Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Which, as always, required the Greatest Ratchet with a foot of extensions getting the 1-1/16 inch socket down to the rod:
Water Heater Powered Anode – socket wrench
Remember to:
Turn off the water heater power
Shut off the inlet and outlet valves
Open the drain valve to relieve the tank pressure
Only then loosen the anode rod
Seeing the first few inches justified extracting the rod:
Water Heater Powered Anode – old rod top
Due to low overhead clearance and inauspicious pipe locations, I had to hacksaw the bottom third off to extract the rod:
Water Heater Powered Anode – old rod overviewWater Heater Powered Anode – old rod bottom
With the rod out, draining a few gallons of water into a pan didn’t produce any notable gravel, so I didn’t do a complete flush. Much to my delight, the drain has a ball valve!
Given that this is a fancy water heater and I no longer regard anode rod maintenance as a fun-filled activity, I installed a Corro-Protec powered anode rod for cathodic protection without all the crud:
Water Heater Powered Anode – Corro-Protec parts
The wall wart proclaims 15 mA with a green LED indicating it’s hard at work:
Water Heater Powered Anode – Corro-Protec wall wart
The data plate on the back reports 24VDC 15mA, but, being me, I poked at it with a handful of resistors:
Corro-Protec power supply measurements
The electronics could be as simple as a 24 VDC wall wart feeding a 425 Ω series resistor and a transistor switch lighting the LED for currents a little over 6 mA.
A quick ohmmeter check shows the powered rod electrode is open-circuit with respect to the tank, as it should be without much applied voltage. Applying +24 VDC from the wall wart drives 15 mA into the water: the rod is hard at work.
I’ll take a look at it in a year or so just to see what’s going on in there …
Heavy winds during an overnight storm on July 4 2026 brought trees down across Dutchess County and caused widespread power outages. Our little generator justified its existence by preserving our food for about 24 hours, but other folks were without power for three or four days.
A large branch fell across the Carriage Hill entrance:
Carriage Hill Bridge – treefall – 2026-07-07
The terrain and lot layout in Carriage Hill often requires heavy equipment for tree maintenance:
Tree Clearing Crane
Many trees along the Dutchess Rail Trail toppled as their root balls rotated or simply broke off:
Rail trail north – treefall B – 2026-07
Others snapped and took out the fences:
Rail trail north – treefall A – 2026-07
We ride as far from this deadfall as we can:
Rail trail south – treefall – 2026-07
Cleanup continued for weeks and we wish the crews well.
After five years of daily use, the lithium battery in the charging case of my Nuheara IQbuds² MAX they’re-not-hearing-aids earbuds began absorbing far more energy during its overnight recharges than the usual 100-ish mA·hr. This isn’t unexpected and, of course, Nuheara specifically mentions their batteries are not replaceable, so just toss the earbuds in the e-waste stream and buy another set.
The lower part of the hinged case holds all the good stuff, with that blank hump obviously covering a great place for a battery:
Nuheara IQBudsMax2 charging case – overview
The bands around the earbuds are strips of gaffer tape holding their halves together after replacing their batteries. In this application, gaffer tape works much better than duct tape.
There being no obvious screws, wedging a thumbnail into the joint just above the Micro-B USB jack proved promising. Doing the same on the other side produced enough of a gap to force a flat steel blade in there; further prying popped the snaps (red):
Nuheara IQBudsMax2 charging case – snaps and glues
The green ovals mark places where the case halves were glued together, accounting for some of the struggle.
The two neodymium magnets in the front corners grab similar magnets in the upper cover to hold the case closed. The two magnets along the front edge grab magnets in the earbuds to hold them in the pockets, with more magnets flanking the gold-ish pogo pins visible in the first picture for better connections. If you’re concerned about the health effects of static magnetic fields, get over it.
The battery was glued in place, so the first position after cracking the case apart must look like this:
Nuheara IQBudsMax2 charging case – pried open
Yes. Yes, that is five years of earwax. You’ll note the lack of a seal at the bottom of the tunnels guiding the foam earbud tips: any and all particles falling off the earbuds have a direct path to the interior of the case.
Easing the battery from its restraints reveals the data plate:
Nuheara IQBudsMax2 charging case – snap and glue locationsNuheara IQBudsMax2 charging case – 802050 lithium cell
The reflections in the pouch’s now-curved upper surface show the battery has become a Spicy Pillow.
Somewhat to my surprise, 802050 batteries are available from the usual sources.
Unwrapping several layers of kapton tape exposed the battery protection PCB:
Nuheara IQBudsMax2 charging case – battery management PCB
Comfortingly, the DW01 topmark on the upper IC says it’s a battery protection IC and the 8205A topmark on the lower IC indicates a dual MOSFET switching the battery current off during shutdowns. I did not trace the circuitry, but the white wire might control the DW01 CS terminal.
