Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
car alternators are able to be repurposed as three-phase motors or generators.
That's true of most designs of motors/generators. Spin the shaft; it generates electricity. Add electricity; the shaft spins. It may be designed to work better one way than the other, but it will do both.
In fact, they typically do both at the same time. The spinning shaft of a motor generates a voltage (called "back EMF" — EMF is an old-fashioned term for voltage) that opposes the voltage you're driving it with. This is the main thing that limits the current draw, torque, and speed of the motor. The faster the motor spins, the more back EMF it generates, and the less current flows through the motor to generate torque and make it spin faster. This is also the reason the starting current of a motor is so much higher than its running current; when it's starting, it isn't spinning to generate the back EMF.
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I have NFC what the voltage limits are on an alternator converted to three-phase motor are.
I haven't either, but I'd guess it's limited mostly by the maximum current the windings can handle, which for an automotive alternator should be pretty high.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
That's true of most designs of motors/generators. Spin the shaft; it generates electricity. Add electricity; the shaft spins. It may be designed to work better one way than the other, but it will do both.
Well, yes. But the part that people may not realize is that an alternator that produces DC voltage can be converted to a three-phase motor or generator by removing the diode pack. It was one of those things that when I saw it pointed out made a lot of sense but I had not considered before.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
After watching the video I can be pretty certain what the issue is that caused him to quit. I would almost guarantee that it is the buck converter he is using. He mentions at the beginning that it will limit current, and he quits the project (for now) because it cuts out almost instantly, requiring him to turn it off and back on again for it to restart.
Well, you can't really limit current and keep voltage up. When a power supply "limits current" it does so by reducing voltage to keep the current below a set limit. So when the voltage collapses to limit current it is probably throwing the microcontroller or whatever circuitry in the ESC for a loop, requiring a reset.
Get rid of the buck converter and it may work. He added it to attempt to limit the speed for his kid. Or perhaps to accommodate the voltage requirements of the improvised three-phase motor or the ESC. I have NFC what the voltage limits are on an alternator converted to three-phase motor are.
I've seen a bunch of repurposed alternator-engines back out in bumfuck nowhere country where I'm from. Plenty of access to shitty controllers from ancient burned out farm equipment too.
Farmers are pretty good att frankencobbling together rubbish into "working" contraptions.
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@Carnage if you want to go down an interesting rabbit hole search for "microhydropower" on YouTube. People with natural water sources near an elevation drop have made their own small hydropower setups that are pretty cool. Some fellow that I cannot remember the name or business name of makes custom machined impellers and generators for your specific head and flow rate and I've seen people that are getting 500+ watts continuous output for a relatively small capital investment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L16s6aUJ0ns
~330w output, 5.9 year ROI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82SVeVXKcA
530w, I don't think they mention the ROI for his.
The power outputs aren't huge, but when you consider that is 24/7/365, for the most part, they would be very roughly equivalent to a solar power setup of twice the wattage. Not everyone has the terrain and land to be able to use one but for those that do it seems like a pretty cool alternative to solar.
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@Polygeekery I'd absolutely get one too if I could. Unfortunately, all the places where it's possible are also places where I don't want to live.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Carnage if you want to go down an interesting rabbit hole search for "microhydropower" on YouTube. People with natural water sources near an elevation drop have made their own small hydropower setups that are pretty cool. Some fellow that I cannot remember the name or business name of makes custom machined impellers and generators for your specific head and flow rate and I've seen people that are getting 500+ watts continuous output for a relatively small capital investment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L16s6aUJ0ns
~330w output, 5.9 year ROI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V82SVeVXKcA
530w, I don't think they mention the ROI for his.
The power outputs aren't huge, but when you consider that is 24/7/365, for the most part, they would be very roughly equivalent to a solar power setup of twice the wattage. Not everyone has the terrain and land to be able to use one but for those that do it seems like a pretty cool alternative to solar.
Yep. I've built one of those contraptions as a kid. It was of the quality you'd expect from a 10 year old, so not in the least bit impressive, but it could power lamps in an illicit tree house in the middle of a forrest. I think it broke in the first autumn storm.
