The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

  • Fluorescent Shop Lights, Early Failures Thereof

    A decade ago I installed a few dozen two-tube fluorescent fixtures (a.k.a. “shop lights”) throughout the basement. Visitors always say something like “Wow, I can actually see what I’m doing!” That was the whole point, of course.

    Being that sort of bear, I write the date on one end of a fluorescent tube when I replace it. Tubes seem to last 3-5 years, which is short compared to the 20k power-on hours touted on the carton: 5 years * 300 days/yr * 6 hr/day = 9 k hours. That’s an overestimate, as I don’t spend all my time crouched in my basement laboratory, honest.

    It turns out that there’s also a spec for the number of lamp turn-ons (“starts”) hidden deep in the lamp datasheets. For example, if you manage to browse the current Lamp and Ballast catalog at http://www.sylvania.com/ProductCatalogs/, you’ll find that a 20k hour rated life comes at “3 hr/start”, which works out to a mere 6.7k starts over the expected life.

    More starts = shorter life.

    I tend to turn the lights off if I think I’ll be upstairs for a few hours, which happens a lot during the winter.  My back of the envelope says that the tubes fail right around the expected value: 5 years * 300 days/yr * 4 starts/day = 6 k starts.

    Lately I’ve had a rash of early lamp failures and it seems the fixtures are failing after a decade; nothing lasts any more. I’m now installing electronic-ballast fixtures that fire right up in the winter and don’t have that annoying subliminal flicker. At a cost of $20 each, I’m not replacing all of them at once, I assure you.

    The only real problem with fluorescent lamps is that they make white people look dead. I managed to buy a contractor pack of warm-white tubes at the local Lowe’s, but they’re hard to find around here. Go for the lowest color temperature bulbs you can find.

  • Unusual Tea Additive

    Green tea is supposed to be good for you and Tazo China Green Tips is supposed to be pretty good tasting, so I’ve been sipping a cuppa or two in the morning. Teabags are a spendy way to buy tea, so I’ve been buying half a kilo at a shot from cooking.com, storing it in glass jars, and teaspooning it into a tea ball infuser over the course of the next year.

    This interesting additive appeared in one of my teaballs; fortunately I was awake enough to notice it before it wound up in hot water.

    Beetle found in Tazo Green Tea
    Beetle found in Tazo Green Tea

    It looked pretty much like the hull of a generic Asian Garden Beetle, although we haven’t seen anything quite like it in our gardens. Not a big deal, as garden beetles are fairly inoffensive critters, but not something that should make its way into a bag of lah-dee-dah tea. On the other paw, it’s hard to filter stuff like that out of the stream.

    Fought my way through the Flash-saturated Tazo site, sent a note to the Customer Service folks, eventually had a pleasant phone chat. After convincing her that I wasn’t rabidly angry and that it really was one of their beetles, she dispatched fifteen bucks worth of Starbucks gift card.

    It seems Starbucks either owns Tazo, both of ’em are controlled by the same outfit, or something like that. She was in the Starbucks Customer Service chain o’ command, anyway.

    Beetle bottom view
    Beetle bottom view

    So I picked up three boxes of Tazo tea bags at the local Starbucks: more China Green Tips and some Green Tea with Lemon Grass (which doesn’t appear on their website). Left me with three cents on the card; I’m not a regular customer, so it’s now in the pile of cards I use as measurement shims in the workshop.

    I’d been adding lemon grass from our garden to the morning cuppa for a pleasant lemon scent. The Tazo version includes Lemon Verbena, some mint, and other flavors that cranked the scent up to 11 and the taste far into my ptui range. Unpleasant, indeed.

    For what it’s worth, if you’ve tried & disliked other green teas, give Tazo China Green Tips a shot. It’s delicate and much better than the other (far cheaper) green teas I’ve tried; Salada Green Tea is particularly noxious.

    One of the China Green Tips reviewers on cooking.com comments “I found a rather long, nasty, kinky hair … I was shocked. I threw out the whole bag  … I was unable to drink tea for a week”.

    Mexican Bean Beetle on Soybeans
    Mexican Bean Beetle on Soybeans

    Now, party people, I’m here to tell you that food just doesn’t pop out of the ground in a pristine state. Maybe it’s because we eat a lot of food from our own gardens, but passengers like that, let alone the odd hair, just aren’t an issue. Consider, for example, this critter that made it all the way into the house on some soybeans: he’s likely related to the Asian Garden Beetle family and not all that far back in their family trees.

    If you want to really worry about something, ask yourself whether your tea grew downwind of, say, Zhejiang Happy Face Metal Refinery Complex Number Six. No way to tell about that, other than through a detailed chemical analysis of every cuppa.

    Bon appétit!

  • Oven Tube Burnout

    Burned Oven Tube Overview
    Burned Oven Tube Overview
    Burned Oven Tube
    Burned Oven Tube

    So the oven made a weird whooshing noise every now & again, but nothing we could pin down or duplicate to debug. Then it sort of stopped heating, even though the ignitor was glowing, and the kitchen smelled of unburned propane and hot plastic.

    Emergency stop, shut off the gas valve, finish the chili and cornbread in the ‘waver and toaster oven, let ‘er cool down, dig out the repair parts manual from the file cabinet.

