Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
I recently bought two dozen Tenergy Ready-to-Use NiMH cells, rated at 2.3 Ah, with the intent of making up three 8-cell packs (identified as A, B, and C, for lack of anything smarter) for the amateur radio HTs we use on our bikes. However, one of the packs measured a consistently short runtime and I suspected one weak cell.
So I ran pairs of cells from the weak pack and found these results:
DSC-H5 Battery – Tenergy RTU NiMH AA Cells
Observations…
These are all measured just after charging, so they’re all the best you can expect from the cells. I haven’t done any self-discharge tests yet.
The overall capacity at 1 A load is roughly 65% of the 2.3 Ah rating.
The red trace falls far short of the others, so that’s the pair with the weak cell. I charged & tested those two cells individually, which are the lower two traces: cell A4 has 58% of nominal capacity. Admittedly, that’s 90% of the capacity of the rest, but, still …
I’ll use the other three pairs of cells through the Sony DSC-H5 camera, for reasons described there. Cell A4 is destined for the shelf…
Now, the question becomes: who should I buy the next batch of cells from?
So Verizon seem determined to spend as much money as it takes to bury us in FiOS Triple Play mailings. For the last few months, we’ve been getting at least one mailing a week with exactly the same offer. Perhaps they think we’ll eventually get fed up and buy the damned thing, although rumor has it that the offers keep coming even after you do that.
Anyhow, I called the number (877-896-3354 this week) to ask:
How about selling us FiOS 15/5 Internet and Freedom Essentials (unlimited US residential VOIP) for $60/month for two years with no installation fee?
Failing that, put us on the Do Not Solicit list to shut off the junk mail
Come to find out that:
Nope, the nice voice can’t dicker on the monthly price, but…
They’re willing to waive the installation fee ($50) without blinking
The fact that we don’t have a TV and aren’t interested in the Triple Play is a dealbreaker for them
The DNS list is just a checkbox on their display of my account: done!
At this point we’re spending $50 for Optimum Online cable 13/2 (more or less) internet and nigh onto $30 for a Verizon landline phone without “long distance” calling (which we do by VOIP these days). They can do a bundle for something like $80/month with a brief teaser discount, but no better than that. So we’d wind up paying more for basically the same thing.
After a pleasant conversation he asked if I would recommend Verizon to my friends & relations. I said “Absolutely not” and he asked if I wanted to talk to a Quality Assurance representative. Figuring it’d be good for a laugh, I said yes… and then went directly to the usual interminable wait-on-hold.
The QA guy asked why I wouldn’t recommend Verizon, so I gave him a few reasons:
Their phone menu system is impenetrable
I often get mysteriously disconnected during intra-Verizon handoffs, particularly if I’m asking difficult questions
Nobody in their “customer support” phone tree can explain how much the “Other charges, taxes & terms” might add up to on a bundle deal: they can’t tell me what their service will cost!
Nobody at Verizon can explain the random charges / credits / debits / adjustments on my buddy Aitch’s wireless + Triple Play bill. He’s a smart guy; if he can’t figure it out, I certainly can’t.
Their pricing is not competitive; it’s more than we’re paying now for basically the same thing. Why switch?
He actually tried to claim that I can’t get FiOS speeds from cable. I pointed out that the difference between 15/5 and 13/2 isn’t “This is FiOS. This is BIG!”, it’s just barely discernible and not guaranteed anyway. Oddly, in the last few months, Verizon has quietly bumped the base FiOS speed from 12/2 to 15/5, which I infer means they found that trying to sell a slower speed to cable customers wasn’t working out that well.
I also infer this whole FiOS thing still isn’t going as well as they’d like. If it was, the incessant offers would stop.
The QA guy said he’d call me back if they could do anything about the price; there’s evidently a New & Better Deal coming out in a few weeks. Of course, since we’re on the DNS list, we’ll never know…
I told him here’s what it would take to get me to switch: paying less than $80/month for internet + phone. I figure $60 (plus the mystery charges) would save me maybe $10/month. I’ll geek for that if they don’t screw me over for installation and suchlike.
Failing that, we may just shoot the landline in the head and go with the cheap prepaid cellphone deal. Google Voice seems to be a reasonable solution; I got a local number that’s very close to our current landline, so maybe it’s time to print up a stack o’ cards and send out some notices.
The insulation on water heaters is pretty good these days: the exterior shell stays within a few degrees of ambient temperature. However, hot water rises, which shouldn’t come as any surprise, and convection currents can drain a surprising amount of heat out of both the hot & cold water lines on the top of the heater.
So I added heat trap loops to the inlet & outlet plumbing using flexible tubing. These are 18″ long and I might replace them with 24″ lines to reduce the angle at the water heater. Surprisingly, there’s not much strain in the tubing: it’s happy with that bend.
The guidelines say you need a foot or so of vertical loop, but even this piddly loop keeps the upper fitting at ambient temperature after a night without drawing any hot water.
