|
|
|
electrical supplies and bling at the AutoZone
Tuesday, November 2 2021
I don't usually bring food to work, but today I brought rigatoni with marinara sauce and sauteed chonks, heating it up in the microwave at around noon. It went pretty well with the admittedly lame hot sauce I have on my desk.
After work, I visited Home Depot hoping to get electrical supplies that would make it easier to jump start the cabin generator when I find its 12 volt battery has died. But it turns out that Home Depot doesn't sell things like big alligator clips. I was able to buy 25 feet of uninsulated stranded four gauge wire (about $25), which I could use for jumping as a ground connector. I was dismayed to find that there was no hydronic antifreeze in stock, and later when I had Gretchen go look for some at the Home Depot in Newburgh, she couldn't find any there either, suggesting there might be supply chain issues stemming from the pandemic affecting availability. This is the time of year when demand for such antifreeze is high, so normally production of it would be stepped up. Instead, I bought a hook for hanging the EV charging cable and a set of cheap (non-ratcheting) metric wrenches to keep down at the cabin's dock for the duration of that project.
I then went to AutoZone, thinking they might have terminals and clips and such, but there was even less there than at Home Depot. If I want big terminal clips, I have to buy them online. (There is, however, a whole aisle at AutoZone selling useless bling to add to a vehicle.)
After getting to Hurley, I parked in the crowded parking lot of the town hall and joined the line for people wanting to vote (as it was election day). If there'd ever been a line before, it had been short and trivial. But today I had to wait something like fifteen minutes. The problem didn't seem to be pandemic-related; there was the usual number of poll workers and machines. The problem seemed to be the size of the ballot, mostly unfamiliar names running in local elections. As always, I voted party-line for the Working Family Party (New York's closest thing to a socialist party) except in cases where nobody was on that line or the person on that line was also a Republican. In those cases I either voted for the Democrat or I wrote in Gretchen's name. I should note that the town hall now has a mask requirement, and yet there were no karens melting down about it.
This evening after eating yet more leftover rigatoni (finishing it off), I researched the pinouts of a Generac 14 kilowatt generator, hoping to find a way to remotely start it and stop it. Ideally, I'd have some button I could push in the kitchen to turn it on and another button to turn it off. I'd also have a way to have an Arduino running on a small battery turn the generator on every twelve hours or so keep the cabin from becoming too cold. It took awhile to find, but eventually I discovered there is a way to enable a remote turn-on/off feature, which involves a secret formula pressed in sequence using the buttons of the generator's limited user interface.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?211102 feedback
previous | next |
