Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[med6753]

 Filled with piranhas and lawyers.

mnem

Hopefully the piranhas eat the lawyers. 

[med6753]

This house was built in the 1850's and has a basement, with a dirt floor. There's even a small spring in one corner that comes to the surface and drains out through the foundation. But it does not smell musty or mildewed because there is good airflow.   

I suspect that's some critters living below trying 'to piss up a rope'!

Perhaps med could provide us a picture from this small spring? I'm finding this interesting.

I'll see if I can get into the basement and take a picture of it. It's not the first time I've seen a house built directly over a spring.

Not gonna happen any too soon. The doors to the basement are locked. Next time landlord comes by I'll see if I can get down there.

[mnementh]

Ooh 5 years for me on EEVblog today 

Well, that's enuf of that. Time to burn the place down to the ground. 

mnem
"Hello, G'rilla Servers...? Yes, you're having another outage. in 3... 2... 1... and *blip*

[mnementh]

 Filled with piranhas and lawyers.

mnem

Hopefully the piranhas eat the lawyers. 

Nuh-uhhh! I actually like my piranhas! Don't want to poison them... 

mnem
"Why don't sharks eat lawyers...?"
"Professional courtesy."

[mnementh]

A quick glance into Shahriar's lab:

https://youtu.be/s2KkgI-kyK0?t=308

 

Dave: " If I had infinite money, and I could build anything I want... I'd have tunnels, and fireman's poles, and moats. I'd have like turret towers and moats... and a dungeon in the basement."   

Yeah, every guy's man-cave fantasy... a tunnel from the bedroom to the man-kitchen, another to the man-cave, and another to the eevil scientist lair... and a moat around all of it. Filled with piranhas and lawyers. Nasty little bitey ones. 

mnem
"Yes, you may touch it."

You mean similar to this?

TVs are all too small. Also, forgot the racetrack.   

mnem
Oh, and the magic portal to that Cantina in Mos Eisley.   

[bd139]

 Filled with piranhas and lawyers.

mnem

Hopefully the piranhas eat the lawyers. 

Nuh-uhhh! I actually like my piranhas! Don't want to poison them... 

mnem
"Why don't sharks eat lawyers...?"
"Professional courtesy."

Yes. Fish the piranhas out and replace with caustic soda.

[Zenith]

I'd have thought that it would contravene building regs as running water has the potential to flood the building or erode its footings and or make the fabric of the building damp making the ideal breeding ground for fungus etc and help cause breathing difficulties for the occupants.

Nope. In both cases there are no ill effects. I suppose the key is good airflow and venting.

Edit.....in both cases the houses were old and pre-dated modern building regulations. Wouldn't surprise me if modern regs prohibit it.

Do you live in Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Water"? He doesn't seem like someone who would have been unduly restricted by building regs.

Apparently there were terrible problems with mould with that.

[mnementh]

Filled with piranhas and lawyers.

mnem

Hopefully the piranhas eat the lawyers. 

Nuh-uhhh! I actually like my piranhas! Don't want to poison them... 

mnem
"Why don't sharks eat lawyers...?"
"Professional courtesy."

Yes. Fish the piranhas out and replace with caustic soda.

Why do you think I have the lawyers stewing in the moat...? The slime they ooze is worse than lethal. Without them, the process servers and PTA could get to me. Oh, and congress-persons. ish. No, definitely need the lawyers... but you know... not inside. 

mnem
Even a dwagon living in a cave has some standards...

[bd139]

Good result from Telonic here. They shipped a duff PP215 probe with my SDS1202X-E. tggzzz will no doubt identify which bit went wrong instantly. New probe in the post to me today free of charge.

[25 CPS]

Pre-WW2 residences here also had a coal chute to the storage in basement for the furnace. After WW2 most converted to gas (no storage) or to fuel oil which usually was a 275 gallon storage tank in the basement. That continues to today.