The solder side:
Nuheara IQBudsMax2 charging case – BMS solder joints
The new battery had a similar protection PCB with two wires. Rather than argue the point, I snipped its (welded!) battery tabs and transplanted the Nuheara PCB to the new battery, adding 30 AWG jumpers because the new tabs were shorter than the old ones:
Nuheara IQBudsMax2 charging case – new battery installed
The strangely empty space to the right of the battery is just big enough for the protection PCB and all the kapton wrappings. The various plastic tabs around the battery hold it in place, so I did not renew its glue.
Similarly, the four case snaps do a great job of holding the halves together, so they’re not glued, either.
An overnight charge brought the case back to life and it’s once again working fine. However, the earbuds may be due for their third battery refresh.
Our new chest freezer has three baskets sliding along ridges just under the lid, but they seem to be just slightly too short for the ridge spacing. After having a basket fall off the rails once too often, I cut shims from 3 mm white acrylic and stuck them in place with double-sided foam tape to soak up the extra space:
Chest freezer basket shims
Each shim is 300×8 mm with the neatly rounded corners that are easy to do with a laser. They may not look like they grew there, but it’s tidy enough.
Perhaps the situation should have become a warranty claim, but a few minutes applying a tool to material I have on hand made the problem Go Away.
Which is entirely good enough for me and pretty much what I do around here most of the time anyway.
That’s not quite “as found”, because it came festooned with the remains of an obviously lab-built Peltier-cooled laser (?) diode fixture:
Rotary positioner – Peltier diode fixture
The positioner sported an obviously aftermarket tapped hole in the side, presumably for mounting to a support:
Rotary positioner – tapped mounting hole
The knob was apparently intended for fine angle adjustment, but it spun freely. Loosening another setscrew on the side released its well-worn parts:
Rotary positioner – drive gear – OEM knob
It’s not clear what the brown ring did, back when it did something, but there were no signs of stripped-off teeth or other debris in the recess; it is a very sloppy fit on the pin holding the knob. The knob may have had a compliant surface engaging the top of the ring, made with a long-since fossilized substance.
It turns out the rotary ring has triangles, not gear teeth:
Rotary positioner – tooth detail
However, setting the gear tooth pressure angle to 45° produces a reasonable triangle:
Rotary positioner – drive gear – solid model – end view
Even so, getting a functional knob required many iterations, primarily because I can’t measure any of the details and had to figure the fit by cut-and-try:
Rotary positioner – drive gear – gallery
The little white dots were an excuse to use the MMU3 for multi-material printing, because why not.
In truth, the knob doesn’t work particularly well, as the forces from the triangular teeth on the rotary ring tend to jam the knob against its pin. The knob might work better with splines driving a squishy TPU tire riding the crests of the rotary ring teeth than a real gear. Perhaps that’s what the original brown ring did before it fossilized.
For now, the positioner returns to the Box o’ Optics Lab Stuff, because it’s the wrong hammer for the Sherline’s laser aligner. It may emerge for a future project, when I’ll have more motivation to build a functional knob.
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
One of the zone valves on the gas furnace developed a slow leak around its actuator stem, so (now that the heating season is definitely over) I’ve been refurbishing all the long-neglected rubbery bits and pieces.
The four zone drain valves showed signs of having leaked in the past, so I took them apart to replace the washers:
Furnace zone drain valve – washers
As you’d expect, the two most-deteriorated washers were on the valves with the most corrosion.
As I expected, the faucet washer assortment on the shelf didn’t have that size. Figuring the size based on the outside diameter produced a description of faucet washer size labels that confirmed my suspicion: it makes no sense whatsoever. In the event of link rot, a lightly reformatted version of his table:
Faucet Washer Sizes
Careful measurement suggested they were 3/8L, which fit perfectly:
Furnace zone drain valve – gaskets
I added the spares and a copy of that table to the washer kit, although I’m certain the next project will involve a washer with yet another nonstandard standard size.
Replacing the washers required dismantling the valves and the first valve produced a gasket that fell out in brittle fragments. Although the remaining three gaskets emerged intact, I picked up some gasket material and laser-cut four new gaskets from the 0.8 mm sheet.
The OD fits into the valve body rebate:
Furnace zone drain valve – gasket installed
Because these valves are closed in operation and even when open won’t operate under any significant pressure, the gaskets aren’t particularly critical, but I dabbed joint compound into the body threads just to be sure.
And, while I was ordering things, I got a set of knobs to replace the sad bent wreckage on their stems.
