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Absolutely love this thread. I've got content. Oh boy do I have content. First let's start with the the house that now belongs to my dad, before that having belonged to his grandmother. It was built in 1927 and surprisingly the bulk of the things that could possibly go wrong over the course of the many improvements that come over the decades. The wiring is a hodgepodge of BX/"Greenfield" armoured cable and primitive nonmetalic cable, with modern NM for all updates. The Greenfield cable means it's got grounds at all the plugs and the service was updated to breakers in the 60s or 70s. But in spite of this the man who owned it before my great-grandmother was the poster child for "There, I fixed it." He wanted an outlet somewhere, he'd bore a hole in the wall and pass some cable through. Inside, outside, whatever, bore a hole, put some cable, fit an end, and plug it in at the nearest outlet, which was usually halfway across the room due to the age of the house. Before the attic was finished he decided he was sick of going up the stairs in the dark, so he got a bunch of screw-eyes and cup-hooks and ran three dozen feet of string down to the stairs. When he did finish the attic he used Homasote for the floor. The master bedroom had a walk-in closet which didn't have a light. So when Mr. Bungler wanted one he did the usual bore-a-hole-put-an-extension job, with the classic redneck switch (which is to say, a male and female end stapled to the wall that you were meant to join to turn the light on. I had no idea where he got the socket, but it was the craziest thing you'd ever see. A simple porcelain tube with a blind end and four ears at that end. Two were made to accomodate mounting screws. The other two were the terminal screws, exposed to any and all who might care to touch them. The fixture was about four feet up the wall and wired with silk-wrapped lamp cord. It was either ancient when he installed it, or it was meant to be enclosed somehow, but nope, live conductors just chillin' in the closet. Then we have the house I grew up in. Built in 1982, by drunken builders. My mother complained that they had littered the ground with their empty beer bottles. Their solution: turn over their iron rakes and shatter the bottles, then rake them in to the dirt. That should be indicative of the quality of the work they did. Few corners are square, the floors all have slight slants, and hidden everywhere are little surprises. Some years ago my father and I decided to change the basement door. When we pulled back the moldings, we found that they had hung the prefabricated door-and-frame unit basically in open space, somehow managing to nail (with suitably giant nails) through more than three inches of air. The entire left side of the doorframe, and much of the right, were like this. Few things that were as dangerous as the handywork of Mr. Bungler, but every corner cut. A hole that will be hidden by a fixture? Don't bother to cut it with a saw, just use a lump hammer, or your steel-cap boot, or whatever. Need a vanity for the bathroom? Hey, there are some extra kitchen cabinets! Let's use those! Secure your building materials or the site? Nah, let the neighbourhood scum kids come in and smear tar all over everything. loving TAR. Thirty years on, this house still has tar smeared in places in the basement because gently caress taking it off from anywhere, it's the basement. We did find some nice tools they left behind, though, including a mason's trowel on top of the foundation.
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Oct 30, 2011 05:05
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:As I recall, some old mainframe computers had big switches that, when flipped, would chop a knife through the power cables to make certain that the computer was off. I could imagine a similar guillotine setup to destroy the hard drives/RAM automatically. This reminds me; I've never heard of such a knife setup, but big computers did have "emergency stop" switches. I recall an anecdote of some bored operators deciding to try out the "emergency stop" feature on a system which had just had its hard drives re-fitted. They were originally fitted with standard metal platters... You should know, these were the sort of things the size of washing machines, with platters to match, spinning at very high speed. So you can see why an "emergency stop" was necessary. The new platters were fancy spun glass affairs, impregnated with magnetic material. They were much lighter and therefore reduced access times. Well, they pressed the big red button and watched in horror as the "emergency stop" mechanism worked its magic, grabbing the platters from the sides with braking shoes. These brakes were designed for the metal platters, and the fibreglass ones simply shattered into a million pieces...
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Apr 22, 2014 03:52
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You guys do know that you can usually open up the shower head and pull out the little restrictor doohickey, right? Anyone with a water-pump pliers and the will to use it should not be suffering in the shower. Personally I have a deluge head and a Teledyne Water Pik Shower Massage with a diverter that lets me run one, the other, or both. Now shower agony, let me tell you, is going to a no-tell-motel and finding the shower head is a needle shower. Y'know, the kind that they banned for use on insane people? Those things are awful; they convert like 50% of their output into steam anyway and the water loses most of its heat to the ambient air so you have to run it obscenely hot to be comfortable. I'm wondering if these things are false economy due to the heat lost. And, y'know, lost custom due to people not going back to the motel with the needle shower.
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Jun 8, 2014 21:48
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MrYenko posted:Horrifyingly, some of the newer models are tamper-proof, wherein removing the flow restrictor will prevent you from reassembling the fixture without terrible leaks. It's a truly dystopian future. Well then in that case I suppose you can apply the old catalytic muffler trick and core it out (although I suggest an electric drill versus the dimensional lumber and lump hammer used for the catalyst) and then replace it. Tamper-proof is like bullet-proof, nothing is really tamper-proof of bullet-proof, it's merely tamper/bullet resistant.
