Some detergents say “septic safe” on the container. My folks bought the cheapest option which did not say one way or another, so I had to call the supplier, who then said it was septic safe. It’s a shame that in the 2020s we still don’t have transparency on what we buy.
I recall someone in #chemistry (on freenode) talking about measuring detergent. He could have been a nutter, but stressed the importance of measuring the right amount, saying get a scale and weigh it according to the manual.
The manual for one of my machines is shit… says look at the program table for detergent amount - then it’s omitted from the table. But what was useful was the manual said what the numbers meant. The lines marked “15” and “25” are for 15cm³ and 25cm³. The brim is 40cm³ and the prewash cup is 5cm³. Those are volumes, not weight. So I calculated the weight I needed at one point and IIRC it turned out that 15g of powder came out to 15cm³ (lucky me!). I don’t recall how I figured out that I needed 15g.
Anyway, these are the variables that influence the amount of detergent to use:
Some of the short programs imply that slow solving detergents (tablets) should be avoided.
I still have not figured out what the ½-load button really does. Manual just says press it if you have less than half a load to save on water and power. That’s it. WTF? So I asked the manufacturer and they repeated the same useless answer, but said fill only 1 rack. WTF… which rack? I wanted to know what the ½-load button actually changed the program so I could use it wisely. How does the machine know which rack I chose? I think the “load only one rack” answer from the manufacturer is bullshit. I’ll probably sprawl out my partial loads. The manual should be telling people how much water is used with this setting. I have no idea how it saves on energy since the program choice dictates a fixed water temp. Maybe it just comes down to the fact that it has less water to heat. In any case, I should probably use less detergent on partial loads but the manual doesn’t give the calculation or even enough info to be able to calculate it.
Too much detergent → etching (and waste of detergent)
Too little detergent → repetition needed, which wastes water, energy, and detergent
If you don’t care about etching, then using too much is probably not a big deal.
In the past couple months Google has become quite hostile toward front-ends that previously made it possible for Tor users to reach their content. And I don’t have a good connection so I can’t do videos anyway.
But indeed, it’s hard to find proper detergent. I have to go to a big store of a big grocery chain to get it. But it’s worth it on the basis of price alone. Buying a couple kilos of powder gives the most loads for the money. IIRC the pods were twice the cost of powder when comparing a promotional sales price on pods.
Shit… sounds about right.
Although the /water is hot enough/ scenario could be addressed mechanically: bigger water tank, lower heating element raised and the heat pump heating the bottom exclusively where it could /always/ add heat because it would never be hot enough at the bottom.
Would the materials have much more of a footprint than geothermal installations? Because that slight 7° difference between below ground temp and above ground temps apparently justifies the labor, materials, and power to the circulators for harvesting geothermal energy. So this seems to be the same but adding a cherry on top – incorporating a heat pump to add to the energy of a geothermal system.
Because of Google’s DoS attack, those of us in the open free world cannot reach Youtube. So would someone please explain the concept in text?
Is this it? → https://utahforge.com/2022/12/30/did-you-know-that-scottish-clubbers-use-dance-beat-to-generate-heat/
Seems like a great idea. Like using the body heat to boost geothermals.
Someone plz tell Massive Attack about this. Massive Attack has gone gung-ho on eco-friendly festivals (in places inaccessible by car). They might want to throw some indoor events with this tech.
(edit) from the article:
“An experienced DJ could get up to 600 watts with the right song at the right time.”
So IIUC that’s like ~1½ solar panels getting a full dose of UV, correct? I guess that’s not much. But nonetheless not something to throw away either. So during the day solar panels on the roof could heat the ground pipes and during the night the clubbers keep the system powered.
Would be fun for that power output to be measured, and then that power measurement could be a performance index on each DJ. You pay the DJ according to the power output they can produce. Though I guess that would screw over the ambiant / trip-hop DJs.
Have they thought this through? To install batteries that are much heavier than what the bus trip requires makes the bus less efficient. Sure they need to store energy for to smooth out peak grid consumption but probably better to do that with batteries that are not mobile – if they must use batteries. Another way to store energy: pump water to the top of a mountain. To get the energy back open a dam that turns a hydro turbine.
from the article:
Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism.
Seems like a stretch.
fees - either no fees, or fees are really easy to avoid
Try getting out of the paper statement fee at a CU. That’s an important one because when the enshitification of their tech crosses your threshold of tolerance, it’s important to have agency to instantly go back to analog. Having that power also creates pressure on them to not enshitify their tech in the first place.
Gratis paper statements seem much less common at CUs than commercial banks.
Also regarding fees: very hard to find CUs that give a zero FX fee when pulling cash from a foreign ATM. IIRC, there is only one CU in the US (Penfed?) that has fee-free foreign currency.
Chase is okay if you can reliably avoid fees
Unless you consider ethics. Chase is one of the worst.
You should never pay for a bank account, that’s just dumb.
I used to think that. But in my boycott on free technofeudal pushers (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) I’ve evolved to prioritize privacy (and thus control) over non-transparent exploitation of my data. Have you thought about why your billpay service is free? It’s outsourced, so the billpay service has to make money somehow. Of course they are selling your data. Google and Amazon want to know about people’s offline purchases so they know whether it traces to an online ad.
I also learned the hard way that Credit Unions are exempt from this
Wow… there’s a gem of knowledge for sure.
I don’t get why folks even care about interest rates when they are so negligably low anyway. When interest rates are ≤1%, I would rather get zero interest just to silence the excessive reporting, like a 1099-int for a couple dollars which serves as a kind of heartbeat signal for where your assets are kept and then having to pay your accountant to declare it. Not worth it. I would rather see the 1% go to a good cause, if not toward just improving the banking service.
