diyrebel

@diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Have thermostatic mixers caught on in US showers yet?

I just visited some web galleries of bathroom remodelers in the US, and it looks uncommon to have external shower fixtures. They tend to bury as much of the fixture as possible in the wall. From the photos, I don’t get the impression they are using thermostatic mixing valves. But it’s hard to tell. Can anyone confirm or...

diyrebel,

You have two controls, 1 for temp and one for pressure (instead of the traditional hot and cold with independent pressure controls on each). The temp knob has a stop in one position as you turn it, which gives 38°C water. The cheaper models are external and use a wax cylinder inside:

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/29f73d68-2b7c-487c-8958-d7f37ded89b2.png

Wax expands as it gets warm. So when you first add pressure, internally the hot water valve is 100% open. Then as the water gets hotter at the valve, it closes and starts letting cold water in to retain the temp you select. It reacts quite fast too, so even if you have screaming hot water arrive at the fixture it’s quick enough to protect you from scalding. You set it and forget it. If someone else in the house flushes a toilet or runs a washer or dishwasher, thus causing the cold water to lose pressure, the thermostatic fixture will automatically adjust to maintain the temp.

The pricier ones are internal, which means all the complex valves are buried in the wall. And instead of wax they use a bi-metallic mechanism (which exploits the fact that a couple diferent metals bend differently with temp, or something like that). They look like this:

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fontanashowers.com%2Fv%2Fvspfiles%2Fassets%2Fimages%2F3-way-mixer.jpg

I think that has 2 pressure knobs, one for rainfall and one for the wand.

Whole external kits with rainfall and wand start at €100. If you just want the mixer bar and wand, it can be as cheap as €25. The internal kits start at around €500. I like the external ones not just because they are cheaper, but the plumbing is simple. You just need to have hot and cold threaded ½" pipes sticking out of the wall 15cm apart, which the fixture can screw onto.

diyrebel,

Yeah, kind of. I’m glad to hear they have that capability. But note that there are some non-thermostatic designs that come close to achieving the same effect. Those have a memory of sorts, where they know you want X volume of hot water and Y volume of cold water. Then if the pressure in one drops or increases, the valve will adjust the other line ensure the hot and cold have the same ratio regardless.

That’s pretty good. But it assumes the hot water and cold water are each at constant temps. So imagine if you get to near the end of a hot water tank supply, the hot water will gradually become colder. In that case, a thermostatic valve will open the hot even more to chase the temp you want. Whereas the pressure balance style will not. Perhaps more importantly, the pressure balance style does not counter the fact that the hot line will be initially cold since the hot water cooled down while sitting in the pipe. So you have to fiddle with readjustments until the hot pipe is maxed out.

diyrebel,

The thermostatic mixers can get as cheap as €25. Though I think the cheap ones have a degree of slippage, whereby mid-shower I have to increase temp. I don’t know if that’s because it lost track of my setting, or if I adjusted to the temp physiologically and need hotter water to psychologically feel the same level of heat.

What kind of bothers me about the pressure balance design is you cannot tell from the pics if it’s really pressure balanced. I think the one handle style goes back decades, and originally did not maintain a balance. You have a joystick of sorts but if the pressure on one pipe changes you don’t know if it internally balances to maintain the ratio. So you have to read the product description and trust it.

diyrebel, (edited )

I appreciate the suggestion but that luxury option sounds way more complicated. Adding a thermostatic mixer under the sink needs no pump or electrical wiring, and does not need a third water pipe to go from the faucet back to the boiler. It’s just plumbing under the sink. And in my case, I happen to have spare thermostatic shower mixers so I would just be buying a couple fittings.

I would perhaps even sooner put a small electric tankless water heater under the sink, which would require just one water pipe rather than 3.

I think there’s even a compromise where an electric insti-heat gadget can be plugged into the hot water line to give instant hot water, which I assume shuts off when the hot water actually comes.

diyrebel,

That’s hard to imagine. I would expect the plastic parts to withstand near boiling temps. The temp should drop some along the route. Often the the problem is people have their hot water tanks too low (to save energy), and then bacteria lives in the tank. So ideally the tank should be out of survivable range of most bacteria, and then showers should have a thermostatic mixer to prevent scalding. OTOH, if it’s a tankless boiler, you can probably get away with lower temps. So I would be tempted to conclude the cartridge you had was bad quality.

diyrebel,

That’s a different kind of leak. A leaky valve isn’t my issue. But indeed it is nice to have replaceable cartridges so when a valve goes bad it does not require digging up the wall and replumbing.

diyrebel, (edited )

I’m afraid you misunderstood. The leak in all scenarios is in the same place - water enters a room two rooms over from the bathroom. It’s unclear whether it’s seeping in around the showerpan or walls.

