inside a computerised pipework scale reducer.

a whole house water distiller that uses electronic techniques around Pape to actually descale the water in the pay but stops the skill settling out and stick to the bothers the pave et cetera and this was aired generously sent to me by Mark who had this in his old house and when he was greatest new house he took it with him to install then thought mmm they kind of want to see what's in this first so he sent it to me and the idea of this unit is that it's 12 volt AC supply agreein from a little plugin adapter and you've got two wires that it comes with and you're supposed to put at least 12 turns around a pipe so if you've got them in paper into the house where they can see you can you can protect just a bit of paper within the house say for instance you've got our water heater that's proven just skilling up you can get the copper paper into that and you wrap two antennas are grounded about CLO roughly about a foot apart I haven't actually checked that bit in the manual but basically two antennas spaced just a bit apart on the pipe and there's only aware of one watt each and notice there's other versions that have two bars going to each as if it's maybe inductively coupling and these can be apparently used on a metal or a plastic pipe and the only thing this is you shouldn't use a lead pipe but then that's included in sort of the usual suite of rules about you know home plumbing regulations things that oh I should mention it's got this fabulous little red LED that scans across like it's doing something really exciting it doesn't seem to change when you do a couple of these in a bit of pipe or anything it just seems to always just run and they do mention the manual that it's a sort of basically and power active which to show it's doing things excellent shall we open it because I'd really like to see how this works what it does it's not a new thing you've been around for a very very long time the case is quite smart I like the factors kept their logo moulded into it that is very smart and these are unfortunately sort of things you tend to get a sales motivated air heating companies I can think of one particular big British company that offers fixed price servicing and as one of the things they do is the people who have been given minimal training just to achieve their the purpose come out they try and pressurize you into buying these things that will improve your plumbing well that's when they're try not to pressurize you to buy a new boarder who so what do we have here it's big cramped in there it's not gonna be so easy to open up we've got the one were agreeable to the standard jack sockets that you'd expect this should to see the banana sockets we've got the DC connector come in quite an interesting way of mounting it actually the connector is there they've mounted pillars and then put screws down to actually trap it in place that works quite well there's LED display that's a can I get this let's that take some screws out so the LED display itself just as one resistor on preserve left chip behind it no it's not I guess they're multiplex because it does appear to be running them off how many are there 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 how many wires to have grunion seven so that could either be let's see if it was a matrix it would be three by four or it could be Pilate reversal not really sure how many are connected together Oh quite a lot of them connect I get the feeling it may be polarity reversal it's using not sure anybody could be look at that afterwards let's unplug it largely reversal where it runs they're the six outputs a long positive first of all the common is negative and then swaps apart in does the same again it just keeps number of wires down is there anything under this let's see if there's any more secretary fading out of state given her ere long these have been about unless they've upgraded convinced there will be much that we have surface mount circuitry but I'm kind of what I was hoping for him not warmed it was inductors and stuff like that to show it's kind of or big capacitors to show it's really trying to hammer a bit of current through the pipe to actually do something know nice kiss oh it's got a seal that's quite enough neat they feel a lot of thought into the case here so yeah what for God will I will I do in reverse engineer this to save time the chip in it possibly wonders is it it's chasing the LEDs I'd guess it might be using a little microcontroller for that with my my magnifying glass sh6 named p20 see not familiar with that I'd guess this is a 7 8 12 5 it is a similar to a 5 so initially looking at it we've got the AC commune here Oh they've actually got their facility for a transformer right you know what Toby before I go any further and I shall go reverse engineer this so we can take a closer look okay that took a while right your other the scope and everything so this air if you want to try a bit of reverse engineering yourself you can take a little snapshot of this and then relate it to this which has main circuit board and is upside down because I just happened to reverse engineer upside down cosy I just felt that with a soccer to the left for a new other good reason so the unit has the facility devilishness former on board they've used an external power supply maybe to make it more compatible get rid of some regulations