My wife has allergies, and I've told you the story more than once. Over the years we have talked to medical professionals and to HVAC people regarding what could be done. The doctors have helped, but apparently moving to a new state upset wife's entire immune system so that we had to start over with the allergy shots. The best information we got was from the HVAC people. They KNOW all about air quality. At least two techs who came out to the house claimed their wives had allergies like my wife, but there was nothing that they could do to the air circulation system that actually helped. There are all kinds of filters and UV lights and whatnot. Clean air does benefit people, but apparently it doesn't do anything for the immune system. However, it might be interesting to find out what kind of HVAC system they have at your doctor's office.
Per her request, my wife got one of those smart wrist watches for Christmas. Since I did the buying it was a watch designed by Google to work with their Pixel smartphones. The watches are computers, but only by definition. There is a processor in there and memory and they can run software, but that's it. The watches need some way to store a lot of data as well as a means to connect to the Internet. That internet connection is a requirement for some of the apps built into the watch. Some watches have that internet I/O built in, and those are the high end very expensive watches. They all seem to have both WiFi and Bluetooth so that they can be paired to something smart, such as a phone or a PC. My wife's watch has a magnetic button that snaps onto the back side of the watch for charging. The USB end can go anywhere that is capable of charging mobile devices. Because the watch uses next to no power and has out of necessity a small battery, any ol' USB charging apparatus will do. I've charged it off a port on my laptop, for example.
Due to my past experience with the FitBit wearable, I would strongly suggest you check the calibration of all the pertinent readings you take. My FitBit was grossly out of calibration for blood pressure, close for pulse rate, and I have no idea about the O2 measurements. The step counter worked well, but the distance walked didn't. Since you are going to do some serious record keeping you want to be certain your watch is accurate. Or, you at least want to know what the fudge factors are.
I must say that I'm impressed that you decided to get one of those watches. The next thing you know I will be reading about the smartphone you got to go along with it.
At my old house in St. Loo, I had electrostatic filters down inside the furnace output plenum, and this was over and above the normal air filters in the intake side of the system. I attribute that electrostatic filter to the reason we had next to no particulates floating around in the house, with two heavy smokers in there.
Plus, even with 4 dogs and 6 cats, there was next to no dust on any of the furniture, but lots of hair on the dog and cat beds of course.
Doctors office do have quite elaborate air filtration systems, due to so many sick people coming into their establishments.
Usually much better than what is in the hospitals too.
When I had my two restaurants, back when everybody smoked, we had really nice air handling systems there too. Our heating system only used outside air which was heated and sent into the dining area, no heat was sent into the kitchen area due to the stoves and ovens making too much heat back there already. And other than the air returns in the ceiling of the dining area, the main air returns were in the outside wall at the far end of the kitchen, right across from the cooler doors.
The unit I got looks nice, and all the reading when compared to my other equipment is dead on except for the O2 reading, which is what I was most concerned about. It seems to fluctuate wildly, not even close to what my fingertip readers are showing, which do read exactly the same as the doctors units show. I've checked them many times, each time I'm there in fact.
Debi has an iPhone now, and gave me her old Android Schmartz-Fone, but it has no cell service.
I did get it to work with my first FitBit I tried, but other than setting it up, all the functions are available from the watch itself.
No where near as fancy as how Debi's works though. Instead of a touch screen, it has a touch panel to move between operations the watch does. But since I've not had time to download the App, I don't know it it has a place to make error corrections or not.
But so far, I'm happy with all of it except the main reason I bought it, to have a quick and accurate O2 reading.
Because of my bad ticker, I don't have enough circulation in my fingers to get a good reading right away anymore on my fingertips. But I know when reading the pulse/oximeter if it is stable or not, fairly easy to tell. The only time it is off is when my hands are cold and sometimes white. Which is why I wanted one that reads on the wrist without a finger plug like another watch type I had. I can't afford the one that clips to your earlobe and sends the data to a receiving unit, they are like 300 bucks on the low end and go up from there.
It is almost 6 pm and I'm just now getting my morning stuff done.
