Horace Heffner <[email protected]> wrote: May people have made this comment. Some, like Jed, directly to Rossi.
And I have the scars to show for it. He is mad as hell at me for what I wrote to him today, which I also posted here. A thermal pulse method is also a useful check on calorimetry functions > during run times. A.k.a. recalibration on the fly. Anything less than this kind of professional calorimetry can not be relied > upon. That is overstating it a little. Rossi is trying to measure kilowatt level heat. People do that all the time, hundreds of thousands of times a day, without calibrating and without a blank test. They do it when they test boilers and other HVAC equipment. They do not bring a "blank" boiler in. When you measure low levels of heat, 100 W or less, you must calibrate and run a blank. When you get over 1 kW you can use conventional HVAC equipment. I assure you, no HVAC technician does a calibration or blank. They don't have time for that. Their results are extremely reliable because they use industrial equipment. It is rugged and it rarely fails. When it does fail, it usually tells you there is something wrong. It does have to be checked and calibrated periodically. They put a sticker on the meter showing when it was last calibrated. Rossi's problem is that he uses low-grade lab equipment instead of industrial HVAC stuff, and he does not follow lab protocols or HVAC procedures. The worst of both worlds. Heck, he doesn't even bother to zero out the meter. Any HVAC guy would do that first thing. It is the sort thing they teach you in junior highschool. "Always start at zero." In the old days it meant you turn the adjustment on the pen recorder to put it at zero, which was an arbitrary value. - Jed
