your embedded developer if they leave, so they just slap everyday tech on way overpowered hardware which makes it easier to find devs.
I was thinking about how the future software engineer to move into the house is probably more likely to curse him rather than thank him for making the server MORE vulnerable than it was before, by removing the SSH password.
The Freescale (NXP) i.MX28 series is the only possible SoC that has ARM9. It doesn't have any Android BSP IIRC. The screenshot looks like a modified AOSP of Android 4.x. How on earth can Android 4.x run on only 128MB-ish DRAM? So many questions are left here.
"The concrete description of what is going on here is spread atom-thin across several websites, all of which expect you to know the terminology. Each of these websites provides you with a tiny piece of the puzzle and you are expected to combine it together on your own."
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.
Heh, small world. They were briefly a client of ours back when I joined my current company in 2015. We were hired to develop a prototype PLC-based energy monitoring system for a cafe, based on the idea of profiling various devices' energy usage (and maybe mains harmonics?) so you could tell which devices were switching on and off. The project was already underway when I joined, so my involvement was limited to drilling some holes in enclosures.
I never really heard anything more from them after the project was complete. Interesting to see what else they did.
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/.
I had a similar experience when moving into my "smart apartment" 9 years ago and finding a wall-mounted Galaxy Tab 3. I went on to develop a one-click root to allow my neighbors to "free" their systems, too:
Putting the WiFi SSID and password on the side of the energy monitor sensor box allowed for this:
> The whole thing was quite dissapointing. However, I do have a few Raspberry Pico microcontrollers lying around at home. If I could connect to the WiFi network of the energy manager directly and get the data from the server, I could just extract kW consumption from the API, multiply it by a correct rate and then display it on some Grafana instance.
I remember when I rented a palace in Singapore, my landlord asked me to download an app called MyKNX to control the lights and blinds in the room. I dumped some packets, and found system is using tcp/ip and the KNX is standardized protocol.
The box is more like a PLC than “smart things”, so it doesn’t need internet to function.
It’s also supported by home-assistant. I want to get one when I’m building my own home.
I really hope we'll look back at this fad of android powered wifi domestic IoT devices one day and laugh about how silly it all was.
Not an IoT hater. I've worked for IoT companies, and there's a lot of very smart embedded engineers doing very cool things in the space. But an old android tablet installed in the wall with a WiFI point? oh dear.
To be fair, that particular Android device is still installed and at least marginally useful. How many other Android devices from that era can say that?
Probably a long shot, but would anyone happen to know the color scheme used by the author in the snippet of Python code showing an example of tcf-agent? I really like the mix of bold, italics, underline and shading to achieve a distinct syntax highlighting with such a limited color palette.
> tcf-agent is [...] probably the second biggest security vulnerability after passwordless root SSH.
I thought that passwordless SSH is actually a good idea in general for servers? Assuming, that is, that the public/private key login mechanism is used as the alternative to passwords.
That was so interesting because around 2015 they built some new apartment buildings in Malmö Sweden and they also included touch screens in every apartment.
Not the same system, but I wonder if that system is as abandoned today as this one was 8 years later.
I'm curious, how do people record the history of their adventures like this? I assume this doesn't all come from memory. And writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard. Or is it common?
Personally, I tend to create a master note for each project like this I dig into, and dump as much information into it as I can. This helps me keep track of what I’ve looked at and avoid retracing my steps too much, and in the end would be a good basis for a blog post.
I used to be able to write about things like this from memory, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to rely quite a bit more on journaling and using “2nd brain” tools like Obsidian.
One of the most useful habits I ever started is using Obsidian’s daily journal feature to jot things down every day:
- Things I’m working on that day
- How I’m feeling
- Ideas that pop up about projects
- References to useful sites / code snippets / various explorations
It’s one of the few tools I’ve found that lets me dump truly just about everything into it, and by the end of a project, I either have a nice collection of draft paragraphs to clean up in a blog post, or a nice future reference for myself when I want to do something similar in the future. And because of the automatic note-to-note connections that Obsidian builds, the daily journal always links back to the more concrete topic notes I’ve touched that day.
> writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard
It was only hard until I had established the habit. Now I can’t imagine not doing it because of the productivity gains that come with it. I get further on things because everything I do leaves behind a tangible bit of progress (in the form of a note) that I can pick back up later.
Keeping a logbook is a part of experimental physics. In grad school, I learned "If you don't write it down, it didn't happen."
And a diary is easy and fun - just a sentence or two every day (even on a wall calendar) reminds you of experiences, travels, travails, and the daily whatnot of life.