about internal power supplies it also probably just lets them put all the liability from the main site on the manufacturers of the power supply what is that round the first plank in with is a midden Taiwan a CEC adapter mm-hmm 12 volt 200 milli amp but they've got the facility for them inside one interesting note there is give main transformer fuse a metal oxide varistor types of device ik suppressed device and then the connector so if they've gone for the means paired one very simple you've got the connect commune one connection presumably neutral go straight down to the air transformer and also to one end of that metal oxide varistor the other connection goes down through this fuse and then to the other side to transformer and also to render the metal oxide varistor very simple just the whole the whole unit is textbook design it's just very classic design though the odd thing about transformer is the pins in the other side normally you'd on a transformer you'd have a different pinning such as former can't be accidentally turned around during manufacture so it makes sense to have a couple of pins in the middle or the four pins that sometimes used with dual windings but you couldn't really use the double winding york so just short them both out normally on a traditional transformer you'd have with two secondary windings you'd have one between these two pins one between these two pins you now connect them in series with their the connections off either end or bridge them across in parallel for a higher current lower voltage and what else is there worth mentioning here the diodes let's switch back to our site now here's the diodes here's a microcontroller here's the connector let's say jump back to this because it's easier probably to follow on the drawing itself we've got a fool Briggs or a rectifier here electro beam style which takes the ACN that they were just jumping in these blue leads and converts it to DC we've got a big smoothing capacitor with a decoupling capacitor and then we've got a voltage regulator here that then converts it down to five volts it is a seven eight or five there's something about this circuit that just makes it look like it's quite an old circuit that they've never needed to update it so they never have which makes perfect sense as well the five volt output was down to this decoupling capacitor and this other Smoot capacitors one other oddity here they've added an extra resistor across the five volt supply presumably just when it saw when it spurred I own to have done this myself it makes sure the power supply goes down the voltage dropped really quickly and ensures a nice smooth process or reset the processor is interesting it's alright because it's a 4-bit processor as saintil wealth SH 69 P 20 C one-time programmable one key bit at 1k memory 4-bit microcontroller so this is capable of internal clocks of which they're using of two megahertz for megahertz or six megahertz I'll make a wild guess and say it's two megahertz gate based on the what it's done it's probable height of choice it makes it more stable using the lower frequency particularly for something that I'm guessing this may be quite an old processor and after that it's fundamentally the block diagram of the processor is that it's got four 4-bit porous which count for the 16 pins that I have I offer sorted and then trooper opens that makes up with 18 pins and it's just very standard these pins also double up as reset and other options the external oscillator things worthy of note the reset pin is used they've got three hundred thirty key from the positive I could doodle this down naturally you know I've got wherever I put there I scribbled this schematic oh sure what let's mark over the all things first so we've got the rectifier we've got the smoothing here we've got the regulator rings identify volts get make a control over the reset circuit and then we've got all these that all 1k resistors here going out to the display and of rocker as well and I transistor the transistor and a couple of these one key resistors are part of the circuitry that goes to output to the antennas if you could call them that here there's the schematic and I'm disappointed I was hoping it was gonna be really exciting I was hoping they're going to be doing something like big Pastores or inductors that says I'm up in this a little bit I thought they were gonna be a big capacitors or inductors to really snap current pulses out to these coils and or really high frequency to capacitively a couple between them but it's not that so look at the schematic we've got the asean bridge rectifier here this big smoothing capacitor in the cover capacitor the 7005 regulator and that leaves a 17 volt real and the 17 volt real comes from the I've lost other calculator it's why I'm back to this one the 12 volts AC commune times 1.4 one gives about sixteen point nine volts and the reason the voltage is higher once you're smooth that is because the AC signal is normally described the 12 volts as the rms value it's the average value of the voltage but the peak value is much higher than the average and when you rectify it and you have a smoothing capacitor it charges up to the peak value there is quite a bit rippling this I stuck headphones across the output and it's got a sweat frequency but you can actually hear the means ripple as well and so we get the regulator we've got the