In theory, you can screw heat-trap nipples into the water heater, but this heater came with something that looks like heat traps and heat most certainly still traveled up the cold water pipe. I think that had something to do with conduction from the tank to the metallic shell of the nipples.
I’ll add all the usual insulation when I’m sure everything is tight.
As always:
This may or may not satisfy your local plumbing code
When you make a plumbing joint with screwed compression fittings, there’s always a question of whether you’ve tightened the nut enough to make a good seal. The fittings come with copious warnings to not overtighten the nuts, which means I tend to undertighten them.
It’s easy to spot a major leak or a trickle, but what about a very slow ooze on a hot water line where the drip will evaporate before you notice?
Fold up a piece of tissue paper and secure it around the joint with a wire tie. Come back a few minutes / hours / days later: it’s easy to tell if the tissue has ever been wet, because its texture will be dramatically different.
Having just replaced a water heater, the subject of leakage is a hot topic around here…
So our 6-year-old Whirlpool electric water heater tank failed and dribbled water on the floor. Fortunately, I spotted the leak before it flooded the basement: I look at the heater just about every time I venture into the Basement Laboratory Electronics Wing. Judging from the mildew & fungus growing on the wooden base I built for it, though, I haven’t been doing a good job of walk-by inspecting. In my defense, the visible wooden edge is 3/8″ thick below the dark rim of the heater.
Grit drained from tank
I turned off the inlet & outlet ball valves, flipped the breaker off, routed a garden hose out the door, laid the end in an old cake pan, and drained the tank. The pan collected a fair amount of rusty grit (and more washed down the driveway), which means the glass-lined tank was suffering from internal rust.
A call to the Warranty Hotline produced an Indian-subcontinent accented voice, who told me that I had to get a licensed plumber to tell them that it was, in fact, rusted out. “Any plumber in the phone book will do”, he said, “Just have them call this number and we will verify the situation with them.”
My back of the envelope, confirmed by friends, is that it’d cost about $150 for a plumber to drop in. Oh, and this was on a Saturday morning, which means it might be a while later and bit more expensive than that. Paying somebody $75/hour to wait on hold didn’t seem attractive.
A new heater of the same general nature is $400, give or take.
Soooo, in round numbers, I’d be spending half the cost of the “free” replacement just to find out if Whirlpool would honor the warranty.
I was ready to just cut my losses and buy another heater when my friend Aitch suggested two simple alternatives:
Call the warranty line again, point out that this is the Internet Age, and offer to send them pictures of the problem, along with a statement that I was being truthful.
Spend the $150 to ship the dead heater to the office of the Whirlpool CEO with a note describing the situation
I picked the first option and had a brief conversation along these general lines:
paying nearly half the price of a new heater for an “evaluation” is absurd
the leak was near the top; even the caps over the heating elements were rusted
the grit shows that tank has internal rust, so it’s not external corrosion
I’ll send pictures anywhere you want
Much to my astonishment, the pleasant voice gave me a replacement authorization! No pictures needed.
Knock me over with a feather…
So I hauled the corpse back to Lowe’s, swapped it out for a new one, and away I went.
Now, it’s worth noting that the new heater has a 12-year tank warranty, not the lifetime one that came with the original purchase. Given my experience with the first one, we’ll see what happens; I suppose they learned how expensive a lifetime warranty can be.
Overall, a pleasant surprise, although the initial presentation wasn’t encouraging in the least.
The top bearing, the one nearest the impeller (on the left in the pic), developed detents, which says at least one of the balls has failed.
Both bearing housings are rusty; water has no trouble getting past the flexible seals at each end. As they’re not immersion-proof, I assume the water has little trouble getting past the shield rings on either side of the balls.
I replaced both of them, squeezed some silicone stopcock grease above the top bearing in the vain hope of excluding liquids, and we’ll see what transpires.
Our dishwasher door started making an odd gronking noise when it was opened or closed. It had done this before, so I knew what was going on: one of the sound deadening sheets inside was creeping down around the enclosure and jamming itself into the spring.
It turns out that a layer of adhesive holds the sheets in position and, in hot weather, the weight of the sheet pulls it right over the edge. They’re made of asphalt or something equally black and sticky and heavy, just what you want to dampen vibrations on those big unsupported enclosure sides.
Oddly, this is the only sheet that’s on the move. The others are pretty much stuck where they started. I don’t know if it’s hotter on this side or what’s going on.
Sound deadening sheet creepage
The situation was much worse the last time; I had to hack off a huge chunk of the sheet that had buckled around the right side of the dishwasher under the fiberglass insulating blanket. The spring was pretty much encased in shredded asphalt. Not a pretty sight.
This time the sheet traveled only a few inches, just enough to hit the spring with the door about half-open. I broke off the offending part, crudely flattened the rest, and moved the entire sheet back up to the top of the enclosure.
A few strips of duct tape should hold the sheet in place until the heat relaxes the bent areas and improves its contact with the enclosure. I hope that, with most of the remaining sheet on top, rather than hanging off the side, it’ll stay in place until the dishwasher goes casters-up for the last time.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 