Useful? Sure! My lab notebook and home diary were prime ingredients in writing m'book, The Cuckoo's Egg.
This was an incredible read! I'm diving into my own hobbyist IoT project and it was super interesting to see how this spelunk turned out. The extra bits about NetThings exploits are the icing on the cake!
Interesting point about not having internet access: these smart meters typically report usage to the energy supplier for billing. I’d go look for a mobile network connection, maybe still up?
Very nostalgic, I have developed several apps before with Lollipop and was surprised with their choice of using WebView. I believe they set the NetThings app as a “launcher” app?
The launcher with its Holo tabs and the icon style look more like Android 4.something (I to K) to me, by the way. Android 5 (L) was the first Material Design release (the one[1] that had actual coherent principles behind it).
Yeah given the holoyolo look it's almost certainly ICS or jelly bean. I think kitkat's launcher looked a bit different, it didn't have the tabs: by then they had moved from tron blue to white.
I wonder if the previous tenant removed the fuse to stop the box broadcasting a wifi signal. In an apartment block the 2.4ghz band will already be congested!
If the live and neutral cables of your electricity supply are seperate and accessible, you can buy a meter that measures power use with a clamp (loop) that fits around the live cable. Perfectly safe, they were often given away by electric companies in Britain in the 2010s to encourage thriftiness.
Honestly, this is the main reason¹ I just haven't got into IoT much as I love the idea in theory. I don't want an adversarial relationship with the electronics I'm putting in the house, so I just don't.
I want my IoT to work off-line with no talking to the Internet unless I explicitly let it for some reason. I want it to interoperate with other things and not just some shitty app on my phone - I don't carry my phone with me around the house all the time and it's a PITA anyway.
I could go the DIY route and bust out the soldering iron and some ESPHome compatible chips, but that's not my passion and life is too bloody short. And even if I did I'd still have strong reservations doing DIY around the 240V AC mains power.
¹ That, and the first thing I'd automate is light switches², but the regulations around mains power wiring in Australia are pretty stringent and the only AES certified IoT light switches I've seen look like I would have and adversarial relationship with and can only be controlled by a shitty app.
² Automating light bulbs themselves is a sub-optimal solution in most circumstances, in my opinion. Perhaps if I wanted to control the colour, but not for on, off and brightness. If I did that it would just make me feel sad.
You can go far using only Zigbee or Z-Wave devices with a Home Assistant server, and then nothing (but the server) has to be networked.
As for switches vs. bulbs, at this point I can't go back to the life I led before picking up a bunch of Hue White Ambiance bulbs and having HA automatically adjust the color temperature throughout the day.
Hey Nikita, that was an excellent read. It felt like a pivotal scene in a movie that would change the course of the succeeding narrative. I envy the ability to write so nicely and clearly, making it enjoyable for most generally technical people and keeping us engaged. I will watch out for more articles.
I was surprised someone would order this from Amazon, rather than get one from the nearest convenience shop or supermarket. Those places only sell the normal thing for local use.
I was further surprised that someone would be worried about installing the fuse. Is he also worried about plugging things in generally?
I see the recommendation every so often to buy a fuse locally, but I don’t live in Akihabara.
I HAVE to buy online electronic components, and usually it ends up being Amazon, because other national suppliers insist on charging $15 for courier shipping on a $2 part.
The person lives in an apartment in Britain. Apartments are only built in towns and cities, and are generally within walking distance of convenience shops and supermarkets.
Every plug in Britain has a fuse, so they are about as easy to buy as replacement light bulbs. Probably on the same shelf.
British household electrical systems are normally built as one large ring circuit, originally in order to save copper after WW2.
This means you don't have breakers for each branch circuit (there are no branch circuits), just the single mains breaker for the house. This single breaker is too large to trip from a short from occuring in the smaller wires inside an appliance.
So each plug (or hardwired device) needs it's own dedicated smaller fuse instead.
Houses built post-1960s (with more than one floor) will have more than one socket ring each protected by a circuit breaker at the distribution board, usually one per floor for general sockets, with a separate one for the kitchen, and usually individual 32A breakers for things like electric ovens and hobs.
Lighting rings are also separate, usually on 6A breakers. We cheap out on cable by not running neutrals to the switches, which causes nerds headaches when they want to install generic smart light switches.
My house is reasonably large (worked hard, all my own money) and has a 20-way distribution board with separate socket and light rings for groups of rooms. It’s handy for isolation purposes.
More recent builds’ rings will be protected by a combination of MCBs and RCDs, or individual RCBOs (now the cost has come down) which combine the two functions and is ultimately the safest option for most situations.