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@Carnage said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Yep. I've built one of those contraptions as a kid. It was of the quality you'd expect from a 10 year old, so not in the least bit impressive, but it could power lamps in an illicit tree house in the middle of a forrest. I think it broke in the first autumn storm.
I saw one where a guy did an experiment with his kids using their rain gutters as a water source and constructed their own generator with a repurposed electric motor and, IIRC, a 3D printed turbine. I think it would only light a small bulb, but was a pretty cool experiment and educational for the kids.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
useful part is that car alternators are able to be repurposed as three-phase motors
Oh right... thanks! Proper bandsaws ain't cheap, so this is on my list of projects now.
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@Polygeekery pass, this is the opposite of irresponsible.
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@Gribnit said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
useful part is that car alternators are able to be repurposed as three-phase motors
Oh right... thanks! Proper bandsaws ain't cheap, so this is on my list of projects now.
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Today I worked out in the yard and garage almost all day. Towards the end of the day I noticed that the house seemed warm. At around 10pm as I was wrapping up I knew the house was warmer than it should be. I check the thermostat and it is set to 72F but the actual temperature is 81F. Ruh-roh.
The a/c condenser unit isn't running. Well, we've found the problem. Now why isn't it running? It has an old school fuse holder disconnect. I pull it and one leg has no continuity across the fuse. Replace the fuse, pop it back in and it tries to start and kicks out.
Houston, we have a problem.
It was over 90F today and we're supposed to host some people tomorrow. I can't sleep well if it is hot. This shit needs fixed.
I grab a long steel rule from the drawer in the garage, pull the fuses to reset the thermal overload, wait a bit, pop it back in and give the fan a good spin with the metal rule and it takes off and runs. No, you don't have to tell me how bad of an idea it was to stick a metal object in to do that was. I know. It was my risk to take.
Fan spins, next step once it is up to speed should be to start the compressor. The outdoor lights dim and I hear a hum and it tries to start but doesn't.
Goddamnit.
I disconnect everything again and pull the capacitor. 40/5 microfarad, 370V. I certainly don't have anything like that in my parts box. I take it downstairs and test it. It's testing at about 1/3 microfarad on both legs. Due to the hermetically sealed nature of the compressor I can't kickstart it like I did with the fan.
I check the websites of the big box stores. They don't stock HVAC capacitors. I could probably get someone out first thing in the morning but I don't want to write that kind of check for a $18 capacitor. Sunday emergency calls are expensive. I ordered the capacitor off of Amazon and had started to resign myself to a night of crappy sleep and no o a/c for tomorrow when I look over and see my table saw.
"Hmmmmmmm, it runs off 220V and has a capacitor start motor." 
I wheel it out from it's resting place, grab a 1/2" socket and ratchet and a few minutes later the motor is out of its hiding spot and on top of the table saw. I open up the little-whatever-you-call-them that holds the capacitors. 40 microfarad 370V.
:burns_excellent:
I made up a couple of leads out of crimp terminals and some 14ga wire I found, scab it in place of the compressor leg of the capacitor, crossed my fingers that nothing went sideways, popped the disconnect back in and gave the condenser fan a kickstart with the metal rule. The fan whirred to life, the compressor buzzed to life and the house is getting back to a livable state again.
I was unable to find anything remotely close to a 5 microfarad capacitor (I found 0.75 microfarad and 300 microfarad, but nothing in between) anywhere close to the right voltage rating so it still needs a bump to get going but it will get us by until the replacement capacitor arrives sometime Monday.
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74F by the time I woke up. Even though it was still 80F by the time I fell asleep last night just having the a/c running and knocking down the humidity made it a lot more livable. When the a/c eventually does kick off I just have to remember to shut if off at the thermostat and then when it's picked up a couple of degrees and will run for a bit I can turn it back on and kickstart the fan motor.
