evasive_chimpanzee
@evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
- Comment on Are there softwares to simulate enough electronics and microcontrollers to learn? 22 hours ago:
Looks like wikipedia has good lists.
en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Comparison_of_EDA_software
…wikipedia.org/…/List_of_free_electronics_circuit…
I’ve never used it, but I am intrigued by fritzing, can anyone recommend?
- Comment on Breezeway Greenhouse Help? 2 days ago:
My dream is to one day have a setup like this. Like others said, humidity and heat in a greenhouse are 2 big concerns. They make all kinds of automated systems for opening vents, etc.
If your primary goal is growing in a contained area to keep pests away (vs. needing to really keep the space warm in winter or something), you best bet could be a hoop house. Basically you can drive rebar or fence posts into the ground, and then arch something (pvc pipes commonly) from one side of the space to the other. You’d then pull plastic sheathing overtop. Those are commonly used to get growing started in early spring and extend growing in the fall. When it’s warm enough, they basically roll up the material. You could do something similar but still have a structure of chicken wire or netting or something to keep animals away.
If you actually want to keep the space warm to grow in the winter, you might want more permanent walls with better insulation, like double walled polycarbonate.
Another thing to consider is water. If you have a greenhouse next to your house, you don’t want rain that falls on it to direct water to your house’s foundation.
- Comment on Breezeway Greenhouse Help? 2 days ago:
Searching around, it seems like stucco and high humidity may not work well together. Personally, I’d be a little concerned about algae/moss growth on my walls if I had high humidity on stucco.
- Comment on Breezeway Greenhouse Help? 2 days ago:
I love the look of repurposed windows/doors for greenhouses, and I’ve even seen them advertised for that purpose at resale shops, but it’s really important to be careful about lead paint if you want to do that. Lead was the primary white pigment for a long time, and since windows/doors are often trimmed white, if they are older than 1978 (in the US, EU was 2003, though many member states had their own laws previously), it could be lead. Lead testers are fairly cheap if you want to go this route.
- Comment on I have no idea where to post this rule 2 weeks ago:
This is the lab behind the poop knife. They are absolutely experts in this kind of thing.
I need to read the whole paper, but I suspect the weight/wind resistance ratio of the javelin is better, and that the motion of launching an atlatl dart is affected by the downward angle. The railing on the scissor lift likely has an effect, too.
- Comment on Kroger’s plans to roll out facial recognition at its grocery stores is attracting criticism from lawmakers, who warn it could lead to surge pricing and put customers’ personal data at risk 4 weeks ago:
They want to merge with Albertsons, who owns the other half of grocery stores: Acme, Safeway, jewel osco, and a bunch more.
- Comment on Vertical solar panels help farmers produce both energy and crops 4 weeks ago:
It’s not a very long article, so they don’t get too into detail. This would use bifacial solar panels. On a purely optics standpoint, you’d think they are much worse than traditional (i.e., facing south at the right angle) panels, but they gain efficiency by staying cooler, and they generate more power when traditional solar isn’t, which helps smooth out the power generation curve. They also self clean and don’t have as much hail risk.
- Comment on Problem? 4 weeks ago:
Yeah, reviewing is about making sure the methods are sound and the conclusions are supported by the data. Whether or not the data are correct is largely something that the reviewer cannot determine.
If a machine spits out a reading of 5.3, but the paper says 6.2, the reviewer can’t catch that. If numbers are too perfect, you might be suspicious of it, but it’s really not your job to go all forensic accountant on the data.
- Comment on [SciShow] How To Make Buildings Into Batteries 1 month ago:
You are completely right. Look at my math above.
- Comment on [SciShow] How To Make Buildings Into Batteries 1 month ago:
I’m pretty disappointed in scishow for this one. Usually, they are pretty good.
There are, in fact, deep conceptual flaws. There are a lot of grifters trying to sell ideas to fight climate change that can be easily defeated by high school level math. They try and spin the obvious shortcomings as “engineering challenges” where you could figure out a way to make it more efficient if only you invested in them enough. The math just doesn’t even check out at 100% efficiency.
