"That's not independent verification"
Agreed. It is what it is: a black box testing of a proprietary technology that cannot be easily replicated by other researchers.
As for "hacking the instruments", read the paper; Rossi was never left alone with the instruments, and was only present twice: at the start, where he inserted his "secret sauce" into the device under monitoring, and at the end, where he retrieved it under similar conditions. He might be a con artist, but "hacking the instruments" under those conditions would require him to be something closer to a wizard.
"1.5 MWh over 32 days is a fairly small amount of energy as in 2kW * 32 days a lot of chemical processes can get you there"
No. That's more than 5800 MJ over the period, the equivalent of burning 140 kg of gasoline, produced by a ~20cm long cylinder. No known chemical process can get you there (by far). I should also add that the 1.5 MWh number is the lowest estimate of the authors, taking into account all margins of error. Agreed on the difficulty of measuring heat; experts far more knowledgeable than I have been reading the report and cannot explain such a high discrepancy.
"As to warrants further research nope, sorry the correct responce is to declare this a clear scam."
So, following the publication of another paper with an open experimental protocol & set up having reported similar findings, it isn't worth spending the few thousands of dollars required to actually verify this ? given the potential benefits and relatively low resources required, I have to disagree. Saying "it's just a clear scam" without even checking this doesn't sound like science to me.
Black swans do happen from time to time; if this effect is indeed real (and I agree that's a huge if), it could lead to unimaginable benefits and - given the fact that current science cannot explain such an effect - could also lead to genuine new science and discoveries in physics. This alone should make it worthwhile to try and replicate this new experiment, no matter how unlikely it seems.