I Am Vexed. Plus Makeshift Greenhouse Thingie and the Ever Popular Stuff!

I suddenly realized this morning that I haven’t posted anything here in a while. That’s because there hasn’t been much going on. Now that the fall cleanup is all done, the gardening season is wrapped up and all that, the solar system is more or less working, etc. I haven’t had much to really talk about. And now I do. So here we are.

Let’s get this vexed business out of the way. (Vexed means mildly pissed off, by the way.)

Here’s the deal. I have my old gaming computer sitting on the workbench right now. After it went Pffft a couple of years ago I replaced it with an MSI gaming laptop, shoved the old one in a corner, telling myself I’d get around to looking at it “real soon now”, and it’s been there ever since until I started cleaning out my radio shack/mad scientist’s lab/workshop the other day. This thing wasn’t cheap. There’s a pretty hefty Core i7 processor in there, a decent Nvidia Geforce graphics card and 32G of high speed RAM. Even by today’s standards it would be a pretty decent computer so it would pay to spend some time trying to figure out what’s wrong with it. It would make an excellent auxiliary computer to run the laser engraver, 3D printer and amateur radio equipment and the like.

What happened was that we were in the middle of a late fall thunderstorm. A nasty one. In the space of about 5 minutes we had multiple momentary power failures and brownouts, and the computer just stopped working. So I have no idea of what’s all wrong with it and I can’t diagnose what’s wrong because the power supply doesn’t actually supply power any more. I suspect the power supply may indeed be the only thing wrong with it. So the first thing to do is get a working PS for it.

And, of course, I don’t have one on the shelf. Need a power supply for a TRS-80 Model II? I got one. Need a power supply for a Ti 99/4A? I got one. But not for this thing. And they want something like $150 for one, and I’m not willing to drop $150 on a PS for a computer that might not work anyway.

So I decided to take a stab at fixing the thing’s power supply.

Power supplies are not complicated beasties, all things considered. I used to repair power supplies for laser scanners, cash registers, and misc. equipment all the time back in the bad old days when I was a technician for a POS company. (No, not POS as piece of s**t, POS as in point of sale equipment)

So I yanked the sucker out. It was indeed dead as the proverbial doornail. So popped off the screws and took off the cover and…

What? Seriously? The damned thing is glued together?

Yeah, they glued everything. Great bloody gobs of rock hard glue or epoxy deliberately gluing the components together to make it damn near impossible to repair. Take a look at this:

That big coil is glued to the capacitors, which in turn are glued to each other. The other coil there is glued to two more capacitors. in the left center you can see another glob of glue where another component was glued to something else. I couldn’t even get the fan connector disconnected until I spent five minutes with an Exacto knife, a small screw driver and a pliers chipping away at the muck to free the connector.

Why would they do this? Someone suggested that they did it to prevent parts from coming loose in shipping. That’s nonsense. This thing is built like an efwording tank, for heaven’s sake. I could drop it off the roof of the house and the only damage would be a slight dent in the heavy steel case it’s in. Gluing down the connectors, maybe that would prevent the connectors from coming loose. But why in the world would you glue capacitors to coils? Or transistors to inductors? The only reason I can think of is to deliberately make the thing virtually impossible to repair so you have to buy a new one.

Now I could go off on a rant about planned obsolescence and manufacturers deliberately making equipment impossible to repair to force you to keep buying new instead of just fixing a broken item, but I will refrain from that. At least for now. Perhaps at some future date when I feel in the mood for a good rant I’ll delve into that.

So what did I do? Ordered a new power supply, of course. It’s the only way I can fully test the stupid thing, and if it does still work, which I suspect it does, I’ll need one anyway.

Growing Lettuce. In December.

So we have this sort of small, portable green house thingie that we use in the early spring for starting seeds before the weather is nice enough to plant stuff outside. Last spring we upgraded a bit, adding a heating pad and grow lights so we could keep it in the basement instead of having to move all the furniture around in the living room to make space for it in front of the windows. That worked out quite well, by the way.

So MrsGF and I got to thinking, we have this green house, we have grow lights, we have that heater, and we have lettuce seed left over, so why not try growing lettuce down in the basement?

So we did. And well, damn, it seems to be working. Within just a few days of setting it all up and planting some lettuce seed in a few pots with some potting mix, dozens and dozens of little lettuce plants popped up.

Hopefully in another week or two they’ll be big enough that we can have some fresh lettuce.

And A New Radio Receiver

On the electronics front I just got this little beastie in a couple of weeks ago, a Mlahit software defined radio receiver. SDRs have been around for years now but I’ve never had one before because I frankly wasn’t all that interested in them. I have enough old fashioned analog radios or hybrid radios to play with to want to dabble with these things as well. But I’ve been curious about these things for a long time so I saw this one and it looked reasonably good and the price was fairly cheap so I bought one on impulse. I haven’t had time to do more than play with it a bit. sometime in the next week I’ll have time to take a closer look at it and I’ll talk more about it then.

Solar Update

The solar power project has been … Interesting? Oh, nothing has gone wrong with the equipment. It’s still working exactly as it is supposed to. What’s interesting is that our electric bill has been literally cut in half ever since we put the system in, even though we haven’t used it that much. It’s been so cloudy here the last few weeks that we haven’t even been able to use it at all for several weeks now. So I haven’t even had the system switched on except for a few days in November.

But our electric bill was still half what it was last year. So what the hell is going on?

When we decided to put the system in we took a close look at how we use electricity here and made some very minor changes. We went through the house and replaced the few remaining incandescent and fluorescent lights with LED lights. We put all of the electronics in the house on power strips. You may not know it but almost all of your electronic equipment like your TV, radio, etc. never actually turn off. The displays may go dark, but they’re still drawing power. We bought a combination countertop convection oven/air fryer that works so well we almost never use the oven in the conventional stove any longer. We’ve become better at turning off equipment and lights when they aren’t really needed. All little things like that which haven’t altered our lifestyle but which, when you add them all up, have made a huge difference in the amount of electricity we use.

So oddly enough the solar power system has, in a way, been successful even when we aren’t using it because it caused us to reevaluate how we use energy in the house and make relatively insignificant changes that have cut our energy usage dramatically. Last year in November our electric bill was $310. This year it’s $157.

So even though we haven’t been able to switch the house over to solar on a regular basis, it is still, indirectly at least, responsible for cutting our utility bill in half. Weird out things work out sometimes.

Postscript

Just before I was going to publish this the new power supply for the computer arrived and… Yeah, it’s still dead as a doornail. I’m afraid the MB is cooked. I’m not even sure if I can salvage any of the parts out of the thing. I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort to dig into it further. Right now it looks like that right before the original power supply failed it dumped a huge power surge into the computer’s motherboard and other equipment connected to the PS. Oh, well…