Our electric went out around 4:30 am, which meant my O2 machine was off. So Debi brought my big rollable O2 tank to the bedroom before she left for work at 6:30 am. Our electric came back on around 7 am, so I got up and got dressed, did my morning round of medications and treatments, and of course had to deal with my niagara falls nose for a couple hours.
About the time I was ready to head out to my office, the electric went out again. The house cools down fast when it is only 9 degrees outside, so I sat down on the rocker in the middle room that has no windows and pulled a blanket over me. About an hour later the electric came back on so I hurried up to the office and got the Silver Yogi fired up. It was only 41 degrees up here, and was only up to around 48 when the electric went off again. This time it was only off for about 20 minutes, so I just lit a candle and kept my hands over the candle, hi hi.
When the electric came back on again, I still had to load all the always on programs I use that require manual setting up each time. Can't auto-start them because they need different setting for each instance of the program.
Once I got that done, and started the old computer with no internet, I got to work, but by then it was close to 11 am.
And here it is 6 pm and I've not started the stuff I usually start after lunch.
Our electric comes from KUB, the U stands for Unreliable, hi hi.
Ameren Missouri brags about it's modern delivery system and the smart meters we all have on the sides of our houses. The first few years we have been here the power went out once or twice a year and stayed out for no less than one hour. Some of those outages were strange in that the weather was sunny and bright in the middle of summer. No flickers or sparks during an attack by tornadoes. Really strange. Apparently we already had the smart meters when we bought the house, but the network for them was not yet fully functional. About three or four years ago that changed and we have not had a power outage since. There have been a few flickers, one of which nearly destroyed my Windows 7 installation. That was the reason I purchased a UPS and line conditioner. It works beautifully when the line voltage flickers. As I do with many things I over did the UPS power capability. With my monitor, my desktop, my NAS, the router, and the modem all plugged in and running I 'm only consuming about 140 watts. Thus my 1500 watt battery will last approximately 45 minutes. That's not enough to get me though a power outage lasting more than 45 minutes, but it will give me time to shut things down gracefully. I have noting that needs to be preset, but if I did that is why batch files were invented. In Linux I am positive you can run a cron at startup to set any program parameters that need setting.
It sounds as if you will enjoy your new toy, but it has to be grossly disappointing that the reason you bought it cannot be fulfilled. I had trouble with the FitBit blood pressure readings. They were way off. However, I did learn that if I pressed the watch down onto the skin of my arm the BP readings improved dramatically. I tried tightening the band but that didn't do much. I actually had to press fairly hard with my fingers in order to get the damned thing to work. The sensor is on the back side of the watch but I would not doubt that my fingers helped improve the reading. LOL O2 readings seems like it should not be a problem. I suppose you could try taking readings on your other arm or up and down the length of your desired arm. There might be a sweet spot up around your shoulder.
Thank you for the good wishes and likewise I hope that you and your sweetheart wife can enjoy the day in peace and comfort. Merry Christmas to your both.
We never had a power outage in Creve Coeur unless the whole city was out. I attribute this to the fact they used a grid system for our electric. So if power went down at one substation, the second substation kept us up and running. Both substations would have to be without power for us not to have electric. That or the local transformer for our group of four houses would have to blow up.
Down here is entirely different, more like a long extension cord, and if it breaks we are all out, hi hi.
We were out for three days when a car hit a major utility pole.
I've had a couple of UPS systems, the first one worked great, but I moved it over to my Ham Station when I bought a new one. The new one was a pain in the arse, as it would cycle for no reason causing the computer shut down and reboot, when we had no power outage at all.
I tried what you said, holding it down, made no difference.
I does have a auto-calibration you can do, but it didn't change how erratic the reading are.
All the other features work just great. And it does many more than I thought it did too.
What I don't like is I cannot move the features around from the order they have them in.
If I want to get to the O2 setting, it is nine taps on the scroll bar.