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Jun 9, 2014 00:45
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SocketSeven posted:I think that when America enacted low flow toilet laws, a bunch of companies just made the exact same high flow toilet use less water with each flush, by putting a brick in the tank, or making the flapper close sooner. That or some well-meaning fuckhead installed a "water-saving" device which made the toilet basically not work. Worse is something I usually see in public toilets which are not purpose-built public toilets; an already low-flow toilet which has also had a "water-saving" device (intended for a high-flow toilet) installed by someone with porridge for brains. The results are predictable.
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Jun 9, 2014 01:47
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Motronic posted:Standard US domestic power is called "split phase." There are two phases that are 180 degrees out of phase with each other. Grabbing one phase and the neutral gives you 120v. Grabbing two hots (one from each phase) give your 220, because as one phase peaks to it's highest the other (which is 180 degrees out of phase) is peaking to it's lowest point. I'm not too sure on using stuff that is rated for 100-250VAC on 220V US outlets, because I'm pretty sure that the electricity in parts of the world that use 220+ volts is also split-phase, not phase-phase. This of course came from something I read that said that the 220V air con socket in US motel rooms should not be regarded as a reliable source of 220V for European appliances. But I've also heard that some switchmode power supplies can deal even with phase-phase 220V. Then again that warning may have been simply because some US 220V outlets are really weird, like the plug for most electric dryers, which provides phase-phase-return, with the return also serving as the earth. Tapping one phase to return yields 120V for timers, panel lights, and possibly the motor, and of course tapping both phases yields 220V for the element. Granted, my understanding of phases is a bit shaky, but I'd still err on the side of caution when it comes to plugging random stuff into US 220V outlets, although the idea of using the whacking great 30A socket for a several-ton window air conditioner to charge up your mobile phone is pretty hysterical.
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Jul 4, 2014 01:33
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Motronic posted:I can't find any reasonable definition on google for what phase-phase is supposed to mean, so I really can't understand the meaning of your post. No, I'm not part of the crowd who thinks you can have too much amps or some such, my concern with charging a phone off a stove plug or some such is not that it can supply too much power (I know that the device will use what it will use and not more) but that the power would be supplied in the wrong way. By phase-phase I mean like a US 3-wire dryer plug, two hots of 120V each, 180 degrees out of phase. I really don't know if a device that normally expects a single phase with a 240V hot side and a return would work or fail to, and if it fails, in what fashion, if it were supplied with two 120V hots. This is where my understanding of phases is shaky.
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Jul 5, 2014 00:39
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Tim Thomas posted:Here's what you're missing: two 120V hots on a split phase system is the exact same as what you're thinking of as "single phase with a 240V hot and neutral". This is very simply where my understanding breaks down. Is there no qualitative difference between 240V derived from two 120V positives 180 degrees out of phase and 240V derived from a single phase, which is how I can only assume power is provided in countries where higher voltages are the norm?
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Jul 5, 2014 08:16
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Tim Thomas posted:Twistloks still engage before the twist is made, and they have the additional trip hazard/socket damage issue endemic to locking connectors. Yes, pretty much. The only time I've ever seen a ground cheater installed correctly (tab/pigtail attached to something actually earthed) is when I've installed it. And countless more equipment with the earth pin snipped off yet still in service. A safer standard seems lovely in theory but in practice would almost certainly fall on its face if 100% bacwards compatability could not be provided.
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Jul 6, 2014 22:57
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The thing that strikes me the most about it is how tiny it is. It looks like some tiny little house all dolled up like a big mansion. Maybe this is an artifact of the re-sizing (which I suspect has something to do with real estate agents by and large knowing nothing about computers) or perhaps it was taken with a very long lens, making the overdone landscaping seem even more like the house is in actual fact a garden shed. The steel roof does nothing to dispel this notion.
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Oct 15, 2014 04:10
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kid sinister posted:If the flapper opens all the way, then why do you have to keep holding down the handle for it to flush completely? You might not have the right flapper for that toilet. For instance, putting a regular flapper on some low flow toilets can make them do weird voodoo poo poo like flushing twice per lever press. It does absolutely sound like a problem with the innards, potentially a missmatch of parts. As far as I know, the above is the only way for the actual toilet itself to go wrong (well, short of shattering into a billion little pieces) and almost any other difficulty is remedied by replacing the insides. Many of the old, dubious-quality low-flow toilets can readily accommodate the old-fashioned brass and copper innards which will more or less turn them into a high-flow toilet. Personal experience also suggests that Kohler's modern low-flow toilets are very nearly as satisfactory as the old high-flow toilets if you decide that you're sick of looking at the old one, although personally I'd never replace a high-flow toilet due to the difficulty of obtaining another one.
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Jan 1, 2015 01:17
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