• 12 Posts
  • 211 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • This is roughly what we have in the UK.

    For electricity, the standing charge is 61.6p/day, then 23.3p/kWh.
    And gas is 29.6p/day, then 6.1p/kWh. (The numbers vary, and you can choose to lock rates for the duration of a contract).

    There has been some discussion of it in recent years (after it doubled, thanks Putin).
    Whether it is fair for people using less energy…But in reality, everyone has similar 100 or 60A connections to the grid.
    There are tarrifs for very low users, where the standing charge is combined with the first kWh.

    Once I’m off the gas boiler, and on a heat pump, I may get my gas disconnected to save the standing charge.

    On a tangent, as you may be interested, we now have the option of flexible electricity pricing that tracks the wholesale rates for the day. Usually, it’s cheaper, sometimes even negative. Link.
    However, this week there has been a lot of expensive energy, so it’s been butting up against the £1/kWh limit!




  • Maybe the best way to think about it is not dark, but the absence of more light.
    On a DMD projector, we use tiny micromirrors for each pixel which flash thousands of times per frame of video.
    The flash/no-flash ratio decides how much light makes it out of the projector. This gives us over a thousand light levels per colour channel, from near dark, to full light.
    When the mirrors are not in position, the light output is very low. (1/1000th of the full output, on a projector with a static 1000:1 contrast ratio)

    The screen is designed to reflect light well, which means in a non-perfect room, it will have a light floor of the reflected ambient light, plus whatever still makes it through the projector (as Cygnus mentioned, room treatment).

    If you do treat a room well enough that the small amount of light that makes it through the projector at all-off is a problem, you can do things like fitting an ND filter to the lens (reducing the full light output, while also reducing the minimum).
    Or you can use the dynamic iris fitted to some projectors (which reduces the amount of light being put out based on the overall scene illumination, similar to the way LCD TVs lower the backlight level to “reach” contrast ratios of 100000:1).


  • The biggest one was probably a combo of having an anemometer, and heat/humidity sensors in each room.

    When it’s cold outside, the top floor of the house (loft conversion) loses more heat. But it loses significantly more heat when it’s cold, and the wind is blowing parallel to the floor joists.

    I realised that because they’re not perfectly sealed (old house), enough air pressure means that the floor void can easily hit external temperatures, meaning the rooms have cold on twice as many sides.

    I will (eventually) get some suitable insulation in them to stop this.








  • For a low tech solution, you could use cold chain labels.
    They indicate when a temperature threshold is breached. So you’d at least know when a vial was spoiled. They’re not cheap, mind, when you only want a few.

    But I know that’s not solving the problem in the way you wanted to!

    If you only need to know when a threshold is exceeded, you could make something simple using (for example) an esp with a PAYG SIM card and a temperature sensor.

    Then set it up to SMS an alert when temperatures go out of bounds. And pick the SMS up in HASS (various ways). That way, you’ll only be spending a few cents each time there is an issue.

    You could also use mobile data if you felt more fancy, and post straight to HASS.


  • I’m currently mulling this. The “gold standard” sensibly priced UHD disc player is £250+ (Panasonic UB-820).

    While it’s getting close to just getting a console, where it does cinch it is adjustability and handling of WCG and HDR content.

    I strongly agree that for DVD/HD/, it’s a solved problem: They can all output the correct ranges, at the right framerate, at the right resolution.

    But WCG and HDR are a bit of a minefield even years on.
    And it’s stupid that’s it’s necessary, but being able to specify “my TV goes up to 300 nits, compress anything above that” is useful.
    Which none of the consoles (to my knowledge) have managed to implement yet.