I am not knowledgeable regarding the electric distribution around here. It must be a grid of massive size because Amaren services a lot of customers. The line voltage during peak hours during the summer is quite stable and only a few volts below what it is during the winter, 117 vs 122 VAC. This tells me they have a way to suck in extra power when they need it which is amazing to me because I would think all power companies are over burdened during hot summer days. The trickier part of the service is when a distribution node goes down for some reason. That node is bypassed and customers are supplied from elsewhere until the damage is repaired. I believe switching sources is what causes the flickering. The fact that they can switch sources tells me it's a grid pattern.
Those watches are wearable computers. Their functionality is growing by leaps and bounds with each new release. The interface, however, will always be a problem given the small size of the screen. You can't have desktop type icons or those app thumbnails you find on smartphones because there is no way to separate them far enough apart. However, it does seem like a lot of clicks to get to where you want. WIfe's watch, being a Google brainchild, can take verbal instructions. Simply say "what is my blood oxygen level" and it will display it without touching anything. She can also say "Call Gary" and if she had your number the watch would pair with the phone and call you. That's all pretty amazing if you ask me. However, she does not like talking to her computer so she does it all manually.
Yeppers, Union Electric, now Ameren I assume, has always had excellent electrical service with next to no outages that you would know of due to them being on a grid system.
Debi's Schmartz-watch does all of those things also, and sometimes it is phunny.
I wore her phone yesterday and compared the O2 readings her watch gave me with my fingertip devices. Now her watch was always dead on, +-1% which is just fine. Mine just seems to shoot meaningless random numbers. If I'm 91 it shows 99, if I'm 95 it might show 84, I get up to 97 and it shows 99 and then 82.
I'm going to have to see about sending it back, because the SpO2 reading is the only one I really needed it for and that does not work on this watch.
Union Electric Company d/b/a is Ameren Missouri. The reason I know that for certain is that today I got a notice in the mail regarding a public meeting they are involved with. Yes, they want to raise the rates by 11% and will discuss the matter at a public meeting come February 2023. The electric bill here seems to be less than what it was in my previous house, and this house has 300 sq ft more living space. I could be using less KW here because the house is wired differently, but this ol' Missouri Home has an all electric kitchen, which I did not have up north. So, I'm guessing it's just cheaper here when it comes to electricity.
As far as computer connectivity and functionality goes, I don't think I need a smart wrist watch to improve my current experience. The watch has sensors designed to monitor certain health related body functions, but at the moment that luxury is not all that interesting to me. The FitBit was a gift from my wife of many years which is why I wore that for a while. It had a pedometer that kept track of my steps, but I could never calibrate it well enough to be accurate for distances walked. That didn't matter at the time because the fad then was to do 10,000 steps per day - recently that has been revised to 7,000 for us old codgers. I was lucky back then to get up to 3000 and that's all I really wanted to know. The Pixel watch can do quite a bit more than that old FitBit, and in fact Google now owns the company of FitBit. I don't use my clever phone for all the things it is designed to do, and I would use the watch even less.
If you got that watch from China you might have a problem getting it back there for a refund. Then again, the last time I bought something from that continent there were no issues other than the huge delay time in customs. If it doesn't do what you bought it for, then you certainly should send it back. There are dedicated wearable pulse oximeters on the market with a wide range of prices. I'm not sure how accurate any of them would be, but your friend Google would gladly show you the available options.
You're electric bill should show what you pay per kwh somewhere on it.
I'm not really into fancy gizmo's much anymore, but years ago I was knee deep in them, hi hi.
The last time I got something from overseas and told them it didn't work, they had me take a picture of the item cut in half, which I gladly did. The charges on my CC disappeared or were reversed.
Another place just had me remove a part and mail it back to them, when they got it, they sent me a credit. The part they had me remove is one that you can't get a replacement for, hi hi.
Just to let you know, today has been a really bad day for me in more ways than one.
I can't breathe even with my O2 up, I'm still suffocating, and very tired from pursed lip breathing.
When our electric came back on, our Heat Pump didn't, not all of it. So we have no heat, not even the inductance heat, because no blower is blowing, and no compressor is compressing, or doing sit-ups, hi hi.
I consider it a new heat pump, even though it is now around ten years old or older. Can't afford to replace it.
