I don’t know what specific pathogens you are talking about, but the classic risk is Legionella, which gets killed at only 55°C.
The heatpump is aware of this, and has built in additional electric heaters, and combine the electric heaters with the regular heatpump cycle to heat the water up to temperatures beyond 60°C regularly to keep the water pathogen free.
There’s plenty of reasons for that to happen, but it depends a lot on how your heat source works.
Most regular furnaces will heat up the water quite high, and just leave it at that temperature, and as soon as the water temperature is about to drop, it starts heating again, therefore the temperature rarely changes, unless you have used up all the hot water (teenagers running long and hot showers for rather long, or just many people showering in short succession).
But many newer smart furnaces, and especially heatpumps will change the amount of hot water available depending on demand, and even dynamic electricity costs.
I have a modern heatpump which both controls the temperature and amount of hot water depending on usage patterns, as well at optimizing for heating up the water when the electricity is cheap. Just today electricity is 5x as expensive at 20:45 as it was at 15:00
This means that the hot water temperature and volume can change quite significantly, depending on the time of day and the electricity cost.
Right now I can see that my hot water is only 45.7°C/114.1°F, which fits well because no one in the house is usually showering at this time, and the hot water is only used for washing up and washing hands.
In the morning the hot water tank will likely be around 55-60°C/131-140°F, because that’s when people are usually showering, and the electricity is usually cheaper during the night hours.
Having a thermostatic mixer that can be set to a fixed temperature, regardless of the input hot water temperature is quite nice in this case.
The ones I’m talking about doesn’t just keep the pressure ratio static, they actually adapt to the temperature of the hot and cold water.
If the hot water drops in temperature, then the output water stays at the right temperature, but the output pressure might drop, as the mixer allow more of the hot water through, and less of the cold water.
Of course if the hot water drops below the set temperature, it can no longer maintain it’s temperature.
And yes these are also entirely mechanical, no electronics or even electricity.
Are you sure about that? I don’t see any numeric temperature settings. Every thermostatic mixer I have ever seen as at least a 38°C/100°F setting.
And also people are talking about the temperature creeping up during the shower due to the pipes heating up… That doesn’t happen on a thermostatic mixer.
But I guess limescale could seize it up… I have just never experienced that, and the water is very hard where I live…
Are thermostatic shower mixers not a thing where you guys live?
It never ceases do amaze me how companies get to keep their ill gotten gains…
Earning $80 billion and then being fined $150 million is less than 0.2% in fines…
If I robbed a bank and stole $10,000. I bet I would have to pay all of that back and with a fine and prison sentence on top… Not a less than $2 fine…
About a decade ago I worked as a software developer consultant at a company that were in the process of outsourcing all their software development to India…
A team of 6 Indians were hired in to take over the piece of software my team was developing. All 6 Indians had CVs that mentioned 10+ years of Java development experience, which was the language the software was written in.
However after working with them for a full month it was pretty clear that none of them were very skilled. One of them was clearly better than the rest, and he confided with me that he actually only had a 12 week programming course as experience.
This was far from a unique experience. Some of the other pieces of functionality had been running with an outsourcing team for 3 years. And despite daily status updates and constant checking up on them, they had yet to provide anything that actually worked.
The company itself was pretty clearly a huge part of the problem as they had pretty much opted for the cheapest possible outsourcing firm…
But all in all Claude would have run circles around pretty much every outsourcing developer I saw during that assignment… To be honest a single Claude license would probably have been a stronger contender than all 150 outsourcing developers combined…
That’s a very large amount of jobs that are very directly threatened by AI.
You’re probably right that the value density of RAM sticks is better… But NVidia B300 GPUs are still ~$45,000 each. A backpack full is still quite a lot of money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_James_A._Garfield
President Garfield was shot in the back by Guiteau, but didn’t die. Garfield was taken to the White House, where his doctors tried too remove the bullet. This went on for over 2 months, and Garfield started suffering from Sepsis and infection, then died.
Garfield might have survived if the doctors had left the bullet alone, and just treated the wound.