OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: It seems to me that while you do not say it outright, as if you are > trying to be polite in mixed company, you are inferring that Jed will > end up botching the job, or worse, cheat.
It is very likely I would botch the job. That is to say, I would end up doing something quite different from what Peter has in mind. Everyone does this sort of thing a different way. He proposes to put a layer of duct tape between the thermocouple and the hot surface. It would never occur to me to do that! I predict that will have a huge effect. That is not a plausible error that Rossi may have made so I do not see much point to it. This stuff is harder than you think, even when you do only rudimentary tests. These handhold temperature sensors have only a few buttons and features, such as min/max and REL (relative? zero-me-out). You can do a lot with them, but you have to feel your way around and try a variety of methods before you get something useful. With hot water temperature fluctuating around it was challenging to come up with a way to test the hypothesis that the cold pipe and trapped air might be affecting the reading. Very noisy. The fluctuations in water temperature were larger than the putative changes from trapped air, I think. I think I took them out of the equation by comparing T1 and T2 rather than an absolute measurement. I assume the temperature fluctuations affected both of them equally. Laboratory calorimeters are far better of course. But they are not useful on the kilowatt scale that Rossi is working with. Even these rudimentary tests are educational in that respect. Bear in mind that by using the bathroom sink flow of hot water I am working with kilowatt scale power. Roughly 12 kW. I can hear the gas heater kicking on and off and I can see the effects of it. - Jed