Potential energy is mgh. Let’s do the math for the Burj Khalifa. The top floor is at 585 meters. According to their published fact sheet, there are 57 elevators, and the service elevator has a capacity of 5500 kg. Let’s pretend that every elevator has this capacity, and they all go to the top. It would store 5500579.8*585=1.797 GJ. This is about 500 kWh, or about the energy used by 17 average American homes for a day.
According to wikipedia, the cheapest Tesla has a 57 kWh battery, so if there are 10 electric cars in the parking garage, they can store more energy than all the elevators.
Hyperloops have the exact same issue, the math never checks out, so any company promoting them is fraudulent.
- Comment on solar PV → heat pump → water heater; direct, no A/C or intermediate components. Practical? Feasible? 2 months ago:
occasionally push it to near boiling temperatures.
So I’m guessing you have some kind of mixing valve set up to handle this going out? Also, are the tanks rated to that high of temperatures?
- Comment on solar PV → heat pump → water heater; direct, no A/C or intermediate components. Practical? Feasible? 2 months ago:
occasionally heat the tank up to 70°C+ to kill off any bacteria that might be growing in it.
Is that a built in function of your fancy water heater, or is that something you just go do periodically as part of maintenance?
I’d love to get one of those heat pump water heaters. Seems like a win-win to dehumidify the space.
- Comment on Why is Facebook filled with so much random junk now? 2 months ago:
I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.
I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.
- Comment on First of its kind 'energy dome' storage project takes another step forward in Wisconsin 2 months ago:
In case you are in this community but haven’t religiously read everything on Low Tech Mag.
- Comment on Installing Solar Over Fish Farms Is a Climate-Friendly Twofer 2 months ago:
Unless I’m missing something, it doesn’t seem like aquavoltaics is actually a real thing like agrivoltaics.
With agrivoltaics, you get benefits to the agriculture (shade helps some crops), and the solar panels (less need for weeding between panels, transpiration cooling panels for higher efficiency). Obviously, probably the biggest benefit is monetary; the money per land area goes up, enabling different crops to be profitably grown, or grown on land that would otherwise be too expensive for agriculture.
With aquavoltaics, it doesn’t seem like they specify a benefit other than “sticking solar panels on ‘unused’ land makes the land use more profitable”; there’s no interaction. I suppose there is still the effect of making aquaculture profitable where it otherwise might not be, and allowing for different species that may be otherwise unprofitable.
Still though, it doesn’t seem like there’s an “interaction” unless I’m missing something. Maybe if the panels were literally over the water, you could keep the water (and the panels) cooler and grow different species?
I feel like if it’s just the money piece, we could coin a whole bunch of other “-voltaics”.
- Comment on World’s highways could host 52.3 billion solar panels, say researchers 2 months ago:
The idea works great if you stop allowing cars the utilize the space
- Comment on World’s highways could host 52.3 billion solar panels, say researchers 2 months ago:
Yeah, this is literally just highlighting the huge amount of land dedicated to cars. People complain about the space used by solar, but a small subset of roads take up as much space as a solar farm that could provide the majority of our energy.
- Comment on Is old-school tar paper hardwood flooring underlayment and old-school tar paper roofing underlayment the same thing? 3 months ago:
I just read into it a little bit. Seems that I was wrong, and “tar paper” is typically not completely waterproof, it’s just water resistant. Most stuff these days isn’t technically tar paper, either, it’s roofing felt. I guess it’s only called paper if it’s made from cellulose. Apparently they did make the felt from asbestos back in the day.
Seems like it’s definitely common enough to use it under flooring, especially if it’s a thinner grade.
- Comment on Is old-school tar paper hardwood flooring underlayment and old-school tar paper roofing underlayment the same thing? 3 months ago:
I haven’t heard of tar paper being used as underlayment, but I have used big rolls of paper for that. In my understanding, the point for the paper is to allow the wood to be able to move seasonally, and to prevent squeaking.