Where do you download subtitles from ?

My vlc (latest ver from fdroid) can no longer download subtitles anyone else have this problem and is there any way to solve it or any other apo to try from fdroid that can serve as both audio and video player ? Anyway some websites i visited puts me in captcha loop because i use vpn so is there any straightforward no bullshut...

diyrebel,

I’ve not fetched subtitles in a while but back when I did, I recall all the websites hosting them were extremely protectionist… more so than any other category of content on the web.

Of course the fix is to have torrents for the subtitle collections, perhaps by language.

diyrebel, (edited )

The others are right. Trying to stream from a torrent seems wasteful and complex.

But if you must for some strange reason, perhaps it would work to use webtor.io to produce an http-reachable audio file which could be curl/wget-fetched and piped to an audio decoder/player. I doubt you could make webtor fetch pieces linearly from the beginning. You would likely have to wait until the last piece is fetched to start streaming.

Dissimilar metals should not be joined, but it’s okay to join a brass manifold to steel pipe? Should I hunt for a steel manifold?

There are a lot of mixed messages about plumbing with dissimilar metals. Mainstream local plumbing shops sell brass manifolds. They say I can connect the brass manifold to steel pipe. Copper is very dissimilar to steel, and fittings for copper are brass. So if it’s okay to connect brass to copper and brass to steel, why...

diyrebel,

@loudWaterHombre or @loudWaterEnjoyer can audit for you.

Seriously, that’s what you’re missing. Bob the non-coder can trust Microsoft not to plant spyware in MS products, or Bob can trust some portion of the public (limited to ~8 billion people) to audit the code. It’s easier to trust the public than it is to trust a corporation. It’s not just about quantity of eyes, but having eyes that are more aligned with your interests.

diyrebel,

The problem is self-contradiction. These two statements are incompatible:

  • “This [auditing] is NOT the most important benefit.”
  • “‘open source’ is good, firstly, because it permits auditing the source code”
diyrebel,

Sounds good… will be interesting to see if @scratchandgame takes you up on the offer!

diyrebel,

Hopefully he asks you to audit a tool you might enjoy using or contributing to.

diyrebel, (edited )

Ending capitalism is not the /only/ way. Within a capitalistic system, you can boycott shit. Most consumers are pushovers but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m boycotting hundreds of shitty companies. Off the top of my head:

  • Amazon
  • Cloudflare
  • Microsoft
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Apple
  • (surveillance advertisers in general)
  • (all closed-source s/w)
  • HP
  • Proctor & Gamble
  • Unilever
  • all ALEC members (American Express, Anheuser Busch, Boeing, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Chevron, FedEx, Motorola, PNC bank, Sony, TimeWarner)
  • many shitty banks
  • Paypal
  • AT&T
  • GMA members (Coke, Pepsi, Kraft - Heinz, Kellogg’s, General Mills, McCormick, Hormel, Smucker)
  • BetterThanCashAlliance.org members (visa, mastercard, unilever) – war on cash
  • Bayar-Monsanto
  • Dupont
  • Hershey
  • Nestlé
  • Exxon/Mobil
  • Comcast
  • Koch
  • Home Depot
  • Lowes
  • …etc

Those are all shitty companies that significantly worsen the world. Giving money or data to any of them contributes to enshitification of the world.

Of course it’s an option to stop supporting assholes. Become ethical. Be the change you want to see.

diyrebel, (edited )

I didn’t see the OP’s pic but these groups generally work against enshitification of the world:

Notice that none of those communities are on Cloudflared instances (thus also avoid propagating the enshitified portion of the fedi).

diyrebel,

You might let her know that she can borrow DVDs from the public library at no cost. Another little-known gratis option is freesat and terrestrial broadcast. I recently started using MythTV as a PVR to record broadcast TV and was pleasantly surprised to find no commercial interruptions (but if there are commercials in her region, MythTV can cut them out).

diyrebel, (edited )

It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.

That’s simply true. It doesn’t do anyone any good to disregard the facts.

Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.

That abstraction doesn’t help much. And first of all, it’s more accurate to derive the statement “If you have more money then you have more influence”.