Domestic fuel oil heating is also a thing of the past here now, although I daresay there are a few working installations left. In my youth it wasn't too unusual to see a fuel oil tank down the side of someone's house. They rather stood out as local regulations required them to be both outside the house, a minimum distance from any dwelling, and surrounded by a brick or concrete berm with a sealed concrete foundation to keep the oil contained in the event of a tank rupture or fire. Made for quite a bulky, obvious installation.

In the northern climes that oil tank is inside the structure. For good reason. In the Winter fuel oil jells in the cold and won't flow. The alternative, and is used in mobile homes with no basements, is to use more expensive kerosene which is not affected by the cold.

Oil heat is something that's largely disappeared in urban settings within my lifetime here.  There was a huge push in the 1980s to shift people off oil and onto natural gas but back then, oil trucks making the rounds were a common sight fall through spring along with the pair of fill and vent pipes somewhere on the side of the house.  My house still had oil heat when I bought it and I went through the first year there with it but converted to natural gas because the fuel costs were pretty steep.  The local gas company had a bunch of new customers after a bunch of oil holdouts got slammed with monster heating bills after a severe winter with a polar vortex so it took a while for the natural gas line to get run to the house and the oil furnace lasted a little bit into the start of the next heating season.  I couldn't poach the ignition transformer off it because it was being used when it got replaced and the crew doing the tank and furnace removal pulled it out of there and scrapped it before I could pull that transformer off for my own use.

My tank was inside in the basement below the living room bay window.  One of the things I need to do is shift a cabinet into the bay window bumpout where the tank was to make better use of the space that got freed up, but several other things need to be done to enable that.  There are only so many hours in a day.  I've seen tanks outside and one of the places I've seen a lot of fuel oil tanks outdoors is in Yellowknife.  Basements are extremely rare there because pretty much everything is built on rock and there is no natural gas service up there so all of Yellowknife runs on oil with tanks outside including some huge ones outside of the large buildings.  I'm not sure if they're running fuel oil and have hot water circulation pipes inside the tanks to deal with the fuel gelling issue like the way you see on diesel locomotives in cold climates or if they're running kerosene or another fuel that doesn't gel up when it gets cold.

One street over from me in my 1942 wartime neighbourhood, there's one house that was built with a coal chute.  Someone decided well after everyone else had moved on from it that they liked shovelling coal and clinkers.  Coal chutes or windows that would open into coal bins were a leftover legacy in all the houses in the older neighbourhood I grew up in though.  They were a useful way of sneaking back inside.

Luckily, "What does it cost to run the equipment in the workshop?" doesn't sway bills all that much.  Usually it's scopes and meters that get used and they don't consume much power.  The giant energy consuming machines like the dynamic signal analyzer and spectrum analyzer that are both in the 350-400W neighbourhood don't see nearly as much use so they don't spike it too badly.  I see bigger fluctuations due to whether I do more or less cooking inside which changes how much time the electric stove spends switched on and anything that causes the laundry to be done more frequently than usual show up twice as electricity and water/sewage.

Yes yes, that is all fine, but what about the MW levitating frog display in the foyer? It helps immensely with the 'mad scientist' image!

I need something up front to piss off the Queen of Mean next door.  She hasn't cut my Christmas lights or vandalized anything else or started any fights with the other neighbours recently but she's still been an absolutely miserable handful to deal with.  Some of her husband's mail got put in my box by accident so I did the good neighbour thing and walked over and put it in theirs.  There was hell to pay from the Mistress of Misery for that, so I'm open to suggestions.

[mansaxel]

Where I grew up on the south coast almost all the older houses had basements (say pre-WWII), often with a street level hatch to deliver coal through. None of the houses I've lived in in London have had basements. Never really thought about the discrepancy until now and I can't offhand see geography being the motivating factor - Brighton is on, very wet, chalk and London is on a similarly wet [clay] river basin so they are both rather damp places for basements.

Colin Furze does offer some insights in building things underground in what I naîvely assume is somewhere in greater London area. His house didn't have a basement either..

https://youtu.be/A_ESR5zoGYQ

Nope, going by what he says in his video, he lives somewhere around the Stamford region as he mentions Rutland water is around 12 miles from his house.