I don’t think I’d want to use tar paper, though, cause it’s hydrophobic. Whatever finish is going on the wood is going to also be a water barrier, and it’s a general rule of thumb to never have 2 water barriers next to each other in a house. That’s how you get trapped water that can damage stuff. If you spill water, and it makes it in a little gap between floorboards, it could just sit there indefinitely.
I could be wrong, though.
- Comment on Your future air conditioner might act like a battery 3 months ago:
They still use the same principle a lot with those misters they put everywhere for like outdoor restaurant seating and whatnot. Humidifiers placed inline with your AC ducts will also boost the cooling performance of your system, too.
- Comment on Your future air conditioner might act like a battery 3 months ago:
Current air conditioners can act like a battery, too. A house has a lot of thermal mass, and you can intentionally use it to your advantage. Smart thermostats are commonly integrated with electric utilities such that they can bump the set temp up during times of high cooling demand. Something they could and should set up is additional pre-chilling, so you could preemptively cool your house down a few extra degrees when demand is low, then when demand is high, you wouldn’t pass your set point by much.
- Comment on Your future air conditioner might act like a battery 3 months ago:
The “used in an evaporative cooling process” is the part where it sounds like it adds moisture to the air. I think it happens outside, though. It sounds like their whole thing is to run moist outside air over the dessicant, then run that dry air over water that is on a heat exchanger. This would cool the heat exchanger that would be tied to ductwork or whatever to cool the house. Evaporative coolers already exist (both as in-house “swamp coolers” and external chillers usually used on bigger buildings). They don’t work if the humidity is already high, though, so this system would enable them to function better in high humidity areas, and it could take advantage of only doing the energy intensive step of drying out the dessicant when there is surplus energy.
- Comment on Your future air conditioner might act like a battery 3 months ago:
In plenty of places, the wet bulb temperature is high 24 hours a day. At night, the temperature goes down, but relative humidity goes up, so you feel cooler, but also worse. You still need AC during that time, but mainly to dehumidify.
Also, in many places, peak demand is actually in the early evenings because people let their houses get hot while they are at work, but turn the AC on when they get home.
Any way you can store energy for even a few hours is really nice, and these kind of solutions could help adjust the daily demand curve to meet the supply curve.
- Comment on Absuing a keg as a bung valve 4 months ago:
That probably shouldn’t happen, cause it would pull a vacuum on your beer (wonder what effect that would have). It might be able to pull a siphon for a short time, and then cut off. You would then have like an oscillation of pressure on your beer which probably isn’t ideal. Definitely a good move to put the can higher.
I wonder if there’s a good way to prevent any siphoning from going the other way.
- Comment on Absuing a keg as a bung valve 4 months ago:
I just did the conversion, and 1 psi = 70 cm h20. That means you only need less than a psi to get the sanitizer moving. I think the bucket can likely hold that. You might want to add weight to the lid to make sure there’s no leakage from the outside edge of the bucket.
- Comment on Groundbreaking barium titanate solar panels are 1000x more powerful than existing panels 4 months ago:
If you live somewhere reasonably sunny, you can expect about 1 kW per square meter during the sunniest part of the day. To charge something like a 15 kWh electric motorcycle battery, you’d need 15 square meters of 100% efficient panels.
- Comment on First overseas trip with my girlfriend – Any tips to make It our best trip? 4 months ago:
Corollary: do not assume anybody doesnt speak English.
- Comment on Does different parts of the world use different standards for water pressure similar to voltages? 4 months ago:
These pressures are all gauge pressure, not absolute pressure. 1 bar gauge pressure would be about 2 bar absolute.
- Comment on Ironing 4 months ago:
Elbows have always been allowed on the table. The rule for fancy dining was that you couldn’t have elbows on the table during a course, i.e., when people are actively eating, but before/after, it’s fine. That’s a reasonable rule to be considerate of space.
- Comment on Ironing 4 months ago:
Fold your clothes immediately after drying, while they are still warm. Also, dryers that can add steam really help if you’ve got a few things that need wrinkle removal. Also, handheld steamers are cheap.
Mostly, avoid needing to iron by avoiding wearing formal business attire.