Posts by John Robson

Re: I'm not sure why you've got so many down votes

Single day statistics can show anything you like.

Summer tends to have a little more power available during the day, and both solar and wind are being built out around the country.

The "off peak" period doesn't have to be at the same time all year round - and it can vary even more than that.

It's what octopus intelligent does - it looks at the grid, and looks at the charge you've requested on your car and then picks the best time to do the charge between when you plugged in and when you need the car.

Nothing complicated for the customer - just say "I want 75% charge by 9 am each week day" and plug in when you get home each day... the hours the car actually charges are then scheduled to be at the most effective times for the grid.

Re: I'm not sure why you've got so many down votes

There is still an excess of wind in the small hours, because demand drops further than the wind.

Re: Not smart at all

Can't be bothered? That's doesn't correspond with the experience of various people I know.

Re: I recently did some calculation for someone who is getting an EV

Yes - take the max they could spend and add on their household usage to get their fuel bill... /s

They can pay £885 by selecting an appropriate tariff, or ~£285 more than they currently pay by adding an EV and switching tariff.

That's less than £25 a month, and 3400kWh/year is likely 12-14k miles so that's £25 for a thousand miles - 2.5p per mile.

Compared with an ICE which gets 50mpg at 144p (RAC national average today) at 13p/mile or £1600 of fuel a year.

So yes, that's one hell of a saving (£1300 in the first year alone)

They reckon the fast charger network will cost a billion...

Besides which a billion is pocket change on national infrastructure... it's what National Highways spend on maintaining less than five thousand miles of roads.

Well, yes - you might need to do some work to figure out what your usage is, and therefore what tariff you can take advantage of.

Even with a 40p peak rate I was paying an average of 27p (including SC) even before the PV and battery.

You don't see the cost saving because you aren't prepared to look for the cost saving.

The grid won't go into meltdown from EVs and HPs - as those running the grid consistently keep telling people.

The discount rate can easily be enough to save more than the peak rate will cost; and the more people who manage to time shift the better - lowering the peak usage is one very important target here.

They've invested heavily in distribution infrastructure... OH, for water? No they've ignored that. They've invested heavily in taking on debt and distributing the cash to shareholders.

Since privatisation in 1989 they've paid £50 billion in dividends, and they now have £56 billion in debt.

Is it only me that expects that £6 billion to appear as dividends soon?

Re: Not smart at all

Nope - they're all talking to either telefonica or arquiva. The retailer doesn't need to set up to read smart meters.

If it's smets1 then it might not have have had transferable data (which was a criminal oversight)

Get a better supplier then.

Re: screw 'em

Audit what code?

Do you need to audit the processor design as well, and the compiler code, and how do you verify that the firmware is the code you saw, or was compiled using the compiler you saw....

They get half hourly usage data (if you approve that data sharing) - this allows them to bill you.

You need to get a better supplier then...

Octopus generally get good reviews, and I've found them to be pretty good.

Referral bonuses are actually paid, you can choose your own payment date and payment value on the website.

They also have tariffs which work really well for people with PV/battery systems.

Smart water meters are already here - though my water company won't fit a meter at all. They claim the pipe isn't suitable.

With half hourly measurements, and that data being made available to the consumer, it's fairly easy to check that you have been appropriately charged.

The complexity of agile style tariffs is something that really needs automation to deal with - battery systems etc can import that data and automatically schedule their charge/discharge schedule to minimise the price of electricity.

But even old E7/E10 style tariffs can be better managed by smart meters, at least they actually keep decent time.

My tariff requires a smart meter, and I like having the data. I know that I am on the best tariff, partly because of the data I get.

It was always a bit of a guess previously.

Re: Interesting design

There are other places to put fuel, but yes, some fuselage space will need to carry fuel rather than cargo - that's not exactly new.

"Yes petrol is bad, but EV batteries are worse."

Citation needed - because that's not what any peer reviewed research shows - and it's exactly the point at hand because EVs are replacing fossil fuel vehicles.

"Tesla sold a million cars last year, and this company recycled just over 1000,if you can do basic maths thats 1%."

Erm - you might want to look at your maths again: thousand/million is 0.1%

So you expect them to recycle batteries as they sell them, rather than after the 15+ years of useful life they have?

Tesla sales weren't a million units 15-20 years ago - 15 years ago they sold 500 roadsters in 18 months. I would expect those to be relatively low mileage vehicles, so their batteries are probably still fine.

"Nobody is going to recycle a battery when it costs 10x more than the value of the components. The reason after many years they are still only doing small numbers is they havent ffigure out how to get the cost down."

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1246828/value-of-recycled-ev-batteries-by-battery-type/

NMC batteries earnt recyclers 42USD/kWh

The lowest value was LFP at just 15USD/kWh

None of the numbers are negative - in fact the recyclers are already earning from their recycling activities.

They are also investing heavily to allow them to expand, which is why they aren't yet declaring profit.

But you haven't recycled any of the petrol that you've used - which is far more damaging to extract refine and burn

And why would you recycle something that's still in use?

Where are you getting your 1% from? The fact that they have processed more than a thousand battery packs, and are investing to scale up to the size that they can do a million over the next few years?

Re: Invasion

Due to a miscalculation of scale?

The pollution in manufacture is slightly more than for an ICE vehicle... it doesn't take long for that to be completely swamped by the running pollution (which, lest we forget is also being belched into the middle of populated areas).

