WaterWaiver

It's 50 bucks though. Too expensive of a date for me.

In the picture are 3 coiled wires, all sharing the same dark grey ring/toroid (but it looks yellow because it is wrapped in yellow kapton tape).

If you try and send the same signal through each of these 3 wires then they will all fight and cancel each other out (a bit like 3 people trying to through the same narrow doorway at the exact same time; no-one gets through). If the signals are different on each wire then they will get through fine (a bit like people going through a door at different times).

common mode chokes = choke/kill the signals that are common/same on all wires

You typically do not want common mode signals to exit your device and travel along cables, because then these cables act like radio transmitters. The exact reasoning for that is a bit more than I want to write here, but it's best explained with some pictures and phrases like "you turned your cable into a monopole you doof, use more common mode chokes and think of England".

Internally these devices work using magnetic fields in the dark-grey (ferrite) ring. I'm more familiar with 2-wire chokes where the coils are wound in opposite directions (so the magnetic fields they make cancel out), I am not sure how it works for 3 windings.

Microchannel coils: Wow. I assumed the pressures were too high for such construction to succeed. Thankyou :)

Fluid metering: I was aware of TXVs and capillary tubes, but not reverse bypass piston inserts. Would these options only be a few dollars difference in BOM price between each other? I guess the extra labour from soldering more pipes and connections for a TXV might be more costly than the extra materials themselves.

A vs N folded coils: interesting. I have mostly seen split systems and their unfolded coils, not central AC units with these A & N folded coils.

heat pumps instead of traditional compressor based ac systems

Heat pumps are compressor based systems. They are the same technology.

In addition to advances in fin design and compressor and motor efficiency and materials

This reads lot like an answer from an LLM. Did you use one? My apologies if not, but you sound very suspicious.

Definitely. Absolute scams. They deserve the "0 energy stars" ratings I've seen printed on their boxes.

My family bought one of those for one of my grandparents. On a 35degC day it was only able to cool the room by a few degrees and it was still humid inside.

Converting them into dual-hose systems would be so simple (almost free) to the manufacturer, but instead they rely on deceiving buyers with a promise of something that is not delivered.

then had lunch with the judge during deliberations where we chatted about how stupid the case was.

I suspect they might see it as their duty to point out legal stupidity; if only just so that the jurors are not given a bad impression of the whole legal system.

Interesting. I sounds like they might start with more than 10 jurors then, just in case.

Do they let a juror back in if they're off sick for a day? I wonder what the threshold is?

I love the "asked the court clerks for painkillers" xD The judge was probably stepping in to avoid a repeat of the episode where clerks gave the jury opiates.

Ty for your story. Interesting to see them that accommodating.

Chux Baku, I didn't think I was doing much :)

AusTransport sounds nice. But what happens to the old communities, to avoid people using those? I don't know if it's possible to lock them and leave a notice, or unlist them somehow?

Not a creeping fig, I sleep.

I love seeing trees in commercial rooves. All the joy and less guilt at not telling someone about it >:D

:(

They really don't put much plastic in these things.

I hope for a world where little phone competitors are more viable, then we might see some actually caring about bits like this. There are a few but they're expensive and I balk at the cost of new phones anyway (I use second hand ones off eBay).

As a general rule I hold suspicion to any marketing that claims that using CO2 (or other products of burning) is environmental friendly. The products you get from burning fuels are supposed to be useless and of low value, otherwise they are not burning them efficiently.

To turn CO2 into potassium carbonate (pearl ash) you will need a lot of energy. Where they get this energy from is far more important than where they got the CO2 from. I would not be surprised if it is more environmentally friendly to make the pearl ash through a different process and ignore the CO2 rather than trying to convert the CO2 into pearl ash.

Background chemistry

Fuels are chemicals with a lot of potential chemical energy stored in them. They are generally considered (at a minimum) flammable or "reactive" in some way.

When we burn fuels we turn them into products with very little potential chemical energy, mainly CO2. You cannot burn CO2 and get energy out of it, it is a "stable" or "unreactive" chemical. It has very little chemical energy stored in it compared to the original fuel.

The difference in stored chemical energy between the fuel (eg methane CH4) and the products (eg CO2) is turned into heat and then electricity (via steam turbines). If your products are still reactive then you have not used them to their full potential and you will not get as much heat out as you could (not to mention improperly burned products tend to be toxic, eg carbon monoxide).

Now let's look at potassium carbonate (K2CO3). It's a somewhat reactive chemical, it's not anywhere as stable as CO2, you can observe this by the fact it readily wants to react with other chemicals (caveman test: put it on your skin and it will sting). CO2 is very stable and does not want to do much (caveman test: put it on your skin and you won't feel it).

To make K2CO3 from CO2 you will require energy input. Turning an unreactive chemical into a reactive one is a bit like the reverse of burning something. This energy will probably come from burning more coal or gas. I suspect it will require more coal/gas than making the CO2 did, so net overall you will probably be releasing more CO2 than you capture and turn into K2CO3.

Of course if they're using renewal energy (solar) for this step then this could be a net positive.

My level of trust in the honesty of product packaging and marketing is pretty low and if they don't mention it then they obviously don't think it's important. 🤷

EDIT: I'll also add that "carbon capture" projects (things that claim to get rid of or make use of the CO2 from burning fuels) are universally disasters or scams.

EDIT2: I've taking some simplification liberties with the chemistry here. Technically CO2 isn't completely stable, you can do stuff like make weak acids in water with it, but I do not believe anyone has found a way for that to usefully use up what we emit from burning fuels.