Having said all of that . . . Looking back at my notes from Hydrodynamics and the County Facility engineer who measured excess heat from the gadget installed in the Fire Department, I should report their methods could not be simpler. In the case of the Fire Department, they did the following:
They asked the firemen not to use cold water for an hour or so. They read the water meter and wrote down the setting. (I mean the meter outside the building used for billing purposes.) They measured the tap water temperature. They ran the hot water and measured the outlet temperature with a dial thermometer. All boilers have these things. They recorded the temperature every 5 minutes. They measured the power input with an expensive wattmeter, set to record kilowatt hours on a paper tape. After a while they stopped, and recorded the water meter reading again. In other words, it was simple flow calorimetry. A water meter is a rather crude instrument, but highly reliable. Ditto a bimetalic dial thermometer. As you can imagine, this method gives you only 5% or 10% accuracy but that is enough to distinguish 5 kW input from 1,000 kW output. It would satisfy any engineer on planet earth. I guess I was exaggerating the difficulties in that sense. HOWEVER, this test will not be enough to satisfy skeptics and scientists, as we just saw from the comments by Mitchel Swartz. They will demand a calibration and a null run, and they will come up with many novel theories as to why the test is invalid, such as the "positional flow error." I do not know if it is possible to devise a test to satisfy such critics. Certainly it would cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Skeptics who suspect a scam will not be satisfied there are no hidden wires, or fake instrument, or professors in cahoots with Rossi. Perhaps it would wise for Rossi to ignore this sort of thing, and try to convince engineers only. - Jed