However the more important question is - why would there be a major recycling network anywhere yet - even the earliest EV batteries haven't come to the end of their useful life yet, they're coming into their reuse phase, it'll be another few decades before they're at the recycle phase.

Well you see if we can spin a "robot overlords" angle then we can say that heat pumps won't work when there are roadworks, and the EVs don't make coffee unless they are triple glazed.

And the evidence suggests that it's actually capable of level 5 behaviour an astonishing amount of the time - it's clearly beyond L2, whatever the certification says.

No, it's not time to surrender licenses and hand over to the computers yet, but that doesn't stop me being impressed with the amount of driving FSD *is* capable of - particularly when it's capable of that on a wide variety of roads and in a good variety of situations.

As someone with a disability - even L2/L3 are massively valuable.

The reduction in cognitive load that they provide make driving for any significant length of time possible. I was reminded of that very strongly over the weekend, because the van I hired for Saturday didn't have the assistance features I used constantly - and driving less than 200 miles completely wiped me out for the remainder of the Saturday and all Sunday (I'm mostly recovered today). With the driver aids I can drive 300 miles and still be able to function in the evening, and the next day.

Re: Fit issues....

Bone conduction is not behind the ear style, it's a completely different sound delivery concept and is usually on a head band in my experience.

Re: Fit issues....

You'll find quite a few sports ones are designed that way.

Really? I've never seen any.

Could you possibly link to a couple

Re: It is a radio service

To be fair I had an issue with cable connectivity which was almost metronomic, and was nothing to do with throttling (although I nearly throttled them)

Every evening (10:30 ish from memory) the connection would outright fail, and resume early in the morning (7 ish).

Took several visits from engineers in the daytime before I actually got a network engineer who understood the logs I had and we tracked down a short section of cable with a tight radius bend in the green cabinet - the core conductor had fractured, and thermal expansion meant that it connected OK during the day, but when it cooled overnight the fracture separated and the signal was lost.

Re: "Design Feature"

I was intrigued, so I ran ping for fifteen minutes against a device behind a remote starlink connection from a colo centre.

Out of 1000 packets sent I got just two with a ping more than 100ms (103 and 115 respectively), and no loss.

The average was 45ms, minimum was 21.8ms, only 6% (57) took 67ms or more (67ms is simply the average plus the minimum) and even those averaged just 77ms. So whilst the tail of slow packets is obviously longer than the "head" of very fast packets (which has a physical limit) it's sparse, and not stupidly long (high frequency traders and twitch gamers might want to pay for priority, I don't know if that has any affect on latency).

There isn't an obvious pattern in the latency data, though there are two clear sections which are a bit slower than the surrounding traffic - 417 - 431 (85ms) and 432 - 446 (62ms), though they are followed by a good patch (twenty with an average of 32ms)

So it wouldn't surprise me if we were talking as little as 15 seconds on some connections.

Satellite Map has a pretty nice live tracker, and watching that for a few minutes might give a little insight.

Re: 200mb/s for "10minutes or so" = ~15GB

Looking through:

The AUP has this clause:

"EXCESSIVE USE OF NETWORK RESOURCES. SpaceX reserves the right to engage in reasonable network management to protect the overall network, including analyzing traffic patterns to optimize services and preventing the distribution of viruses or other malicious code. SpaceX reserves the right to immediately restrict, suspend, or terminate Services without notice in order to protect the network or minimize congestion caused by unauthorized use."

The FUP:

"Traffic Neutrality. We treat internet traffic equally, without discrimination based on content, sender, application or service. Network management practices are deployed based on technical requirements for specific categories of traffic. These practices are applied in an “application-agnostic” manner, meaning that the treatment of traffic is independent of the content data."

"Distributing Data Based on Service Plan. We seek to distribute data among our users in a fair and equitable manner by (1) implementing network management policies when the demand for network resources actually exceeds supply," [item 2 is the priority service]

"Starlink seeks to distribute Standard data among our users in a fair and equitable manner. If bandwidth patterns consistently exceed what is allocated to a typical residential user, Starlink may take network management measures, such as temporarily reducing a customer’s speeds, to prevent or mitigate congestion of the Services. Bandwidth intensive applications, such as streaming videos, gaming, or downloading large files are most likely to be impacted by such actions."

The Specifications:

"Actual speeds may be lower than expected speeds during times of high usage. Performance varies based on location, time of day and the precedence Starlink gives your data in the network based on your Service Plan."

"Starlink users typically experience download speeds between 25 and 220 Mbps, with a majority of users experiencing speeds over 100 Mbps"

So nothing explicitly says that there is a 15GB cap on single downloads... it's a rather substantial amount of data to be pushing.

Maybe at 2 am is when all the businesses etc who pay for priority kick off their backups?

Re: "Design Feature"

I don't notice the switch, even during video calls...

The satellites aren't overhead for very long - orbital period is about 90 minutes, and that's covering a distance of ~24k miles, they'll only be in view for a few hundred miles of that...

So let's say they're each visible for about 2% of their orbit... that's about 2 minutes of visibility - and they'll not be used for that entire duration, they need to be found and tracked before they are used, and I don't imagine that performance is as good at low angles of elevation.

Re: What's the monetary damage?

Surely everyone who uses XP would instead buy WindowXX (what number are they up to now) at full retail price... no seriously they're not using XP because the latest version is too cheap and would cover their use case.

Re: "Frore is confident it can defeat dust": More details please.

Their system has a "blow backwards" mode, so their paper filters can be cleaned out by the cooling system itself.