Those familiar with IP telephony, IP-TV and internet connectivity in general know about Quality of Service (QoS) functionality to ensure the highest priority devices on the network get access to bandwidth first. This ensures that, if your office uses VoIP for phone calls, that the phone conversation will have priority over standard internet traffic in your network to prevent choppy calls when you experience a high load on your network.
I thought up an idea this morning that seems like it would great potential. An engineer and a plumber could get together and make this happen fairly quickly I suspect. I want QoS for my H2O.
Households, especially old ones, have long had issues with hot water availability. Sometimes its due to low pressure, sometimes its due to small water heater capacity, etc, but it can have a large impact on the functioning of a household. You can’t start the dishwasher in the morning because it’ll pull hot water from the shower and we’ve all been burned by scalding water in the shower because someone flushed the toilet upstairs. This is nonsense. We send people to the moon and build electric cars, we can fix this.
We need a basic device that sits on the outlet of the cold water from the street and the hot water from the water heater and gives priority to certain devices on the plumbing network. I suspect this would require you to run pipe from each room in the home to terminate to this device, much like a circuit breaker for electrical but man, wouldn’t that be nice? You could give the bathrooms high priority to never have the pesky shower incidents, give the dishwasher low priority so it doesn’t impact other water usage in the house. It’d basically just be a regulator for temperature and pressure across the various devices. You could even control it remotely by running a small onboard web server connected to wifi in your home. Pipe burst in your upstairs bathroom? Shut it off with a button or over the web, no more climbing around in the basement or crawlspace to find that water shutoff and have to shut off water to the whole house!
0 Comments on “QoS for your H2O”
Leave a Comment