Installing a remote control in the kitchen for the tankless water heater and some power consumption data. I wanted to add a remote control so I could manage the heater from the kitchen. For example, bump up the hot water temp. for the dishwasher or lower it for showering. One advantage of an on-demand tankless unit is you can make hot water at whatever temperature you need. For the dishwasher, with the "hot start" feature, I can now fill with 140F water and then the washer only has to heat it 10F more to 150F with expensive electricity. Likewise for a shower, why heat to 120F then cool the water to 100F, instead, just make 100F water to begin with. If you are looking for one, shop around, prices range from $60 up to nearly $180 on eBay. If you don't see one right away, wait a week or so and search again. Remote control information: http://www.takagi.com/products/accessories/remote-temperature-controllers Excellent thread on the Takagi remote control interface: https://terrylove.com/forums/index.php?threads/reverse-engineer-takagi-tankless-wh-control-protocol.45965/ Seems to be a DC power supply voltage with a pulsed communication protocol riding on the wires. A 20 bit data packet is sent at 500 baud about 5 times per second with the remote responding similarly. For electrical energy consumption, ~3W standby, 54W operating and ~224W in freeze protect mode. I would estimate approx. 2.5KWH/mo. of electric energy usage. One day, I'll be powering that off a solar power inverter. In effect, that'll be trading solar power for the natural gas that used to be used by the old tank water heater, saving about 1 Therm/week. More to come: https://youtu.be/rYecHPXXQSE Be sure to rate, comment and share And as always, thanks for watching Intro: Louisiana Fairytale by Austin Rogers http://drfiddle.com/show_tune.php?id=94 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjte7t8Cf_c

In this 3rd streaming radio video, I'll look at some of the streaming add-ons (content sources) available for Kodi/XBMC. It would take dozens of videos to cover all this information in detail, but I just wanted to give a brief overview of some of the streaming options available. I'll also look at a few of them in more detail. You can get Kodi from a number of sources, I used the OpenELEC build below for both Windows and Raspberry Pi: - http://openelec.tv/ That install will include the Kodi add-ons repository from which you can install the Music add-ons. I also installed the TVaddons repository from: - http://fusion.tvaddons.ag/ There's many more official and unofficial Kodi add-on repos available, a search on Youtube or your favorite search engine will bring up tons of information about those. Check out Husham Memar's excellent Kodi channel: - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb5DkdbEOBNoOY7RGkGN4pg I mainly run the Radio and NPR add-ons to get basic radio playback on my old portable TV that is now a streaming radio player: - https://youtu.be/nm38gbKpVYE It's solar powered and I can also run it portable off of a 12V LiPo battery pack. This has let me unplug a radio and a set of powered speakers that I used to use in my garage/shop area when I spend 8-10 hours a day with my business. So while over the air radio signals are free to receive, I had been paying for electrical power to run the radio. Now that power comes from the sun and I can also tune in radio stations well beyond the range of my old antenna-based radio. I know there are internet radios available for purchase and I did look at those in the past. But they cost more than a RPi and only do that one thing. On top of that, they have one of those nasty 2-prong electrical plugs on them, so I would simply be trading a plug-in FM radio for a plug-in internet radio. Now I have a full streaming media player and it runs off free solar power to boot. And it's made from an old obsolete portable TV a few pieces of open source hardware and software. Now I used an old analog TV as it had a 12V power supply, display, remote control, speakers and an audio amplifier ready to go. But you could build a streaming radio/music setup from scratch using a touch screen LCD screen plugged into the RPi display connector. Add a Bluetooth adapter in a USB port and finally connect up some Bluetooth speakers and you would be set. Questions welcome in the comments section below. And as always, thanks for watching! ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJPy5SwVa-I