Oh, my knowledge of UK geography is a bit spotty, isn't it London, the Fens, Wales and Scotland?

[Zenith]

I need something up front to piss off the Queen of Mean next door.  She hasn't cut my Christmas lights or vandalized anything else or started any fights with the other neighbours recently but she's still been an absolutely miserable handful to deal with.  Some of her husband's mail got put in my box by accident so I did the good neighbour thing and walked over and put it in theirs.  There was hell to pay from the Mistress of Misery for that, so I'm open to suggestions.

Be very careful. Bite your tongue. Rows with neighbours can get out of control easily, end in court and make your place less saleable. If she objects to you putting their misdelivered mail in their mailbox, she can't be entirely rational.

[dl6lr]

Speaking of coding and programming...

Anyone in need of a handful of NOS Motorola MC68705? Just found ten of them while I was looking for something else. Still no trace of something else, though.

Interestingly yesterday I got a programmer for those. But cannot test the programmer... It is socket adapter SA41 for my Kontron EPP-80 with MDM module.

[Cerebus]

I'll see if I can get into the basement and take a picture of it. It's not the first time I've seen a house built directly over a spring.

It seems quite a sensible thing to do in pre-mains water days. There are/were several London pubs built over springs. In particular in Clerkenwell, which is unsurprising once you think about how the area's name quite obviously came about.

[Cerebus]

 Filled with piranhas and lawyers.

mnem

Hopefully the piranhas eat the lawyers. 

Piranhas won't eat lawyers. The reason is the same as why sharks don't eat lawyers - professional courtesy.

[mansaxel]

Dave: "I'd have like turret towers and moats... and a dungeon in the basement."   

This is my preferred turret:



Dungeon is included. Counterweight for raising it gotta go somewhere..

[Vince]

It's amazing how a quick lick of paint can shave 80 years off of it, like I bought one !

[mansaxel]

It's amazing how a quick lick of paint can shave 80 years off of it, like I bought one !

That one is in Epinal, is a Modèle 1905, installed 110 years ago, and it is restored to immaculate condition. Probably not good enough to fire, but it will go through the motions swiftly.

The turrets we've visited in the Maginot Line have, with the exception of Schœnenburg (which is in as new condition, the entire visitable part of the ouvrage) been in somewhat less well kept, but some even work electrically; there's a 135mm Lance-Bombes in Hackenberg that will raise and rotate by motor. Bonus points for Fermont, where both the elevator in the en puits munitions entrance and the ammunition elevator in the visitable casemate bloc are original, in working order, and used.

[bd139]

Celebrated my EEVblog 5 year anniversary with a curry, beer and some single ladies tonight at Namaste in Holborn  .

One of them has an electrical engineering degree. But she’s 15 years older than me 

Anyway enough slacking off. Getting home soon and will do a Vince and sort out my capacitors 

[simba15]

So looksl like I have fallen in the hole!

Nice lot of stuff, had my eye on a hp 3688a but it had to go though its channels not my way.

Notable items are
Genrad RLC 1650
IEC F34
WAVETEK 185

Now to make space on the bench!

[bd139]

The heathkit HT supply is a notable bit of kit too. Good second hand market value 

[simba15]

Ahh yes I agree looks like it could be a good one, needs screws and a new switch, hope it works.

Also a HP thermal printer under the plotter but not sure about how useful those are.

[mansaxel]

The heathkit HT supply is a notable bit of kit too. Good second hand market value 

Yeah, HT supplies are hard to come by. For some reason. I'm looking for a 6209, of course.

[bd139]

Well that was interesting. A car just crashed into the side of the bus I am on in Brentford  . Not the driver’s fault.

Moving again pretty quickly but there are some top tier retards out there 

[Vince]

So looksl like I have fallen in the hole!

Nice lot of stuff, had my eye on a hp 3688a but it had to go though its channels not my way.

Notable items are
Genrad RLC 1650
IEC F34
WAVETEK 185

Now to make space on the bench!

No. The old HP plotter eats the cake by a mile. 

I love plotters. Wish I had one... one day, probably.