area capacitor the capacitor and the 5 volts I'd 100 nano 2 coupler we'll get a three point 3k resistor to make sure that 5 volt real goes down we've got the reset capacitor which is a 100 nano charges up so it power up from the 313 ensures a CPU does a proper reset there is one more resistor that's just used to tie a pin there which one is that that's used to tie a pin from the positive rail 15 K to pin D 1 port D 1 is a they've used a resistor for that I could just I could just put a resistor in it just it's been used to hold a pin in a new ins state I'm not quite sure or maybe it's just sometimes they're on the microcontrollers the pins can be filled up at high or low internally but you can't really leave them floating it may just be that one doesn't have that facility to pull at high or low and that has to be tied to a logic level which it can it doubles as an oscillator pin which that would make sense then they wouldn't want to load it with internal extra circuitry so that would make sense to have that resistor and it's got a value of 15 K let's write that in 15 K so that's just in the job we've got a fairly standard transistor here it's a low level signal transistor a bc named for 5 or c named for 5 what does it say on the thing it says just see 9 4 5 and it's a standard NPN transistor and here's the hard things so one of them tenner windings is connected to the positive + 17 volt rail via a 1k resistor and the other end is connected via r1 resistor to the negative rail and the capacitor just shunts between them so technically speaking and there is going to be some modulation in those coiled coils but it's really small of the way the only way this could really couple onto the pipe with this arrangement is capacitively although it gets quite complex and this is the perhaps the clever bit of the design that they're getting every bit sort of mystical and therefore it's quite hard to disprove it does anything in particular and you could good have a capacitive element to the metal or to the liquid inside if this was on a plastic pipe you could theoretically by having these and having an EC signal across from you could theoretic couple come some current into conductive water and hard water tends to be fairly conductive and by having to them in the plastic pipe you would then through actually be covering a bit of current through the water but it's tiny and even taken to count if these were passed and capacitors coupling on to the pipe then charge it via one key resistor and the way the transistor is being driven here it's just tiny little pulses and a ramp frequency and it's an audible frequency if you do stick the headphones and you get a very distinct sort of trilling noise or sir from the actual air the sweat frequency and with a metal pipe ultimately if there was any capacitive coupling on to the metal pipe then it would just short out through the copper pipe you know you if you use your imagination you can vet invent ways this would work they had to crack out the scylla scope had to crack out the key side thank you key say for sending me an oscilloscope let's say oh that's a nice fitting in alright and here's the odd thing because they've used if they'd actually this resistor here and they tied the emitter direct down to the negative real then I when this transistor turned on it would basically it were their shunt these what's the best way describe it result in a much I said at the moment it turns on you get a slight voltage fluctuation but it's it would have created a much wider swing let me let me show you boom the oscilloscope that's the best way to actually show you that the Silla sculptress it's hard to fit the oscilloscope right under the bench and Tavano such faff around for a while these dips here are actually the means frequency modulation so this is a sample of across the full sweep of what it does so it doesn't actually do a massive frequency range I worked out by putting cursors on there was their point su me and putting the cursors on the oscilloscope and it suggests that the frequency ranges from 1.6 4 kilohertz to 5.5 kilohertz so that's the low frequency and sweeping up to the higher frequency 5 point 5 kilohertz and then it resets and it just continually does a ramp quite easy to do in the software the actual pulses the transistor turning on this set down here is this a 0 volt reference if it had that resistor missing so the transistor wasn't operating opening serve emitter follower bit approach these pulses these spikes would have gone right down to this a 0 volt real it would have actually created a much sharper spike but as it is the 17 volts here each of these divisions is 5 volts it's only coming down abouts at a halfway so there's only a roughly um 8 volt drop there it's not really that huge 8 or 9 volts um the policies themselves are tiny really they're like four microseconds each and that of hints that with a microcontroller you have the clock frequency and then it's divided by four to get the instructions frequent send for one megahertz that would result in for maker seconds for one instruction cycle but it they're lost frequents that can run out about two megahertz which would suggest that each of these dips is literally two instructions one changing the state of the the bit output bit and then new author ition or maybe the next instruction then canceling that and it takes that the time it takes