AliExpress experience?

Great value, those racks.

I'll have to look. I have whopping 5mbps DSL. Hmm, found a couple on Google, but not actual assy pics.

Oops. Fun to find, though, huh?

G'luck!

Ex-battery life?

I can just see the nightly Gnu Hamster news channel "Jim Wilkins was arrested today during an attempt to smuggle food out of grocery. The local bomb squad was called in to explode an unknown 'device'. Wilkins was thought to be attempting to cool the device with the frozen food so it wouldn't prematurely detonate."

Reply to
Larry Jaques
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Habanitro sauce?

The clerk asked me where she could buy one.

I took the freezer in to see how much I could stuff into it, as I hadn't jammed in the more compressible empty boxes as tightly as possible. Usually I put cold food in soft-side insulated cooler bags in the shopping basket. They've told me I am the only customer who does even that much to keep food from thawing.

We are in the middle of a major snowstorm, over a foot of wet sticky snow that bent down the tree branches, though we didn't lose power. New Jersey (Ed) got twice as much.

I had the fridge and freezer on UPS power overnight. The DIY UPS for the DC-input freezer, a Radio Shack 13.8V 19A power supply charging a battery to 13.5V through a diode, ran at the rate of only $2.20 a month according to a KAWez. That PS reads 0.0W on the KAW without a load,

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Over two feet north and west of us, but I'm close enough to the coast (6 miles to Raritan Bay) that we got only about ten inches here. There are lots of power lines down but, again, not here.

And the snow blower started on the first pull, so I'm a happy camper. d8-)

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Just over an inch on the ground here in the classic Central Ontario Snow Belt, after the warmest (by 2 degrees) Feb on record, where we set numerous record lows early in the month, and several record highs late in the month.

If all the rain we got had come as snow we'd still be digging our way out.

Reply to
Clare Snyder

We haven't had much of our usual cold Canadian air here, either. The weathermen said that the lack of our usual cold air mass pushing down from Canada made the path of our nor'easter wobbly and uncertain. They usually have a pretty good handle on where the air masses will collide, and thus, they can predict snow lines more accurately.

This time the sucker just moved up the coast unhindered, and then headed out to sea -- actually, up to Cape Cod and Maine.

So we had wildly different snowfall amounts 20 miles in any direction.

BTW, a "nor'easter" is just a storm that travels up the coast from the Southeastern US, sometimes from Florida, following the path of hurricanes that take the same route. They can be worse than hurricanes here. They have a tight cyclonic airflow and the flow is strongest when the eye is positioned such that we feel the wind coming from the northeast -- thus the name. One of them blew half the shingles off my house 30 years ago or so.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

It was in the 50's a week ago. Cold, snow again but just an inch or two the past few days. We'll keep passing it along to your way ;-)

This article just ran in the paper. Kind of interesting when you have a minute or two:

"Epic salvage effort saved 230 new Chryslers from U.P. shipwreck" (Nov

1926)

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Don't think it would be handled quite the same way nowadays...

Reply to
Leon Fisk

That's quite a story. I used to hunt snowshoe rabbits near Copper Harbor -- in January -- and I can imagine what that was like. Frozen Hell is what is was like.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

The counterclockwize rotation around the low pressure causes the north-east wind to suck moisture out of the atlantic and drop it on the leading edge of the storm as the low travels north.

Hense the old saying "when the wind is from the east it is fit for neither man nor beast"

Here in central ontario those easterlies drag the moisture out of lake ontario and dump it on us when the lake isn't frozen. The prevailing westerlies pick it up off Superior and Huron, dropping MOST of it to the west uf us. Something has changed in the weather patterns and Kitchener/Waterloo, Elmira, and Statford get a LOT less snow in recent years - and where Elmira used to get significantly more than waterloo (only 14km apart), both now get significantly less than areas both to the east and west - almost like we are in the shadow of something - - -

Reply to
Clare Snyder

I do that, too. Wally World had them for a couple bucks a handful of years ago, so during the summer, I fill in-store and refill after the self-checkout.

Milk is extremely susceptible to early death without being kept at 40 or below, so I use them for all cold and frozen foods. In the winter, the truck is cool enough not to need it for the (5 minutes, 3.5mi) drive home.

Did I just hear a "yet?" at the end of that first sentence? Another storm is hammering Seattle right now, given the yellow features on the radar screen on Wunderground, the last one over ID right now.

We've had drippy rain all day, and there is a 45mph wind advisory up. The real rain will get here tomorrow, it appears.

Indeed. You don't want dueling PSes on your hands.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

The intent is for them to cooperate, with the higher of the two outputs, PS or solar, charging the battery. The series diode keeps higher voltage from backfeeding into the 13.8V PS and solar controllers are built to accept battery voltage on their output when their input fails.

I tested the concept with an old taper charger to which I added a Variac to adjust the output, on a hazy day when the solar couldn't quite keep up. The soft voltage/current knee of the taper charger allowed the battery to drop more than the well regulated switcher does. Perhaps today will bring enough sun to test the circuit before more snow arrives.

The Alpicool freezer current appears to average a bit below 1 Amp, though the power meters I have now are sized for the 50A max of the APC1400 and don't measure low currents accurately. The blue meter like you have can be off by 0.2A. This is on order to hopefully make more accurate Amp-hour measurements on lower powered devices and small batteries such as Lithium 18650s.

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-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Nope, not the same at all. Collectors would be heading the effort, out there saving all the priceless old '26es this time. ;)

Reply to
Larry Jaques

How does this differ from the diodes attached to most solar panels nowadays? You chose the exact schottky voltage you wanted?

Got preps? Somebody turned the storm cycle back on. Prolly that nasty AGWK stuff, which means OMIGODWEREALLGONNADIE!

Added to my list. This is one of the few times that Amazon ($18.56) vendors beat Ebay vendors ($23.35). The extra precision is needed for the little guys, I see.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

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Figure (d) shows a diode switch that passes the higher of battery or power supply voltage to the load while isolating them from each other. The diode in series with the lower voltage source is reverse biased.

I have the battery directly connected to the load and use diodes to select the higher of power supply or solar controller voltage. The power supply provides 13.5V through its diode, the solar controller limits itself at 13.9V if there's enough sun. The solar controller's series diode is internal, to keep battery voltage out of the panels and wiring. That diode shorted in my HF controller.

On a partly cloudy day like today the solar controller supplies whatever current the panels can produce and the power supply provides the rest of the load's demand. I can watch the power supply's input wattage rise and fall on a Kill-A-Watt as the sun dims and brightens. Sometimes the KAW Watt display goes to 0.0 and the system is purely solar powered, although the power supply is still connected and turned on.

When neither the solar panels nor the grid can provide power it reverts to the battery, all automatically.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Good explanation, and I grok it now. Thank you.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

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