Plus I'm worried about my water pipes freezing and breaking. It did warm up to 40 today so maybe they'll be OK.
But I have no idea how long it will take to get the unit repaired.
It also snowed here about 2 inches is all, but for down here, that's a lot.
When it rains it pours, and always when I have the least amount of funds to work with.
You are correct about the charge per KWH being on my electric bill. I can look at it to see what I'm paying, but I don't have any bills from the old house for comparison. I simply have a gut feeling we are using more here and paying less.
I've had a few experiences similar to yours with return goods. Most of the time they just want pictures showing the damage or as you mentioned the item of interest made to be unusable. I guess it costs more than it's worth to return items.
The cold air we just got rid of caused a lot more news than those Arctic blasts that were common when I lived near Chicago. They always made it sound dramatic by mentioning wind chill being -40℉ or some such number. Who the heck is going to be standing outside sweating when the temps are near 20 degrees below zero? To me that wind chill is a bogus number that at best represents a theory. Not much more. And, of course, the big concern during such weather events is power and plumbing. I've read and heard about several incidents of power outages and frozen water pipes as a result of this past storm. We did not get the full force of it here in Missouri, but the winds were ferocious nonetheless. Apparently a lot of people lost power and a few ended up with burst water pipes. Lambert International Airport, just a few miles down I-70, experienced burst water pipes in their luggage handling area. I guess a few thousand people ended up with frozen luggage on a broken conveyor system as a result. I have heard of weather related problems when I lived near O'Hare, but I don't recall any of them having to do with water being frozen and interfering with operations.
We are keeping out house at 74℉ and those damned leaky plastic windows make it feel very uncomfortable. It's not so bad when the wind isn't blowing hard, but I never had that kind of problem with wooden windows up north. I also know about the negative effects of cold air when you are not feeling well. I can't imagine how you are able to deal with it all having no or little heat. The good news is they are predicting 60 degree temperatures by the weekend. That should warm you up a little, but this is just the beginning of winter. I doubt that we've seen the last of those bomb cyclones. I also don't understand how a heat pump can work at all with temperatures this cold. They sure are amazing machines.
I figure it only costs around 3 to 5 bucks to make that watch. The fact it was advertised at 120 bucks and sold for half price is irrelevant to the cost they paid for it. I don't expect they will want it shipped back to China or wherever it came from.
I still have not got around to handling that with everything else going on here.
Wind chill affects humans, horses, and a few other animals, but not dogs since dogs don't sweat through their skin.
I heard the water pipe that broke at Lambert was their fire sprinkler system, not their potable water system.
Makes sense since it is exposed.
We have our thermostat set to 74 also, but that is because all the rooms in the house, except the one with the thermostat is at 68 to 69 degrees, 72 up close to the ceiling. The thermostat is right above the cold air intake so all the air in the house goes in that direction. We have one register in that room now too, and I have the damper in the basement for it turned down to only 1/2 opening in the feed pipe. All the rest are wide open to the other rooms, yet they are colder all the time. It doesn't feel like 74 in the middle room either.
In my bedroom, I have a clock with a thermometer in it up above the armoire it often shows 72, but another thermometer on our ledge of the headboard shows 69 and that is where we are. Also, if we close the door to any of the outer rooms, the temp in those rooms goes down by about 4 to 5 degrees during the heating season.
I have a thermometer by my chair in the den, and Debi has one by her chair in the den, on end tables which are down at our level, they all read 69, while the one on the bookcase shows 72 up a foot above eye level.
A heat pump only works down to around 30 degrees, below that it uses expensive to use inductance heating elements.
This is why you don't see heat pumps up north and very few in the midwest, unless they also have a gas furnace or gas heating element in the heat pump. We have no gas here so have to use electric.
