mending things

So sometimes I fail to fix things, and it is only fair to document those occasions too. I am very fond of the stories of Sherlock Holmes. In the short story "The Adventure of the Yellow Face", set at Norbury, Staffordshire. Holmes gets the case completely wrong. Later Holmes says: " Watson, if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you. " For me, that whisper goes ' nano ' A few weeks ago I opened the washing machine and out tumbled my sons iPod nano, with the recently washed clothes. It had been in his shirt pocket and not been noticed. So.... consulting the web the general consensus was that slow drying stood the best chance of resurrecting the device. Some advocated keeping the iPod in a bag of dry rice. I just placed it inside our airing cupboard and left it for a week. I then pl...

Well the trusty old Dell Dimension 2350 is still going strong. I decided to replace the power supply with a more efficient one. If you've read my earlier Dell post you will know that the original Dell PSU started to fail some years ago and was replaced with a gold Sweex Brand 400 watt supply, which has worked well. I decided to replace the Sweex with a 400Watt AKASA AK-P040FG8 which is 80plus rated . This means it is more energy efficient. The Sweex was fine, but I didn't really do much research when I bought it, and I had another project in need of the Sweex , so it seemed like a good idea to upgrade the one in the Dell to a more energy efficient design. My Son had also seen the occasional lock up of the PC while running games and iTunes simultaneously, and I thought this might be due to PSU demand. However before replacing it I wanted to do some tests of standing and peak power consumption of the PC with both the Sweex and Akasa power supplies. I plugged the PC into an en...

Having been interested in music and audio equipment since the late 70's, I hate to see old speakers go to waste, especially when they classic British vintage designs like Wharfedale, Leak, ,Mission,Celestion etc. I subscribe to freecycle and sometimes I see old speakers come up on there, usually because they are damaged in some way. I'm no expert on this, but have managed to cheaply get some pairs back to working and presentable state. It's actually not that hard. If certain collectable brands ever came up (i.e Tannoy, Lowther) I know enough not to attempt this kind of "get you home" repair and would consult the experts. The speakers described here are high quality models from the 70's/80's that were produced in large numbers, and while very good, they are not that valuable. The Leaks The first pair I got from freecycle were a pair of 70's vintage Leak 2020 sandwich speakers. The term sandwich refers to the technology that Harold Leak used...

I know more than I want to about these light bulbs. While the UK Government is waging war on the 100 watt incandescent light bulb, they have, typically, ignored the growing trend of using these bulbs. I guess they pay people to change bulbs for them. We had our house gutted and rebuilt in 2000, and as a consequence had around 40 recessed lights fitted, each of which take the GU10 mains voltage (240v) GU10 light bulbs. At first, the main issue was that the halogen bulbs had a very short life span and cost a lot to buy, around £5. I seemed to be changing a couple a week. Things have improved and now the bulbs are relatively cheap ( £1-£2) and have a fairly long life expectancy. So what is my gripe ? Well these bulbs are rated at a hefty 35 or 50 watts. The packaging even implies that they are energy saving in some way, but of course watts are watts. i If you have 5 * 50 watts halogen bulbs in your kitchen, then you are using a unit every 4 hours they are on. If I turn on all th...

I am on an Economy 7 electricity tariff. E7 , as it's abbreviated, offers lower cost electricity at night, but with slightly higher day rate and standing charge. The original reason for E7 was so the Electricity providers to reduce the peak demand. In very general terms, the electricity we are using now is being generated now. This means that the grid has to anticipate peak demand, fro example the ad break in the middle of "Coronation Street" , when millions of viewers get up and switch electric kettles on. By encouraging people to use electricity during off-peak times i.e at night, less generators have to be bought online. Also the mix of generators determines the amount of CO2. For live CO2 data from the grid see http://realtimecarbon.org/ You can see that the mount of CO2 released in grams per unit is at it's lowest at night. Also lowering peak demand means less power stations needing to be built The biggest household use of electricity is heating water and space ...

Over the years I have accumulated a number of old PC hard drives. Some were mine, other from neighbours & friends who asked if I could "fix their PC". It occurred to me that I had a burden of responsibility for these disks, if someone got hold of them they might be able to extract confidential data. In each case I had determined that the disk was dead or dieing, having failed the manufacturers full surface test (via Ultimate Boot CD - UBCD ), but conceivably the disk could be attached and read on another computer. They might contain personal data - so I decided to put these disks beyond recovery. First you have to dismantle the hard drive. this involves removing all external stickers from the disk , and with a torx driver (purchased from your local hardware shop - in my case the always helpful W. C. Baker of Fleet ), remove all the bolts which hold it together. An excellent video of how to dismantle a similar hard drive is here : Once the disk is in bits th...

My latest gadget, which I have had for a few months is the Current Cost CC128 . This device displays how much electricity we use , in real time. It also gathers historical data which I can download to a computer for analysis. There are quite a number of these type of devices from Owl, Wattson and others and they all work in broadly the same manner. The device has a display unit , as seen in the picture. It communicates with a sensor which you install alongside your electricity meter via a wireless connection. The sensor unit has a clamp which loosely attaches around the cable leaving your electricity meter. That's it ! Takes about 2 minutes to install and does not require an electrician. Nor does it interfere with your electrical supply or wiring in any way. Completely non invasive. I had previously had an Owl device which worked very well, but did not record historical data. I passed this unit on to my mother-in-law who is using it in France, where it also works well. I chose the...