I’m done with credit unions. They just create the illusion of a small org but then farm you out to big companies via outsourcing anyway.
Being free from Cloudflare sometimes means you can login over Tor and avoid most of the problems above. OTOH many commercial banks also block Tor increasingly more frequently lately (because they also want to track your physical whereabouts). There may be some Cloudflare-free CUs that still permit Tor logins though it’s becoming harder to find them.
Gratis paper statements are important more than you realise:
If you cannot find a bank or CU that gives you the privacy of Tor, the best feature to look for is gratis paper statements and paper checks so you can scrap the website and take back your privacy. It’s more common to find gratis paper statements from banks than CUs. As enshitification of the web proliferates and more FIs join Cloudflare, gratis paper statements is an important safety net so you can ditch their tech the moment it goes sour.
Regarding apps:
Credit unions do not write their own software. You have just a few closed-source Google Playstore banking app makers who all the credit unions outsource to. Whereas every commercial bank reinvents the wheel with their own implementation. For me it’s a shitshow no matter what. I am not going to enter Google Playstore and tell Google where I bank and let Google track exactly which software version I have which also reveals what vulns I inherit, to then run a closed-source app that snoops on me in countless unknown ways. Fuck all that.
Sounds like they would do well in Arizona, where the air is dry. IIUC swamp coolers were very popular in Arizona until ~20 years ago when temps increased so much that swamp coolers could not make enough difference (this is largely because more and more land became concrete, which reduced the effect of evaporative cooling the land mass). So a/c became more popular in AZ IIUC. But the dry air would still be dry.
Great basic concept but I think I would benefit more for the stored cooling going toward ice cubes for mojitos.
I don’t imagine that a single family dwelling would benefit from the extra complexity of adding cold water pipes in all the floors of the house. Probably makes more sense for apartment buildings (or perhaps homes that already have hydrothermal floors for heating).
Consider this excerpt:
When the grid is extremely stressed, utility companies are sometimes forced to shut off electricity supply to some areas, leaving people there without power when they need it most. Technologies that can adjust to meet the grid’s needs could help reduce reliance on these rolling blackouts.
So grid-powered a/c can give the grid relief at peak times with this tech.
But indeed this tech on a PV-powered compressor seems sketchy. There are probably moments when the sun is hitting hard but the temp has not climbed up yet (sunrise) in which case it would be useful to store the energy. But I’m struggling to understand how the complexity of the system would be justified considering the overall efficiency is reduced as well. I wonder what proportion of time this system would be working in storage mode. If sunrise is 9am and peak heat is 2pm, maybe there’s ~2—4 hours of storage time potential.
OTOH, consider someone with a slightly underpowered PV. Maybe the energy storage can compensate for peak heat times when the PV output may be insufficient. Perhaps it would enable homeowners to spend less on PV panels.
Subways are pretty much exclusively built in the cities
Not just any city. Dense cities. Cities that are so densely populated that it would be /impossible/ for every person to move around in a car. Countless US cities are not even close to crossing that threshold. It just makes no sense to look at nationwide per capita on this. Only a city by city comparison of like with like population density is sensible.
(edit)
There is a baby elephant in the room that needs mention: US cities are designed with shitty zoning plans. They are designed so that each person on avg needs to travel more distance per commute to accomplish the same tasks (work and groceries). This heightens the congestion per capita. So ideally we would calculate daily net commute distance needed per capita plotted against subway track per capita for cities of comparable people per m². Which would embarrass US city mayors even more.
From the article:
See the U.S. flatlining in transit miles per capita
A devil’s advocate would rightfully argue that that’s expected given the much lower average population density of the US – the same factor that made it a struggle to get broadband Internet to everyone in the US. Bizarre to use a nationwide per capita as a basis for mass transit comparisons. It should be a city-by-city comparison that groups cities by comparable population density. US cities would likely still come out behind and embarrassed, but more accurately so.
Consider the marketing angle – instead of saying “the US is losing”, instead say “@[email protected]’s city lost its ass in the bi-annual city infra competency competition”. Then that mayor has some direct embarrassment to pressure action.
We did some behind the scenes changes with the firewall setup which will make it easier to identify and block scraping attempts and other such abuses of our technical setup.
Why is scraping being treated as abusive? I have actually been on the look out for a tool the scrape Lemmy servers so I can grab a copy of all my own messages, replies thereto, and parent messages of my comments. slrpnk can go down at any time. It would also be useful to be able to grep my own content to recall where I discussed something and to know where to expand on past discussions.
this poll shows it’s non-partisan:
https://layer8.space/@hyakinthos/112554837920009346
The left respects privacy far more than the right. But the left also has that high-taxation tendency. The outcome of that tug-of-war within left-leaning people results in 70% embracing cash – just like the conservatives who don’t give a shit about privacy but have contempt for tax.
Beware on your next trip to Netherlands, where some bars refuse cash and conceal their contempt for cash (reference)
I just linked your post from that one because it fits well with the story.
I think liquids are heavier to transport than solids because solid detergent is more concentrated (no water). Liquid detergent (which comes in all viscocities) still has its place: for people with hard water. But apart from that I think solid detergent is the best for the environment.
There are those solid tablets which are like powder pressed together. Sometimes those are in a plastic wrapper that needs to be removed before use (yikes), and sometimes they are in a disolving gelatin like the liquid pods. But I guess the sacks of powder need not be as thick as the liquid ones.