I don't know about wind chill, but I do know that relative humidity has a lot to do with how we experience any given temperature. There are tables to show what humidity should be in a house at a given temperature. In general 40% relative humidity will work well unless the outside air gets below 20℉. Below that temperature the inside relative humidity should be lowered to about 35%. Anything higher will cause frost and ice on the windows but it will also not make you feel any warmer. Above that 20 degree outside temp an indoor relative humidity between 40% and 45% will make you feel warmer than the actual air temperature. The problem with all this humidity and air temperature stuff is exactly what you point out. It all varies greatly from room to room and from one height to another. That's the reason they suggest keeping the furnace fan going all the time. In that case the moving air cools you off so that there doesn't seem to be anything but a general guideline one could follow. All I can tell you is that we are fairly comfortable at 74 degrees and 45% relative indoor humidity. When the humidifier fan kicks in we need to put on a sweater. Other than that, it's al perfect.
The Pixel watch my wife has is pretty fancy and I'd guess the materials cost hovers around $50. Add to that the development and manufacturing costs and the cost to produce it is well over $100. I'd guess by now a lot of those watches have standardized chips in them, such as the Bluetooth function being all on one piece of silicon. The most expensive components would be the display and the battery.
A friend of mine lives in the hills of North Carolina. She heats her house with a wood stove. She has to acquire her own logs and split them, but a lack of gas or electric would not matter when it comes to keeping warm. Then, too, she is one of the people I know who ended up with frozen water pipes. I guess they don't run close enough to the wood stove and froze over.
That's another thing I miss about both my home and my parents homes in St. Loo. My home had a climate control system that added humidity when necessary and took it out when necessary. My dad's new house all of that was still under manual controls, but at my house, it was all done automatically based on the setting originally made in the system.
My dad's old house in Des Peres always seemed backwards to me. There was a cold air return under every single window in the house, and a hot air register or two up at the ceiling opposite the windows. But I will say this, every room was at the exact same temperature whether a door was open or closed.
My uncle Louis's home was the most amazing in the way the air handling systems in his house worked. He too had a cold air return under each window, but his registers for heating were long narrow strips above the baseboards. For cooling, there was an intake register above each window where hot air went in, and the same long intake vents under the crown molding up at the ceiling where cool air came out, again on the opposite wall. You never felt any air blowing that hit you, I assume because it was disbursed through those super long vents. Those vents did not look out of place in the manner in which they were installed, just looked like baseboard or crown molding.
My wife's watch is really cool, but I really don't want one of those types.
What I would really like is a simple wrist worn pulse/oximeter, and if it had a watch as a part of it, with day and date, that would be Ideal for me, provided you didn't need a Schmartz-Fone to set the clock on the watch, hi hi.
Debi's cousin heated their house with a wood burning furnace. But they didn't have much piping to worry about, they were on well water and the pipe was 3 feet underground from the well to the house, and only came up inside an interior wall between the kitchen and bathroom. I always thought it odd when I went there to visit, because the kitchen sink was on an interior wall, so no window to look out while doing dishes. But I guess with it over the long counter, that is where most of the meal prep is done anyhow. It was just unusual to see it that way. Their wood burning furnace was in a room like we called a breezeway, the room between the house and the garage. It had one small duct going to the garage, and one large duct going into their great room, and then totally separate was a small fan duct up in the corner between the great room and each bedroom. But inside the wall, the heat was carried down to floor level to a register down close to the floor. The ceiling of the great room was around 12 feet tall, but the other rooms the ceiling was only like 8 feet tall. They did have an automatic damper style intake vent on the furnace, sorta like was on my wood stove to control the temp and save on wood.
Her husband died suddenly at a young age, around 40 I would guess, and she moved in with her parents until she got married a couple of years later, so now lives in a super nice new modern home. Her new hubby does have a few bucks!
What I would really like is a simple wrist worn pulse/oximeter, and if it had a watch as a part of it, with day and date, that would be Ideal for me, provided you didn't need a Schmartz-Fone to set the clock on the watch, hi hi.
No, that one still uses a finger tip clip to read SpO2, and due to my slow circulation, when my hands are cold, they just don't read my SpO2. Thanks for hunting for one for me though!
