Hacker News Reader

Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

I am in the exact same quagmire trying to research water softeners and drinking water (RO) systems. I am having to pull fragments of information from many different sites / videos and having to discard large amounts of contradictory and misleading information.

At this point, I’ve had to resort to reading scientific papers on how some of these technologies work (and how some don’t work) just to avoid the bad information. Unfortunately, the more I research the farther I get from making a purchase. This is not where I want to be, however, since the water in my area is very hard and everything gets scaled up all the time. I’m looking to purchase an espresso machine to get into the hobby but I’m not going to drop the money in expensive equipment until I can get access to water which will not damage it in short order.

View on HN

It isn't just me noticing this.

I had a project take me into an unfamiliar knowledge space. Up until... 2018? I could have relied on Google to find the meaningful information.

The reason people accepted Google was that it dramatically lowered information acquisition costs through the Internet. That benefit doesn't seem as common now. Back to webrings.

I bought my home water filter based on a Consumer Reports recommendation. I feel that's still a reliable source. I think you can sign up for online access for a month to do all your research.

I also really like the Wirecutter but I know not everyone here agrees with me.

Wirecutter advice seems dubiously linked to how much they can get paid by their "winners". It's not all bad advice, it often seems quite good, but it has the same corruption as top SEO blogs.

You guys had a bad time trying to search things that are at least a little complicated and obscure. I had the same experience trying to find a basic brownie recipe last week.

Recipes have somehow become one of the absolute worst parts of the internet. Google results are consistently dominated by websites that will require scrolling past multiple screens of narrative and increasingly some clicks to see the actual recipe. And when you start looking, you quickly discover that most of the time these websites are just repeating recipes from well known sources like The Joy of Cooking, or worse they have made changes that it's not clear they ever actually tested.

For stuff like that you should probably just buy a recipe book from a reliable author.

Same for my experience buying a furnace. Science journal articles were my best source of information, because I worried the manufacturers and installers would be biased.

I'm not sure how this could be otherwise. Who's going to pay for someone to stay current on such things and publish an easy to understand summary?

Which science journals review furnaces?

Most people’s experience with HVAC specialists comes from dealing with the technicians who install and service these systems in our homes. It turns out there’s an entire subfield of mechanical engineering dedicated to inventing, designing, and improving HVAC systems.

Wherever there are engineers, there are academics who do engineering research. They have journals of their own to publish this research.

As to the question of reviews, I’m not sure any articles actually review specific furnace models. The point of reading the papers is to educate yourself on the principles behind the technology so you can read manufacturer’s technical specifications and avoid the non-technical marketing language.

Yeah, I didn't get specific furnace models out of the articles. I was trying to decide between single-stage, two-stage, and many-stage designs. It turns out that the installers' claims about efficiency are bogus. Once you realize that you need the same number of BTUs regardless about how they're distributed, it's obvious. It's true that it might be more pleasant to have a little heat and a low fan constantly, rather than a blast periodically. In my opinion that's not worth the difference in upfront cost, increased maintenance cost, and reduced reliability.

If you are reading papers on water softeners you might already know everything this video contains. For me it was a good intro to the topic of good water for making coffee: https://youtu.be/jfElZfrmlRs

Thanks for this! James Hoffmann is how I got into the hobby. I binge watched all of his videos, including this one. But then I forgot a lot of the useful information he gives here, only remembering his frustration at the complexity of the problem. Upon second viewing I think there is some good stuff for me here.

I had been following Jim Shulman’s research which Hoffmann mentions in this video. It’s very dry and technical though and doesn’t provide much in the way of actionable advice on what equipment to purchase, instead recommending bottled water which I absolutely refuse to use (my household is already addicted to bottled water and I’m trying to break that addiction).

Ha! I was searching for the same (water softening systems) for Mexico... the amount of signal to noise ratio is so small in google, that it's mostly unusable.

I've been there and it's a hell of a rabbit hole, one that is easy to lose days to. Whatever you do don't fall for the Berkey scam.

Check out APEC RO systems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com