It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is. The worse thing you can do is tell people not to boycott shit products on the basis of rejecting reality. It’d be like telling people not to vote in elections because their vote is a drop in the ocean.

Some people vote for democrats, then they cancel their own vote by getting their internet service from Spectrum, buying fuel from Chevron for their car, shipping their packages using FedEx, getting their phone service from AT&T, banking at PNC Bank, flying on Boeing planes, shopping on Amazon, doing their web searches on a Microsoft syndicate’s site (e.g. DDG), buying Sony devices… etc. They either have no clue that most of their voting is actually for the republicans, or they think that drop-in-the-ocean vote that comes once in 4 years somehow carries more weight than the daily votes they cast with reckless disregard.

Greg Abbott’s war chest is mostly fed by oil companies. If you buy fuel for a car, you help Greg Abbott and other republicans. And if you buy from Chevron, you give the greatest support to republicans (Chevron is an ALEC member).

Why do Instances Block?

So I want to make this post because I don’t know why instances, mine specifically, choose to block others. Now, don’t get me wrong that blocking instances that are CP related and anything illegal is something that should and needs to be blocked and/or removed. but if its something like Threads, let me choose to block a user...

diyrebel, (edited )

If you oppose tech giants, then of course these Cloudflare instances are unsuitable and should be avoided:

  • lemmy.world ← Cloudflare
  • sh.itjust.works ← Cloudflare
  • zerobytes.monster ← Cloudflare
  • lemmy.ca ← Cloudflare
  • lemm.ee ← Cloudflare
  • programming.dev ← Cloudflare
  • lemmy.zip ← Cloudflare

This has nothing to do with your question about blocked threads, but I gather that you want to avoid the enshitification brought by tech giants, and you are on lemmy.zip. Cloudflare is a walled-garden and exclusive club. Not everyone can access Cloudflare-jailed content. CF also sees your username and password. So I suggest choosing an instance other than the above, and favoring communities that are also not on those instances.

Some free-world non-walled-garden instances are:

  • fedia.io
  • sopuli.xyz
  • beehaw.org
  • infosec.pub
  • lemmy.dbzer0.com
  • slrpnk.net
  • links.hackliberty.org
  • mander.xyz
diyrebel, (edited )

Perhaps, but your reasoning is a bit too vague to be convincing. So what am I missing? Beehaw registration is open. I had no problem getting an account there; over Tor in fact. I don’t recall if they were using the Q/A interview field back when I signed up. OTOH that screening mechanism has become quite typical these days.

W.r.t defederation, I only know that Beehaw defederated from centralized instances, which is fair enough from the PoV of those embracing the decentralization principle. I skimmed through their several page long policies which boil down to “don’t be mean”. So I would guess they defederate from hate-rich nodes - not sure. What specifically do you have in mind?

The Cloudflare instances I listed are walled gardens because they restrict access hard and fast to various demographics with arbitrary exclusion of various groups of people (which IMO is an even harsher form of walled garden than some of the corporate walled gardens). I would not call having a code of conduct indicative of a walled garden, otherwise we would be calling just about every single instance a walled garden and thus not a useful place to draw a line.

diyrebel,

When I first read this, I thought you were referring to threads in the generic sense – that your instance was blocking specific discussions. You should have capitalized Threads™, and ideally have the TM.

Wow… Fuck for hi-jacking a common word. We really need to replace FB Threads™ with an unambiguous word that does not fuck up conversation.

diyrebel, (edited )

lemmy.ml (formerly dev.lemmy.ml) was centralized by Cloudflare (after the renaming iirc). It was an embarrassment that the flagship instance was so antithetical to Fedi philosophy. Perhaps due to that well-placed criticism, lemmy.ml eventually dropped CF. But lemmy.ml is still today centralized by disproportionate size. There is also copious political baggage with those admins which has helped drive people off (thus beneficial shrinkage) but which ultimately enabled/led lemmy.world to become the biggest most centralized instance (which is centralized by both factors: Cloudflare and disproportionate size).

In the big scheme of things, AFAICT beehaw is federated and reachable from other Fedi-principles-respecting instances. I can reach it from other non-walled-garden instances I listed. Grouping beehaw with the walled garden instances is a weird place to draw a line. I’ve only heard about beehaw defederating from instances that are antithetical to the fediverse spirit. But I only know w.r.t the big instances… feel free to point out counter examples. There probably wouldn’t be much chatter about defederation from small instances.

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