A minor inconvenience compared to writing a $500-$1,000 check for a $18 capacitor and getting hounded by a salesperson all week to replace a perfectly good a/c unit.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
knocking down the humidity
Yeah, in a humid climate this is half the battle.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
When the a/c eventually does kick off
Hasn't happened yet. 13 hours and counting. Electric meter goes brrrrrrr.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
No, you don't have to tell me how bad of an idea it was to stick a metal object in to do that was. I know. It was my risk to take
Checks out for you.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I ordered the capacitor off of Amazon
By "capacitor", do you mean just a plain capacitor, or is there some kind of special-purpose electronics package integrated?
Because, if we're talking about a plain capacitor, I'd rather buy it from Digikey or some other proper components supplier.
You could take your pick of specced operating hours. Have a proper datasheet for the part. Etc..
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@acrow said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I ordered the capacitor off of Amazon
By "capacitor", do you mean just a plain capacitor, or is there some kind of special-purpose electronics package integrated?
Because, if we're talking about a plain capacitor, I'd rather buy it from Digikey or some other proper components supplier.
You could take your pick of specced operating hours. Have a proper datasheet for the part. Etc..Sounds like he needed a motor run capacitor with two different ones integrated in one housing (hence the 40 µF / 5 µF rating) for it to fit right.
You can always find substitutes, but finding one which fits in the exact same spot on the machine is easier if somebody sells a part specifically for your brand of device and guarantees to sell only perfectly compatible parts.
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@acrow said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
By "capacitor", do you mean just a plain capacitor, or is there some kind of special-purpose electronics package integrated?
Because, if we're talking about a plain capacitor, I'd rather buy it from Digikey or some other proper components supplier.
You could take your pick of specced operating hours. Have a proper datasheet for the part. Etc..@JBert nailed it.
Some (most?) HVAC condensers have a three-leg capacitor for the motors in them. 40 µF for the compressor, 5 µF for the fan with a common leg for the third connection. Older condensers have two separate capacitors. In this particular case the capacitor is round and there is a hole in the contactor housing that it slips through that precisely fits the diameter of the capacitor housing and the capacitor rests on its rim. It is a fairly specific part.
They are pretty standardized it seems. To be fair, this was the first time I had seen a capacitor packaged like this. Hell, when I first took it apart and saw that the capacitor had three connection terminals on top of it I had a bit of a
moment because it made no sense until I realized what they had done.All of this reminded me of last summer. We were at a friend's house one weekend and their air conditioner had stopped working. They were going to have to wait until Monday at the earliest for someone to come out and take a look at it. I suggested to the husband that we take a quick look at it to see if we could do anything and get them cooled off. He looked at me like I had just asked him if we could try to perform literal magic. For most condenser units the fan is held on the top with 3-4 sheet metal screws. We pulled it off and it was fairly stiff, the bearings had started to fail. A liberal dose of oil, rotating the fan by hand, some more oil, eventually it limbered up and worked for the rest of the weekend. It gave up the ghost again that Monday morning but it got them through the weekend.
This shit isn't rocket surgery, although designing HVAC systems is pretty close. But the mechanicals once installed are fairly simple.
2-3 years ago we had our furnace stop working on December 23rd (IIRC). I pulled the side panel and gave it a quick once over and saw that a relay on the controller board was pretty crispy looking. I took a photo of it so I could remember how everything was connected, pulled the board, went looking through my parts and found an equivalent relay and 5 minutes with a soldering iron had the relay swapped out and the furnace was working again. Just now as I was writing this I realized that I went ahead and ordered a new controller board with the expectation that my repair would fail at some point but that I still have the board and have never had to install it.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
2-3 years ago we had our furnace stop working on December 23rd (IIRC).
20-ish years ago, ours stopped on the 24th, Christmas Eve, in the middle of the night. The only thing open was a 24-hour Walgreens. I bought every fireplace log they had in the store. The house was still cold everywhere except directly in front of the fireplace, but it got us through the night.
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@HardwareGeek for a while we were on a real bender of appliances failing on xmas break. Either the year before or the year after the furnace shit itself I noticed water around the water heater and ended up having to replace it as part of my xmas break. The one good part of that is that the person who installed the water heater that needed replaced put it in the dumbest place possible and it made a large part of the mechanicals area effectively useless. So when I did that I took out an unused water softener and moved the water heater to a place that made sense and made it so that I could build 8' of shelving in a place that it was previously impossible to do so.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
but it got us through the night.
