Wiring an EV charger

Too many trades people estimate their jobs by looking at the house of the prospect, what type of cars they drive etc. Recently I received an estimate of $8,000 to install a charger outlet (but not the charger). My estimate was for an experienced professional, it would take about 20 hours. So they were charging high $300’s per hour for an electrician and a partial helper (For pulling wire).

Instead, I decided to do the hard work instead and to get an electrician out to inspect it (for maybe $100).

I had a few surprises.

The wire had to go from the south end basement wall to the attached garage on the north end of the house. Moreover, there was no direct way to get the wire from the basement to the garage. The route I took was up through the stairwell into the house attic, then down into the garage attic and finally to the distant wall.

Probably the biggest obstacle was hitting a fire-block in the stairwell. Even worse, once I finally got through the block, I discovered that maybe a foot away was another. I did not have proper tools, mostly drill bits for drilling 1″ holes 1-2 feet away from the drill . Needing a variety of tools and extensions, caused me several trips to hardware stores which also ate up some time.

Mobile Development in Xamarin

For about 5 years, I have been developing android apps in the Microsoft product “Xamarin”. I initially chose Xamarin because it is able to share code between Android and IOS and it has close to native speed. Normally I am not obsessed with speed but I have an App in development that needs speed. Over the years, and in general, I have found working with Xamarin difficult. There are very large amounts of background you need in order to build Apps. More importantly, the tools, although powerful also are very particular and often cause hours of lost productivity. Recently, Microsoft indicated that they are ending support in early 2024 for Xamarin Native, and, I would need to learn their newest flavor … called Maui.

Considering my experience with Xamarin, and the fact that I will need to learn something anyway, I’m investigating Flutter, a Google, cross platform development environment. So far, the learning curve is much less difficult, and the support and documentation is solid. I’m in development of my first Publicly available app and am about 90 % done. My initial guess is Flutter is about 3 times more productive for the developer. I’m hopeful

8th Year for Charter School Lottery System

About 9 years ago, I built an online system for taking applications for people looking to get their kids into a charter school in North Carolina.

Over the ensuing years, I will say that the system has been very solid. The biggest problem we had was in using shared hosting. It turns out that Email black-listing spans customer who are on the same server. The application sends a confirmation to each registrant, and on shared hosting, if another person is sending spam or causing your IP address to get black-listed, you are an innocent bystander. I desperately pled to the hosting company (GoDaddy) and my requests fell on deaf ears.

So I moved to Amazon Web Services. My experience was and is night and day. I did have to learn lots about hosting managing web servers, sending emails the AWS way and much more, but having my own server where I can add capacity in a few clicks is a game changer.

Adding the Lottery to the Charter School Lottery Registration System

Traditionally, the Charter School for whom this system was made had external software that ran the actual lottery. It was a cumbersome process where we would need to export the registrant data into an excel format, then import it into this desktop software, the lottery was randomized and run on the desktop and a file exported with results. Then we would need to re-import the data and run SQL co0mmands to match the results to the students application.

This year, we wrote the lottery so that it runs on the actual registrant data. There are some rules about acceptance (such as if one multiple gets accepted, the other(s) do too. Anyway, the system runs in about 1 minute and the results are immediately available.

Defending against Form Spam

Form spam is when a bad actor creates a script that submits lots of fake data to your real data. This is potentially very costly to reconcile and usually not discovered until a significant amount of fake data is submitted.

Although the school lottery system had very little (less than 1 per year) form spam and it was entered manually, We fortified the system to detect strange activity and reject the submission.

I can’t go into details lest I divulge our defenses, but adding the defense mechanisms greatly reduced our risk of this horrible occurrence.

The Garage Door Troubleshoot

My garage doors has been operating marginally for quite a while. I’d mess with the settings, watch YouTube videos and basically tinker around with the adjustments trying to get it working right. I’ve resorted to manually opening and closing them because the motors sometimes are not able to do so.

Today, I’m tackling this beast or, dying trying.

Background:
My garage doors are wooden, old and have some goofy situations. I’m not sure if it is normal, but the installer seems to have ran the tracks into the poured cement on the garage floor. This make moving the rails basically impossible… yea I can cut them at the floor but don;t have enough ecperience to be sure that won’t cause a secondary problem.

I’m currently doing a deep education, but I find the info that you really need is hard to find. There’s lots of YouTube videos of varying quality but nobody explains the principles that one should seek. This happens a lot as it takes a higher level understanding to communicate at the level. Lots of people know what to do but can’t explain it in a more general sense so you can morph the understanding into your particulars (something I try to do in all of my teachings).

Anyway, so here I am.

What I have grasped with a mild confidence is that it’s about balancing forces. Like an elevator, the springs provide a balancing force against the door so that the motor in the opener can do less work to open and close the garage door.

You want the door to move smoothly and with minimal effort without the opener before adding in the opener.

The door will naturally fall so the springs are there to pull back on the tension.

I believe the first thing to do is to work on the spring tension and keep adjusting it so that the door is easy to open and close and is not prone to either go up or down when left alone

One safety warning is that you need to add protection to stopping the door from running away free and slamming to the floor. If part of your body happens to be under a heavy, run away door, you could get hurt. The standard trick is to use a vide grip plyers and clamp it to the rail so that the door will be stopped by it, and only slowly remove if. I would suggest a backup safety the first time you remove it in case something is wrong… A problem avoided is a problem solved !

I’ll be posting more about this process but it is happening or I fail after a hard try TODAY.

PVC Pipe Freezing Experiement – Intro

What’s it take to break PVC – Field Experiement?

Part 1

I love to know from first hand experience. I usually feel vulnerable to taking information from someone whose values and standards I do not know. In the world, there are plenty of information regurgitators, but few with original knowledge. I revere the concept of knowing something, but it has to be deep, personal knowledge not the type that comes from averaging other regurgitators perspectve on something.

I love to know.

The Standard Water Line Clearing Story

If you read about winterizing your pool or irrigation system or a water line, the general gist is you must completely empty your lines. Pool and irrigation / sprinkler system owners pay hundreds of dollars each year to service providers to completely empty or blow their lines and then add anti-freeze to insure their buried PVC pipes  won’t break. The marketing is filled with motivating fear “Close you pool properly or risk digging up your yard for expensive fixes”. I’m not saying don’t do it but instead get a sense of perspective, an understanding how careful one needs to be.

 

For me, fear based marketing is usually an indication that some research… real research needs to be performed. Freakonomics covered the actual benefit of car seats over a child seat-belted in the rear seat. Tire companies put infants sitting in the middle of tires, electrical contractors play up the risk of electrocution.

A Careful Study of PVC Pipes Tolerance to Freezing

I’m taking a Mythbusters or citizen scientist approach to verifying exactly how tolerant PVC plumbing is to freezing. How far do you need to go to protect your lines? How much water needs to be removed, Anti freeze put in etc. How much is enough  is enough to protect buried or exposed PVC pipes from breaking due to freezing?

 

This winter (2017/18), I performed a controlled , 3 month experiment on different size, percentage filled and concentration anti freeze was enough to protect the PVC pipes.

My findings were surprising!

I’ll soon be posting a video of my findings once most of the below freezing nights are behind us.