Individually fusing plugs (and in the case of high-draw appliances like washing machines and dryers, protecting with a fused socket) is still a very good idea. And don’t get me started on earthing practices in other countries…
To add: Many pre-90s buildings don’t even have circuit breakers, they have fuse boxes with fuse wire (different fuse to the one being talked about). Literally just a piece of wire that burns out at a certain current and breaks the connection. You “reset” it by putting a new piece of wire in.
The second fuse at the plug allows using a narrower gauge of wire in the device’s cord. Let’s say you have a lamp with a 3A fuse, the cord only needs to be able to handle 3A, so then it can be lighter and cheaper. If it had to handle the same amperage as the circuit it’s plugged into then it would be seriously impractical and expensive.
Of course there are modern ways of solving this but fuses are dirt cheap and already implemented.
My last place had a 1970s Wylex board, which at least had plug-in MCB modules that replaced the fuse wire holders and can be reset. However given you can still buy fuse wire in DIY stores there still must be installations out there that need it. Shudder.
I recently replaced the old fusewire plugs with MCB modules. Really didn't fancy trying to wind a bit of wire around the terminals in the cellar in the dark :)
Let’s say you desperately need a cup of tea. So you buy a cheap 4-way extension cable and 4 electric kettles. You fill all the kettles and turn them on at the same time for maximum tea-making throughput.
The combined load of all the kettles exceeds the rating of the extension cable.
With a fuse: the fuse in the extension cable plug blows, you buy another fuse, and learn some patience.
Without a fuse: the extension cable overheats and causes a fire, your house burns down, and worst of all you still don’t have any tea.
In the UK, there's typically one ring circuit and one lighting circuit per storey, a separate ring circuit for the kitchen, and dedicated circuits for large current draws such as an electric oven or hob, shower, or immersion heater.
Each circuit would have a dedicated MCB (Miniature Circuit Breaker) which will trip if too much current is drawn. The standard MCB rating for a ring circuit in the UK is 32A.
Thanks for clarifying. I took the fuse in the article to mean something like an appliance fuse, which for some reason, was conveniently located in an accessible place.
That's what immediately stood out to me, why the hell would you order it from Amazon instead of literally driving 5 minutes down the road to pick one up from any electronics or hardware store? what a horribly inefficient way to do things
For US readers:
The big orange or blue store are probably better for you for anything electric that would go in your walls. I went down a rabbit hole of amazon clones of popular brand things like switches/dimmers/outlets and what I found is dubious UL certificates shared by multiple "brands".
WiFi is not only reasonable but preferable. Because if a cat5 cable is going to be ran, it'll be done by an electrician. And when they get to the end of a spool, they will break out the wire nuts and splice away. I've seen it first hand.
It's a little more expensive but it's always worth it to get a low voltage specialist to run your ethernet. To an electrician a conductor is just a conductor no matter how you splice it.
Small bit about that Wi-Fi remark. Yes in your case it’s close to the server but Wi-Fi lets you mount the touchscreen anywhere. Wi-Fi completely makes sense here.
Absolutely. Try retrofitting this into a multi unit home and "just run a digital data cable up there". With some bad luck, this can easily cost as much as the whole unit.
I don't like getting everything on WiFi, too. OTOH I have ~30 devices on an VLAN isolated IoT WiFi network. This easily saved us a 4 digit expense and a lot of time(!) as opposed to installing new additional wire (redoing all the old ones was bad enough). Plus, I can do dumb stuff like control my office's window blinds individually, which is nice when only one of them has the sun blinding me while using the PC (temporary desk location due to ongoing renovations).
The equivalent energy monitoring device in my flat uses an RF link (no idea what kind, I haven't investigated further) to talk to its base station. Wireless seems fine, but WiFi itself seems like overkill.
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 electricity than all my lights use for a month”.
I have an inverter and solar panels in my place (very common now in South Africa middle class homes due to unreliable electricity producer) and I can see a full history of electricity usage.
It’s easy for me to see where I can improve my efficiency or why my consumption was so high.
It’s still only an overall figure though, so you have to do an informed assumption as to what caused the consumption.
For example it’s obvious that the 3kw draw for about an hour or so after I shower is the geyser heating itself back up. I can see from the usage stats that my battery was depleted from the night, that the solar production is still low due to my showering in the early morning and that the energy was thus coming from the grid (the inverter records all these figures).
It is then obvious that I can very simply save money on electricity by putting a timer on my geyser so that it only heats after 10am or so, once the sun is high enough for solar production to cover the energy usage.
Now I just wish I had something as convenient for monitoring water consumption.