Then it's alright. It's alright.
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@Polygeekery HVAC systems seem to have clocks in them. They always fail on weekends or holidays.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery HVAC systems seem to have clocks in them. They always fail on weekends or holidays.
More than 2/5 of absenteeism occurs within 1 day of a weekend or holiday, as well.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The house was still cold everywhere except directly in front of the fireplace, but it got us through the night.
Fireplaces match the Christmas spirit much better than furnaces
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The house was still cold everywhere except directly in front of the fireplace, but it got us through the night.
That is mostly a function of how the fireplace works. Unless you have a fireplace insert that has supply and exhaust separate from the home then it has to draw air from inside the home for combustion and then exhaust that out of the chimney. So the whole time you are burning a fire inside of your fireplace it is drawing outside air through all of the tiny holes and drafts that are a part of every house. While you are warming one room with radiant heat from the fire it is making the entire rest of your home colder.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
While you are warming one room with radiant heat from the fire it is making the entire rest of your home colder.
And the radiant heat wasn't really effective very far from the fire. Inverse square law. 5-6 feet was about the limit of noticeable effect.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
While you are warming one room with radiant heat from the fire it is making the entire rest of your home colder.
And the radiant heat wasn't really effective very far from the fire. Inverse square law. 5-6 feet was about the limit of noticeable effect.
You can add a thermal mass to absorb the exhaust heat and redistribute from that, if you have a good place to put a 10-ton mass.
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@Gribnit said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
You can add a thermal mass to absorb the exhaust heat and redistribute from that, if you have a good place to put a 10-ton mass.
I remember seeing an article or video where someone had put a bunch of copper tubing in their chimney that they circulated water through to recapture the heat that would normally be wasted out of the chimney. ISTR that it may have been Jamie Hyneman?
That is a bit of a dangerous tight rope to walk though, because as you cool the air you also reduce its ability to carry waste products away (which lots of people refer to as "creosote") and as you drop the temperature you also reduce the airflow velocity that carries away smoke and all the stuff that could kill you. I remember back in the day my father had made a nifty woodburning heater for his shop that had a secondary heat exchanger which worked really well but would occasionally catch fire internally and glow red hot as it burned off the creosote build up inside of it. I shudder to think what could happen if that happened in a residential fireplace chimney.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
worked really well but would occasionally catch fire internally and glow red hot as it burned
I can see your pyromaniac tendencies are hereditary
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
I open up the little-whatever-you-call-them that holds the capacitors.
That motor part goes by the delightful name, "peckerhead".
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
as you drop the temperature you also reduce the airflow velocity that carries away smoke and all the stuff that could kill you.
You could work around that with a forced draft, which could be injected after the secondary heat exchanger. Steam locomotives used a jet of steam from the boiler (or compressed air when starting the fire, before the boiler was hot) to force the exhaust gasses up the smoke stack when there insufficient natural draft, like when the exhaust was impeded by the roof of a tunnel or the fire wasn't yet hot enough to create its own draft. A duct could direct high-velocity air upward through the chimney, which would pull the exhaust gasses up the chimney with it.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
as you drop the temperature you also reduce the airflow velocity that carries away smoke and all the stuff that could kill you.
You could work around that with a forced draft, which could be injected after the secondary heat exchanger. Steam locomotives used a jet of steam from the boiler (or compressed air when starting the fire, before the boiler was hot) to force the exhaust gasses up the smoke stack when there insufficient natural draft, like when the exhaust was impeded by the roof of a tunnel or the fire wasn't yet hot enough to create its own draft. A duct could direct high-velocity air upward through the chimney, which would pull the exhaust gasses up the chimney with it.
The mitigation on the setup I saw was very, very strong draw, I think using optimized chimney sizing and placement and I recall with added chimney height.
We used to burn 5-gallon tubs in it n'shit. Couldn't smell anything.