to process that instruction to turn is the time it takes to turn the transistor back off again but it's just these tiny little spikes that are nothing compared to the rest it's almost just I don't know it's very strange so that's it it basically it does modulate the outputs so you can't you can't say well there's nothing in the output it does have something there and it's sweeping a frequency so that takes the box for the the you know tuning to wherever the frequency of the contaminants and the water is and that just bit like leaves you to make the decision then whether you think this is real or not based on that circuitry because it really is very very simplistic my own impression is that I would not waste my money on one of these personally because I don't think it's real but the only way you could prove that and this is what these things tend to rely on is to actually put it in a house and then saw the paper in half and look see if it referred up I remember when these things were first came out and they use the same pictures for the magnetic water softeners they show a worst example of pipe the week or through and then all the crust and then they say before and after and it's a lovely clean copper a piece of pipe of there no contamination so that's what you'd expect to see if it did work and you had an installation of this running for many decades long enough to actually for a pape up you'd expect see this on one side and lovely clean paper another if it worked hmm tricky they also have a little cop out saying that your kettle will still fur off because I the papers water flowing through it but the kettle it's all the stuff is trapped in the kettle therefore it can't go anywhere and that's why it tends to precipitate there and then lots and lots of testimony or saying I put this in and you can they taste the difference in the water before and afterwards and no more spots and the shower and things that and you're thinking mmm these been written by the people or are they just people who have installed this and they're just got that lovely warm feeling when you've installed a device but there we have it and my gas says all the LEDs that I didn't draw the LEDs in this because there wasn't a huge emit was going to be really cluttered there are seven pins there are 12 LEDs one pin the one with the black lead there's the common and it alternates between positive and negative so it goes positive for one set and then runs through the channels and then it goes negative and run through channels and that solar set that's how they've very simply multiply x12 LEDs on two and seven pins but much of the airtime there must have been a better time trying to work out because LEDs are not in order it must have been a wee bit of effort to actually work their own paper and they're right the cords but I would guess to actually get them to run the correct sequence my guess for the software itself is that it's got a routine that does one sweep one frequency sweep on the output and the routine will the main routine they've software will have 12 steps basically one for each led nor do it like the first led and then it all call the sweep routine X number of times as Lily then it all put the first LED I like the second one then it will call the sweep routine for X number of times and come back and that's how it gets that chasing along while it's also doing the swept frequency on that hope code so there we have it I'll let you decide if these coils could capacitively coupled mean technically speaking yes it can induced current into the Pape copper paint or if it was plastic paper could induce current into the water but not much current but then who knows maybe it doesn't take much current to change the state of the water this is what they rely on so I can't specifically say no it doesn't work but I can say that the output circuitry was less than I was expecting hmmm interesting the maker control is interesting it doesn't make me think this might be quite an old design and well you know if it rocks don't mess with it that's what they say oh that's a good thing to live by they could possibly use I suppose ultimately only incentive to change the microcontroller would be if it went obsolete or maybe it is a standard maker controller still interesting certainly worth taking a bit so thanks to mark for sending out it was certainly fun to take two bits and have a little reverse engineer and see what it actually does in the output

Channel: bigclivedotcom

Views: 97,768

Rating: 4.9509053 out of 5

Keywords: water, pipe, scale, reducer, electronic, active, coil, winding, pulses, computer, gas, engineer, heating, commission, inhibitor, testimonials

Id: QnahQPSKCcA

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/NoShowbizMike]

I know the UK libel laws are much worse than the US but it is a shame Clive has to dance around it. It is obvious they spent the budget on the case and the chasing LEDs to make it seem legit. One tiny transistor for the bogus scale reducing part. I bet they market that as energy efficient.

One tip for the future from Penn and Teller's Bullshit show is that calling someone a quack, fraud, charleton, etc is legally actionable. But calling them a bastard, fucktard, piece of shite, etc does not call into question their proficiency and is just an insult. But I wouldn't want you convicted for a hate crime based on a tiny dog's actions.