Tag Archives: electricity

How To

What do you think of this?

RPOP-2016-06-0598

I’ve always been curious about the two holes on ungrounded NEMA 1-15 plugs (Type A). There they were, one hole on each blade — what were they for?

When I had to make an electrical connection inside a junction box a few days ago, to power up a little adapter for a network camera, I thought: why not get some stubby hard drive screws (short machine screws used to afix HDs to drive bays), crimp a couple of ring terminals onto the hot and neutral wires and see if I could screw the terminals onto the adapter blades  with the hard drive screws? There are no screw threads inside the blade holes, but if you turn the screws a little harder, they’re just the right width that they’ll make their own way through and the whole thing will be quite snug.

Of course, the job isn’t complete without isolating both connections separately with electrical tape, or even better, with heat-shrink sleeves, but that’s easily enough done. The last step involves placing the whole thing inside an IP 56 junction box, for extra safety.

I think it’s a fun and novel way to get power to these little adapters. What do you think?

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Thoughts

Electricity in Romania

Here’s what I keep saying to every friend and acquaintance who visits my house: you definitely need a voltage stabilizer if you live in Romania.

voltage-stabilizer

Around midnight last night the current started fluctuating wildly. Our UPS units were going crazy, clicking and kicking on and off, trying to contain the power fluctuations and cutoffs. After quickly shutting off all important equipment in the office, I went to see the voltage stabilizer down in the basement. It was going nuts as well trying to keep the current to our house stable, its arms moving quickly back and forth across the copper coils, barely containing the madness. I shut off all current to the house, fearing the stabilizer would burn out.

As I write this, it’s past noon (the following day) and the current still isn’t back on. Oh, it’s been back on and off sporadically, but nothing reliable to speak of. And I found out from one of our neighbors that the scrambling and bungling Electrica (that’s the power company) employees reversed the polarity on one of the phases in the neighborhood, which means they potentially burned out some people’s electrical appliances. As a matter of fact, another neighbor said his heating furnace shorted out and almost caught fire from all the electricity problems during the night.

This is part of the price one pays for living in Romania. It’s a beautiful country, but as they say, caveat emptor.

You may recall unreliable electrical power was partly to blame for a massive data loss that occurred to me a few years ago, before I replaced all wiring and fuses in the house and added the voltage stabilizer. The Drobo units I was using then simply didn’t have the capability to keep the data uncorrupted when experiencing multiple power failures within a short amount of time. They’d simply lose track of some bits, and then the corruption would spread across the drives, eating more and more data, to the point where the Drobo would cease to mount. Nowadays, Drobos come with built-in batteries that allow them to safely complete data operations and shut off in case of a power failure, and they also have some algorithms in place to ensure that data corruption is kept at bay, but it’s hard to trust a device meant to keep your data safe once it’s lost about 20% of your most treasured data, isn’t it?

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Thoughts

The importance of walking barefoot

All of us have probably heard at one point or another that it’s good for us to walk barefoot once in a while, either on grass or on the beach. It’s the sort of information that we file away and don’t remember to do all that often, until we find out why it’s important.

In these three videos posted here, Dr. Stephen Sinatra explains why walking barefoot (or grounding, as he calls it) is important for our health.

Enjoy and apply his advice! It’s backed by the wisdom of our forefathers and by current scientific research, and it’s also really easy to do.

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Thoughts

Quantum dots for LEDs

Last month, I wrote about CFLs and LED light bulbs, and today, I found a great video from Economist magazine, which not only talks about a new technology called quantum dots, but also does a great job of explaining the differences between incandescents, CFLs and LEDs when it comes to the light spectrum and lumens they emit.

It turns out a company in Massachusetts called QD Vision is among a handful of companies that are developing quantum dot filters for LED bulbs. These filters improve the spectrum emitted by LEDs to make the light less harsh, warmer, and closer to the spectrum of incandescent light bulbs, which ultimately makes it more pleasing to the eye. Personally, I think their filters make the light slightly redder than it needs to be, but still, it’s a step in the right direction.

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Thoughts

A simpler way to dispense water

Let me show you a simpler, less expensive, more sustainable way to dispense water at home or even at a business. I didn’t see this in the US, where the water cooler is practically ubiquitous. I saw this in Romania. You see, here it matters if a machine is plugged in and consumes electricity all the time. You feel it more in your wallet than you do in the US. Generally speaking, things are made smaller in Romania, and if possible, made to be operated manually instead of automatically. In many ways, that’s a better way to do things — better for the people, who burn more calories, and better for the environment, because the carbon footprint is smaller.

You have here a water pump, hand operated, which works on the principle of building a small vacuum inside it to draw water from a large jug. It screws on top of these plastic jugs that you can buy at the store, and it’s operated by pressing down on the large button on top. As you press repeatedly on it, negative pressure builds up inside, pulling the water upwards and releasing it through the spout. It’s an old principle which has been in use for many years, but here it’s been packaged in a small, inexpensive little pump.

Isn’t this a better way to dispense water? Wouldn’t you rather use this than a large water cooler which will take up more space, make noise as it cools the water, and require you to lift those huge jugs and set them on top of it?

You can get a water pump like the one from the video at Amazon.

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