The theory behind the workings of an oximeter never got as far as my brain. Just looking at the setup for one I'd say it's impossible for it to work at all. LOL The technology required to sense the blood oxygen saturation in one's finger has to be the same as sensing it on your wrist, or any other part of your body. The sensor may work better due to localized skin conditions, but given that it's all done externally without doing an actual lab blood analysis I can't see why it's accurate to any degree. Obviously it is. My thinking now is that if the test fails at your finger tips, it isn't going to work any better elsewhere on your body. But then, you do have evidence of a difference when you make comparative readings. My recommendation is to get one of those chips implanted into your skull so that the government can do some real time monitoring of your system. That might be more than you are willing to do, but I am betting it is a lot more accurate than what you are doing now.
Technically, taking an oxygen reading on your arm or torso should be more accurate than using a fingertip.
They work by sending out a red light and an infrared light, and the receiver picks up those signals and the electronics do the calculations.
The reason fingertip units give false reading on folks who have had heart attacks is twofold.
Low circulation and cold hands the blood is not circulating fast enough for an accurate reading on fingers.
The other thing that throws off the reading is fingers come in all sizes and shapes, which can affect the reading also.
An upper arm band reader is considered the most accurate.
But so should a wrist worn unit, because it uses a specially spaced out transmitter and receiver.
Skin thickness can affect the readings slightly, but your circulation is usually only impaired near the extremities.
So far they've not come up with a way to measure CO2 using a fingertip or wearable device.
But if your O2 is up and you are still starving for air, it means the CO2 in your lungs is too high. Pursed Lip breathing time!
I can understand why a CO2 measuring meter is not widely available. You are the first person I ever hard about using those readings. The O2 measurements are as old as Moses and every doctor I've been to uses an oximeter. I don't think that the pulmonologist my mom was seeing measured CO2, but they always put the clamp on her finger tips. You are very well informed and thus know a lot more about self treatment than most people. That means you also know what you don't have to help you get by. You deserve a lot of credit because you have learned so much and extended your lifespan as a result of your knowledge. Hopefully you can keep up the good work for a long time to come.
Oximeters like we have now, only came about because of LEDs.
Albeit, they did have them years ago, but only in labs and some doctors offices, and a lot of hospitals.
I think the devices that read O2 used some type of radiation and UV light plus an injection of something else like a gas to mix with it for the sensors.
I'm a miser with my money, what little I do have, so I look for ways to cut down how much it costs to get the doctor recommended dose of those expensive drugs he has me on. Namely the nebulized drugs. Those devices are most wasteful.
I hope to be around for a while yet, but honestly, it is really getting super hard to breathe.
The sensor on my wife's new watch is rectangular and greenish. I think the old FitBit I had also was green. Then, too, the watches are designed to measure quite a few things besides oxygen. If I wasn't so lazy I'd ask my friend Google how it all works. All I can say from personal experience is that they have a long way to go before the readings are reliable. I've seen a couple ads for blood sugar measuring devices similar to the FitBit. In other words they claim you don't have to poke yourself with needles. I don't know anybody who actually used such a machine, but I'd be willing to bet they are not any more reliable than the O2 measurements.
If you are talking about the arm patch for blood glucose, it still has tiny needles in them, and they only last for 2 weeks, then they have to be replaced. One of my wife's friends is on an insulin pump and it uses a more elaborate wearable device than the ones used for only measurement.
As far as O2 readings go, I bought a continuous monitoring SpO2 reader for her, that could also do an overnight printout on a round paper disk. It was an old device, that used Nixie Tubes in the display, but it was always dead on accurate. Even with it, you had to replace the taped on sensor once a week. We often didn't until it showed iffy readings or burned out, which is what usually happened.
The little fingertip readers we have now basically work the same way. When you turn it on, it keeps upping the power to the sensors until it gets a pulse in the proper range it needs to read right. Then it will start displaying the O2 reading.
Off the top of my head, I don't remember exactly what they are reading, something like Hemoglobin and O2 and doing some fancy internal calculations to display the results. Apparently not all hemoglobin cells have an O2 attached to them, so they sample how many of each have and don't have O2 with them. At least that is how I remember they worked.
BG readings MUST be accurate, because that is how you determine how much insulin you need to take.
