I wrote:
The secondary circuit is open. The water is not recycled.
Rossi explained this /repeatedly/ in his forum.
I know he did, and this confused me. As you see in the video he
changed his mind.
This is in the video at around 1:26. "We just get rid of it . . ." The
camera follows the outlet pipe to the pipe in hole in the wall that
serves as a drain an this lab.
This video is worth watching several times. It makes many things clear,
such as the nature of the flow meter. The video shows why Lewan had to
manually log the temperatures from the cooling water loop, instead of
recording them on a computer. As you see, the temperature was logged on
a multi-input handheld thermocouple. A meter. It is not plugged into a
computer so he had to read it manually.
I asked Lewan if this is the Testo 177-T3 he lists in his report. I
looked that up on the Internet and it does not look the same to me.
Anyway, they used some sort of handheld meter that can have up to four
thermocouples attached, as you see on the meter's screen in the video. I
wish he had held the camera more steady so I could read the make of the
meter. (By the way, when you make a video of an experiment, you should
let the camera linger for a long time on each component. There is no
need to keep moving the camera around. Do not try to make an exciting
video. Don't worry about production values.)
I think this is the meter that Lewan says had a 0.5°C bias. I cannot
imagine why! That's strange. These things are highly reliable and
internally consistent. The meter may not show the actual temperature but
all of the thermocouples attached to it should show the same temperature
when they are all immersed in well-stirred water.
Honestly, even though the data had to be manually logged in this case,
is a good thing that Rossi used a handheld meter rather his own computer
interface. Even the skeptics will have to admit there is no way he can
monkey with one of these. It is a clean, stand-alone interface.
It could be that all the data points were recorded internally in this
meter, and someone can figure out how to dump them over the USB port.
That would be nice. They might even be time-stamped! It would be great
to move this project right up into 1970s technology.
- Jed
