5 ms·

On the topic of overengineering: My modern sensibilities mean that I'm always surprised that toilets and taps work when there's no electricity. Most of what wa

• sircastor 6y ago
  I was the same way about landline telephones - the fact that they carried their own power source was unexpected.
  • pp19dd 6y ago
    And very useful. We used them to power shortwave radios in '93, during the war in the Balkans to figure out what the heck was going on since there were communication blackouts.
• dagw 6y ago
  My favorite piece of everyday 'overengineering' is that old fashion phone lines basically always worked even during a complete power outage.
  • zaarn 6y ago
    Phone lines are their own power grid. It can have outages too, but since they don't share infrastructure too much with HV lines, it's less likely both fail at the same time.
  • agumonkey 6y ago
    copper lines are getting replaced by .. fiber it seems, i hope it retains that feature
    • exhilaration 6y ago
      Nope, the ONT (Optical Network Terminal) that Verizon FIOS installed has a backup battery, but once that's exhausted it goes dark like the rest of the house. They also removed the copper line during installation, it seems like Verizon at least doesn't want to keep supporting their copper network where FIOS is deployed.
    • Accujack 6y ago
      Technically, it does, but it's difficult to run anything on microwatts of power generated by photovoltaic cells. A better standard fiber to premises standard would include a power connection, but that would greatly increase prices, too.
  • tim333 6y ago
    Cellphones usually work too, at least for a while.
    • TheCapn 6y ago
      That's because cell broadcast stations have big ol' UPS hookups and even diesel generators as backups
• bobflorian 6y ago
  Modern day water systems will only work for a while, until the water towers run out of backup systems. Still need electricity to pump water up for gravity to pressurize/distribute it.
  • Accujack 6y ago
    Not always. Also, a lot of water towers have alternative power sources they can use. More and more, solar panel arrays do this. They work very well despite the lack of constant power output because the water tower itself buffers the need for service.
• umvi 6y ago
  > Most of what was once a "trivial" design decision has become computer-controlled beyond recognition. Indeed, it's almost caused by lazy thinking. If you need conditional behavior of a widget, the default is to reach for the almighty transistor, why spend more brain cells than that. Yet... sometimes it's better to trigger your conditional behavior on some other physical phenominan (read: gas station nozzles[0]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venturi_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venturi_effect
  • Accujack 6y ago
    I think it's mostly due to the change in the makeup of the average "engineering" employee in corporations today. There's a very heavy emphasis on computer hardware and software knowledge, and much less on mechanical engineering and physical design. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you want to design a door handle with specific behavior and you understand software and electronics well but mechanical design less so, you design an electronically actuated door handle and do all the features in software. It's cheaper, too, honestly, because revising a software system is inherently cheaper than the design-manufacture-construct-test loop for mechanical design. But, as automotive design advances out of the technical design stasis it's been in for decades due to the dominance/barriers to entry of the US car industry, there's going to be a need for more advanced rules regarding what needs to be manual/mechanical vs. fly by wire. A similar regulatory regime already exists in aircraft design, which could be a guiding example.
  • jjk166 6y ago
    That's the opposite of reality. More mechanical/moving parts increases risk and complexity, not reduces it. If something is misaligned or bends or breaks or even if it's just insufficiently lubricated, you're SOL. Solid state transistors are stupid reliable in comparison. Further, implementing more than two or three levels of conditional logic with mechanisms is prohibitively expensive, whereas you can have thousands of checks in a digital system practically for free. Finally, a mechanical system can only handle situations it is designed for, upgrades are difficult and sometimes impossible to implement. On the other hand digital logic is easily updated to deal with unforeseen issues. Electricity is just as much a physical phenomenon as fluid flow or mechanical stress. [Edit] I'm a mechanical engineer, no one should be any more enthusiastic about doing things mechanically than I am.
• mschuster91 6y ago
  > My modern sensibilities mean that I'm always surprised that toilets and taps work when there's no electricity. That entirely depends on where you live! If you're in a valley and the water source is up in the mountain, gravity will do the job... but if you're living (in terms of height) above the water source, you'll likely run out of tap water very soon - depending if your water utility provider has installed backup diesel generators on-site.
  • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    And out in the country with my own well and pressure tank, I lose water as soon as the pressure tank is empty (about 10 gallons). Two or three flushes.
• jiveturkey 6y ago
  They actually don't. Your plumbing is pressurized thanks to electrically operated pumps.
  • mauvehaus 6y ago
    In most places, the proximate cause of the pressure is gravity, which continues working in the face of a power outage. In many places, electric pumps have to raise the water to a tower or reservoir, but there's a buffer of water at height that can be drawn upon when the power is out. Yes, it'll run out eventually, but it meets the need in the short run.
    • LeifCarrotson 6y ago
      In my experience, it's often true that city water remains pressurized even when a snow-covered tree branch has taken out a residential power line. Obviously, if the grid is taken out by a hurricane or earthquake or something the whole region is offline, but that's pretty rare here in the Midwest, but freakish ice/snow/wind storms knock down some wires and cause power outages at least once or twice a year. Why we can't convince regulators and the utility to spend 30% more initial capital and bury all the gross power lines underground where they're safe, instead of stringing them through the forest using dead tree carcasses instead is beyond me, but the city water treatment plant is typically powered by larger, more reliable segments of the grid. However, now that I have a private well, yes, it kind of sucks when power goes out and water doesn't work. I've got 40 gallons of hot water in the heater that I can drain, and between 10 and 30 gallons in the pressure tank in the crawlspace. More than enough to draw some off for drinking and cooking, and a few buckets for pouring in the tanks of (gravity-operated!) toilets. Speaking of cooking, another utility that's surprisingly operable in a power outage is natural gas. I can cook on my gas stove (but not in my electric oven), heat my house with my gas fireplace insert (but not my forced-air furnace), and heat water with my continuous-pilot water heater (but not fill it with my well pump) because the buried natural gas pipeline is always, always at 2 PSI.
• me_me_me 6y ago
  My pet peeve. Trying buying good oven or induction hub without touch controls. Why premium products are the ones using worse control system is beyond me.
  • arnon 6y ago
    It's easier to clean, and less likely to stop working in a high-oil/spill environment like a hob...