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@Gribnit said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
very, very strong draw, I think using optimized chimney sizing and placement and I recall with added chimney height.
I don't know about other optimization of other chimney parameters, but taller chimney does help. In this case, though, for an ordinary household fireplace, you mostly just want it out of your own house. (As someone with occasional asthma-like symptoms, I don't really want it lingering around the neighborhood, either, but there's not much I can do about that, other than going full California and banning fireplaces altogether.) And a household fireplace doesn't really burn hot enough to ensure a "very, very strong" draw even with a good chimney — adequate, but not super-strong.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
other than going full California and banning fireplaces altogether
Doesn't help. We just burn 100s of thousands of acres instead. (I've been lucky so far - the winds have kept the smoke away from this area)
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@dcon The entire state is a giant fireplace. It's just too bad Sac-o-tomatoes isn't in a heavily-forested part of the state.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
2-3 years ago we had our furnace stop working on December 23rd (IIRC).
20-ish years ago, ours stopped on the 24th, Christmas Eve, in the middle of the night. The only thing open was a 24-hour Walgreens. I bought every fireplace log they had in the store. The house was still cold everywhere except directly in front of the fireplace, but it got us through the night.
I can't sleep at night and as typical of NYC apartments we have steam heat. Some rooms have a radiator (can be on or off), others just a pipe (always
oneon).We have our radiator off because it would be unbearably warm during the winter when it is on. Opening the window and fans just don't do it.
So we leave it off. Which means it gets really cold in the winter. While working from home, I've worn layers of cold gear, sweatshirts, hat, and finger-less gloves (though before my job changed locations, I had to do that there for a while).
Easier to put on more clothing, blankets, etc. when cold than have no ability to take more off when wearing barely
anything when too hot.I've always teased my friends, (especially when they are Hispanic or black), that my people come from a cold environment...
Upstate New York.
edit: grammar, I blame tequila or
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
8' of shelving
Living in NYC, I covet shelving. Any time my husband
stalks about moving things around and says something about removing a shelving unit, I have panic attacks.Edit: I only have one husband.
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@Polygeekery said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The house was still cold everywhere except directly in front of the fireplace, but it got us through the night.
That is mostly a function of how the fireplace works. Unless you have a fireplace insert that has supply and exhaust separate from the home then it has to draw air from inside the home for combustion and then exhaust that out of the chimney. So the whole time you are burning a fire inside of your fireplace it is drawing outside air through all of the tiny holes and drafts that are a part of every house. While you are warming one room with radiant heat from the fire it is making the entire rest of your home colder.
Yeah, when my parents' house had a wood burning stove, my bedroom was on the opposite side of the house.
**When I was that young I had fewer sleep issues.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@Polygeekery HVAC systems seem to have clocks in them. They always fail on weekends or holidays.
House usage patterns change on weekends and holidays. For a system slowly eking towards failure, it's the last straw that breaks the camel's back.
The proper way to prevent it would be to do regularly scheduled maintenance. Like, say, changing the fans and capacitor when their rated hours are up. But
usually.It'd be nice if these systems also had a bit more monitoring built-in. A fan bearing that's going to give up will show up as drastically increased power consumption well before it fails. But
and , so it's not usually done either.
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@HardwareGeek Most fireplaces in Finland actually circulate the air in a channel formed from the fireplace's bricks. The fireplace absorbs a lot more heat this way, and has enough mass to keep radiating during the night. Nobody keeps the fire going during the night here; it's always burnt out early in the evening, and then we close the chimney for the night.
Image of a small fireplace for the principle:
Image of a properly sized fireplace for a normal family house:
Notice the mass. There should also be a couple more hatches on the other side for cleaning the circulation channel.
The mechanism for closing the chimney for the night. Shown here, because apparently not every country has them. They just let the heat out the chimney at night
:
About the chimney.
A brick chimney need not be much more than 2 meters to reliably suck the smoke out. Though a short one is a pain to get going in the fall, if it's paired with a very heavy fireplace. Them memories of holding a fan on top of a chimney to jump-start it...