    Dismantled the oven and found a weird encrustation on the burner tube. I wasn’t sure if the tube was supposed to have a dingus that meters the ignition gas at some known rate, but scratching at the lump made it look as though the tube simply burned through and corroded. The size of that hole would certainly make the gas whoosh a bit.

    Note the soot lines. The heat shield over the tube had a soot smudge, too, which I think caused the “plastic” smell.

    The replacement part from Sears is $80. It’s $50 from RepairClinic.com and they throw in the ignitor module that’s $70 from Sears. Judging from their picture the burner tube has three little holes that blow gas over the ignitor, no metal dingus. You can see the holes in the second picture.

    So a new burner tube (and ignitor, which I’ll zip-tie to the back of the oven) is on order.

    Update: of course the new ignitor doesn’t fit on the old tube, nor does the old ignitor fit on the new tube. And the connectors are completely different. Had to dig some ceramic wire nuts out of the parts stash; I knew I’d been saving them for some good reason.

    Grrrr & similar remarks…

  • Steel Preservation, The Good Old Days of

    Cadmium plated hangers
    Cadmium plated hangers

    Last year I geared up for scraping the soffits and figured I should put a piece of plywood across the windows so I couldn’t possibly have the ladder fall into a window. The storm windows are big, awkward inserts that hang from hooks atop the frames, so I planned to cut a plywood blank to match the opening.

    Gene left us a cigar box of “Storm Window Hdwr” containing this card of hooks-and-eyes that looked just like the ones on the windows. Alas, they’re not quite the same and don’t quite fit, a fact I discovered after mounting them and manhandling the sheet out the window. So much for “standard size”.

    But I’m sure the hardware on the side of the house looks as good as it does because it’s cadmium-plated, too! None of the hooks & eyes have a hint of rust, other than where the edges scrape together, after half a century.

    I heroically refrained from sucking my thumb afterward…

  • Counterfeit Memory Stick from eBay

    Bogus Memory Stick - Front
    Bogus Memory Stick – Front

    Last year I bought a “generic” Sony Memory Stick using eBay’s Bidding Assistant to get one of a whole bunch of similar items. Got it for a reasonable price, opened it up, and it turned out to be “too good to be true”: it looked to be a genuine Sony stick in sealed Sony packaging.

    I checked the “how to identify a counterfeit Memory Stick” sites and concluded that it really was genuine, what with good printing and laser engraving. Sometimes these things happen; maybe the seller got a pallet of leftovers?

    Bogus Memory Stick - Rear
    Bogus Memory Stick – Rear

    It failed a few months later, I mailed it to Sony for a warranty replacement, they concluded it was a fake, and sent it back. Huh. Those cunning Chinese are getting really good at making fakes; maybe this was a “fourth-shift” product from the real Sony factory.

    I contacted the seller, who said he sells “generic” products. I pointed out that “generic” means a second-tier manufacturer’s correctly labeled product, but that he sold a falsely labeled item. He offered a refund, I asked for money to cover my shipping, and he agreed. Knock me over with a feather.

    So I sent it back and he actually refunded my money, plus shipping both ways. More feather toppling.

    Sony Warranty Rejection
    Sony Warranty Rejection

    The term “fraud” did not enter the conversation, but I think he knew he was on thin ice and was willing to do whatever it took to make me Go Away.

    From what I can tell, reporting this to eBay has no effect, because they already know and simply do not care.

  • Database Follies

    My “biz” (I use the term loosely) credit card statement had a $7.25 mystery charge from “NEWARK US CHICAGO IL”. I have done biz with Newark Electronics (and their HQ is in the Windy City), but not recently. Soooo, I gives ’em a call to ask WTF. Got passed from ear to ear, eventually reaching Jolanta in Credit Card Billing.

    I described what I knew, she tapped in my credit card number, paused for a moment, then said “Oooooh, I know what happened!”

    Turns out that they use “general account numbers” (or order numbers, or some such) for low-budget customers like me and that they recycle those numbers. A while ago it seems “the computer” started

    1. Assigning some no-doubt-carefully-chosen general account number to the new transaction
    2. Reaching into the database for, um, data
    3. Sending the bill to the old account holder

    Oops.

    She says “the programmers are working on it right now” and she’ll refund the money muy pronto.

    Wanna bet that a few somebodys got mystery charges for a few kilobucks apiece?

    Uh-huh…

  • Replacing a Refrigerator Bulb

    Chandelier Bulb in Refrigerator
    Chandelier Bulb in Refrigerator

    Subtitle: ya gotta have stuff!

    Our refrigerator went dim; poking around inside revealed one of the two bulbs was dead.

    It was obviously a replacement: both are 40-W flame-shaped bulbs that I bought for the chandelier that might still hang in 89 Burbank Road. I intended to leave them for the new owners, but they got swept up in the moving frenzy.

    Being the sort of bear I am, I had written the replacement date on the bulb’s base: May 01. So that fancy bulb survived only six years!

    Nothing lasts!

    I picked the next-to-last flame-shaped bulb from the “Decorative Bulbs” box in the basement storage room, wrote the date on it (with a notation that the last one lasted 6 years), and screwed it in. Problem solved!

    Being the sort of bear I am, I can do all that with a completely straight face…