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lukewarm bath
Monday, September 19 2005
In anticipation of later stages of solar panel construction, today I finally got around to screwing the panel down to the wooden frame it's been lying on all this time.
The sun appeared today for the first time in days, so I tried collecting solar energy using the panel as it current is. It's been spray-painted black, but it's uninsulated and there's no transparent material in front of it. If it's not too windy the panel gets pretty hot, but the process is ruined in even a modest breeze. I was encouraged by the amount of hot water coming down the pipe, and in the evening I even attempted to take a bath with the heated water. This proved a major disappointment; water that is warm on the hand isn't necessarily warm when you're soaking in it. Still, I forced myself to endure the lukewarm bath anyway, sitting there for about ten minutes reading my primary information source for this project, The Solar Home Book, copyright 1976.
In the course of the continuing effort to address building-inspector-mandated code requirements for my laboratory, today I installed the last of the goofy handrails that go on either side of the two brief lengths of stairs (one at the entrance and the other to the laboratory deck). They actually look pretty sharp and I find I actually use them now that they're there.
This evening I addressed the one sorta-kinda code violation I knew about from the electrical inspector's impromptu inspection. He hadn't liked how I buried the cords to some lamps under the drywall. So today I just converted them to nominal low voltage DC lamps. I soldered pins to some super-bright LEDs and stuck them in a screw-in 120 volt outlet and then plugged the ends of the cords (where they come out of the drywall) into a double-duplex receptacle which gets its power from a 10 volt brick. Voila: instant low-power lighting, completely outside the regulatory jurisdiction of electrical inspectors. I covered all the 120 volt hardware with tape or hid it in plastic containers so as not to draw attention to it, even though none of it was actually handling 120 volt current. When the inspection is done and I switch these lamps back to 120 volts, I have to be sure not to do it while those LEDs are stuck in those screw-in outlets!
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?050919 feedback
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