Quote:
Originally Posted by Daox
Looks like a nice little gadget for the price.
|
I think that it's actually more than a gadget.
Some years ago, as I became interested in thermal behavior, I started doing bizarre things like performing my own comparative testing of available insulations because I didn't trust the advertised values.
The only tools that were available to me were a digital multimeter and a temperature sensor from Radio Shack. I constructed a simple apparatus in my living room because it was temperature controlled.
My apparatus was a sheet-rock mud bucket. I lined it with the insulation I was testing and as my heat source for the tests, I used an aluminum beer can that had just been yanked from a pot of vigorously boiling water, and it went straight into the humble test chamber. The I covered the beer can with more of the insulation I was testing.
Then I watched the values from the sensor as they were displayed on the multimeter, and wrote them down by hand every five minutes. This gave me valuable data because better insulations slowed the thermal decline.
The process was quite time consuming, the cost was minimal, but the knowledge I gained was considerable.
Since then I have done many more experiments and wanted to be able to log multiple temperature points of the same thermal event.
The equipment to do this has been so expensive that I have resorted to using cheap indoor/outdoor thermometers and setting up several at a time and hand logging events.
This is how I did the first graphs for the Homemade Heat Pump Manifesto. This is how I came to understand that it is possible for a beginner with few tools to achieve a COP much greater than 1.
It was after that, that I built my own mulit-source data logger from preconfigured micro-computer assemblies.
So, in my opinion, being able to accurately log thermal events is fundamental to understanding those events, events that can't be directly perceived.
And any device that puts this power in your hands does not deserve to be called a gadget.
It is a tool in our flight from ignorance.
Best,
-AC_Hacker