Susan Gipp <susan.g...@gmail.com> wrote: Here the "flow meter" > > http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0LCgn_05ZGY/TWGehaAfm-I/AAAAAAAAE5w/Ew3nHhdHUDQ/s1600/E-Cat110211.jpg > > It's a simple house utility water meter like this >
Thanks. They said it was an ordinary utility meter. Why did you put the word "flow meter" in quotes? That's a meter. For the purposes of this test it as good as a $10,000 meter would be. > They mounted above a camera connected to the laptop taking pictures at some > interval. > This meter has in the middle a kind of star. Its spinning speed shows the > water flow. Visually you can only rougly extimate the flow rate. > A rough estimate would be fine, but like any other utility meter it shows the cumulative flow, and I am sure that is accurate. Water utility billing would be chaotic if meters did not work. To get the flow rate per second you read the total amount and divide by duration. > It's not very unlikely that, if for any reason the water pressure > temporarly dropped, they could think of an unexplanable power peak. There were no unexplained power peaks, except for the first one. So your statement is hypothetical. It is also extremely unlikely for the following reasons: 1. Pressure does not vary with a municipal water supply, except when there is construction and they shut off the supply at the street. You can tell when this happens. 2. Apart from the initial heat burst, the temperature was steady, as shown in the laptop photos they took. So the flow must have been steady. 3. If the temperature had gone up, they would have checked the instantaneous flow rate. It isn't that difficult to read. They also would have watched the cumulative flow for a while. Anyway, they said the temperature did not fluctuate. - Jed
