Yellow EnergyGuide stickers, how accurate should they be?

en

r

nice

the

The

...

in

I dont think tis about not caring, its more about the costs involved in repeatedly testing a few of every component as a new batch comes into the factory. Its not cheap.

ck.

nd

h e

No, its done partly because its more efficient. To use the house's stored hot water would mean drawing off a lot more hw from the cylinder than the machine would otherwise use. HW may be heated more efficiently per litre of hot, but if you use 4x as much there's no gain.

Very few houses have recirculating hw here

t .

That doesnt make it an issue in the genuine sense of being worth correcting for engineering reasons.

NT

Don't discount the foreign brands. I am all for buying local and domestic stuff where possible. But I am not being held over the barrel. If the quality is shoddy or prices are outrageous I will buy foreign.

They do, but only for some products.

Almost every business does that pushing of high-profit low-service products. Even IEEE, where I receive numerous life insurance mailers a year but they can't figure out how to obtain really useful insurance for their members, like useful PL coverage that doesn't exclude lots of stuff.

Yup. Happened right here in Sacramento :-(

It's amazing how many of those big box stores have croaked during the recession. 10mi from here is a newly constructed BestBuy. It operated for a very short time. Sits empty for years.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

Not much testing needed, usually. For example, the alternator kept getting loose and falling off. Reason: They had it on an aluminum bracket. That's a design flaw that just about any smart consultant would have pointed out in five minutes. I made my own from steel, probably was cheaper than what they had -> problem solved. That's just one example. Quality is mostly in the design, it can't be tested into a product.

And that's the problem. We need smart recirc. But all this home automation is just talk. Always has been :-(

It does make sense for sales reasons. For example, many offices aren't allowed to buy it if it doesn't have such rating. Even more so for public entities. That means hardcore lost revenue, companies that don't look into this will be leaving lots of money on the table.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

Isn't that the classic case where you have a whole bunch of small players who largely figure that, unless that one universal automation standard is what

*they* already have developed, they stand to lose more than they might win by trying to rally support for one such universal standard? I.e., they'd rather try to get someone to buy one of their widgets and thereafter profit from vendor lock-in than promote a system every anyone's widget could talk to any other's, at which point you have to compete on features, reliability, and price?

See, e.g., schematic capture/PCB standards...!

In Europe this would be the kind of thing that the government would like dictate, but of course that has plenty of problems as well.

It plain and simple greed. Exorbitant license fees, secrecy, closed circles, all that meant doom for such standards.

Governments over there only used to dictate telco standards. Good examples how it can be done successfully are RS232, RS422, RS485, Ethernet, WLAN. But anything powerline was so far either closed standard or technically inadequate like X10.

In the US we have it much easier, we don't need to use PLC. We are allowed up to 1W on 900MHz. That penetrates a whole lot of walls. At one client we got a whopping mile out of it, in a fairly built-out area that was not particularly RF-friendly.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

Yep.

I forgive X10 a bit given as how it was initially designed back in the '70s, but it has been disappointing that they didn't make it that much more robust over time here.

There actually are a lot of very nice systems used for home automation at the high end of the market these days (...iPads have become popular lately as universal remotes for these systems!); it's the middle class that's been left out of anything both inexpensive and robust.

Personally I'd probalby trust PLC more than I would wireless, at least assuming all my PLC stuff was on the same phase. :-)

---Joel

Government would dictate OrCAD Crapture as the "standard" ;-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Of course the ironic thing there is that Cadence themselves had to largley kill off PSpice Schematics for being better than Capture!

I don't know if OrCAD still supports PSpice Schematics. I know I insisted on it for many years, until PSpice (simulator) itself was no longer updated at each "update". Then I stopped paying ;-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I was just a kid back then but one thing I did know, that you don't use an AM on/off protocol over a noisy connection. They should have known that, too.

Sure, in the five-digit Dollar range you can get stuff that works :-)

After testing homeplug devices I don't. It couldn't even get across this office. If you have surge protectors in the house the whole concept falls off the rocker.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

So what works? At my rickety old age I'd like to remote control my spa bubbles ;-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

They set the stage for the entire electronics industry cranking out devices that "pretty much" work. :-)

Yep... and if you're building a seven-digit house, that's down close to the noise!

Well, don't pretend it doesn't happen! It does, and they don't seem to care. I certainly will never buy another Whirlpool appliance or anything Chrysler. Not going to happen.

Likely the reason we have little else here outside electricity. There is gas around but not in any of the newer developments. I gave LP, but not because it's cheap. It isn't.

You'd have to have a smart washer, too. Recirc pumps waste heat and cost more to install. Sure, it's better than a mile of cold copper to the washing machine, but don't do that. ;-) Perhaps clothes washers should have heaters, like dishwashers.

Ideally I'd want to make a megabuck/year and pay no taxes.

The US buys into a lot of Europeon fairy dust. Even more since Obummer.

BTW, fridges should have a PF pretty close to unity. The motor is pretty well matched to the *known* load.

They were, but that's pretty much been squashed.

Gass is a thief. He's done himself more harm than anyone should be able to survive.

CPSC

It won't be.

Yeah, they're not allowed to use dado blades (the arbors are too short to accept them). They might hurt themselves doing something useful. Europeons really are sheep.

I was reading the FTDI FT232R spec today. I thought it had a pretty good MTTF of 11162037 hours (1274.2051 years). That's the QFP part. The QFN is *much* worse at 4464815 hours (509.6821 years). ;-)

Page 17:

He'd be smarter to work on cost-reducing the technology and then licensing it at "reasonable" prices to all the major manufacturers, IMO... but of course these days I guess anyone who's out to make a profit contemplates trying to get the government to mandate the use of their specific widget, giving them a virtual printing press for money. (See., e.g., HD Radio, cane sugar tariffs, etc...)

(And hey, who's to blame them? If the Federal Reserve effectively gets to print money, why not you or me!?)

:-)

And apparently there's always a riving knife on a European table saw, whereas they're optional in the U.S... although even my little contractor-grade saw has one.

---Joel

They're certainly free to offer them. Car manufacturers do.

That happened with my first VCR, in '78. It did cost $750, but they wanted $200/year for an extended warranty. They kept telling me that it cost $100 just to put it on the bench for diagnostics. I asked if they really failed twice a year. I was assured they didn't but it was still a good deal.

But you don't even want a "smart" washing machine. ;-) You really want some fancy electroinc thing buried in the plumbing?

How many public entities buy residential washing machines?