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
And the radiant heat wasn't really effective very far from the fire. Inverse square law. 5-6 feet was about the limit of noticeable effect.
Good fireplaces have special ducting and baffles so that they move plenty of heat into the room by convection without also sending the smoke there.
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@dkf said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
And the radiant heat wasn't really effective very far from the fire. Inverse square law. 5-6 feet was about the limit of noticeable effect.
Good fireplaces have special ducting and baffles so that they move plenty of heat into the room by convection without also sending the smoke there.
And good houses have well-insulated walls. Even if all the replacement air comes in through the walls, the fireplace should be easily able to overcome that. But that's assuming that the fireplace was ever meant to provide primary heating for the house.
For all we know, he has a decorative fireplace with an insulated, straight chimney and a non-insulated foot. So all the heat is dumped straight outside, apart from what little is radiated by the open face.
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@acrow said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The mechanism for closing the chimney for the night. Shown here, because apparently not every country has them. They just let the heat out the chimney at night
:Many houses here have gas-powered heating, which generally has efficiency of more than 100%. That is, the amount of heat released into the heated rooms exceeds the energy value of the natural gas. I suspect this is because the temperature of the gas as it arrives in the house is higher than that of the outside air, and even that energy is extracted by using the smoke to heat the intake air.
Nowadays most new houses use a shared heating source. Personally I think this is a good idea if it uses industrial waste heat or similar, but too often it's just a shared gas-powered heating system which supposedly allows for efficiency of scale.
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@PleegWat said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Nowadays most new houses use a shared heating source. Personally I think this is a good idea if it uses industrial waste heat or similar, but too often it's just a shared gas-powered heating system which supposedly allows for efficiency of scale.
In Finland that's called Remote Heating. It used to be just waste heat from power plants. But now there are about a hundred dedicated heat plants, too, since electricity production is moving to windmills etc.. Apparently it's the most comon way to heat apartments now. Less common in stand-alone houses, for obvious reasons.
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@acrow said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
In Finland that's called Remote Heating.
It's called District Heating in English. We use such a system at work now, but it's completely uneconomic out in the 'burbs where I live.
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@acrow said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
It'd be nice if these systems also had a bit more monitoring built-in. A fan bearing that's going to give up will show up as drastically increased power consumption well before it fails. But
and , so it's not usually done either.
It's a conspiracy. How else will the repair companies be able to charge exorbitant rates to replace simple parts. Oh, and need to replace complete pump units because all that broke was the fitting from the container to tubing.
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@acrow said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
@PleegWat said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Nowadays most new houses use a shared heating source. Personally I think this is a good idea if it uses industrial waste heat or similar, but too often it's just a shared gas-powered heating system which supposedly allows for efficiency of scale.
In Finland that's called Remote Heating. It used to be just waste heat from power plants. But now there are about a hundred dedicated heat plants, too, since electricity production is moving to windmills etc.. Apparently it's the most comon way to heat apartments now. Less common in stand-alone houses, for obvious reasons.
Some datacenters now also shunt their rather big heat production towards productive means as well. Finland was one of the first results for that (e.g. Yandex in Mäntsälä)
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@Rhywden said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
Finland was one of the first results for that (e.g. Yandex in Mäntsälä)
Sounds more like like Russia did it, in Finland.
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@acrow said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
he
hashad a decorative fireplaceIn the US, in 20th century houses, at least, built-in fireplaces are rarely built for actual heating. Wood stoves, maybe, but those are uncommon and usually homeowner additions, not original construction. Many can't even burn wood, just natural gas, because they have insufficient draft. The house I grew up in had a fireplace like that; the few times we tried to use it, we had to turn on the A/C blower to push the smoke out, because it just poured into the room instead of going up the chimney. And it was huge; it certainly had enough mass to retain residual heat, if it had been designed to take advantage of it.
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@HardwareGeek said in Mostly not internet, and mostly just as shit as you make it:
The house I grew up in had a fireplace like that; the few times we tried to use it, we had to turn on the A/C blower to push the smoke out
You gotta open the damper
