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a Fuhjyyu capacitor survived three months
Saturday, February 12 2022
I had a relatively bad hangover today, manifesting mostly as intestinal upset. As usual, it seemed to peak in the evening and so this morning it wasn't all that bad when Gretchen and I sat in the living room in front of the blazing woodstove playing the New York Times Spelling Bee and then (for me) reading various web articles and (for Gretchen) solving a crossword puzzle, Wordle, and continuing to read whatever book she is in the process of reading. It being a fairly nice day, of course there was some asshole (or group of assholes) down at the bus turnaround shooting guns. They sounded semi-automatic or perhaps even fully automatic, which would be illegal in New York State.
When the battery of my Chromebook became exhausted, I went upstairs to the laboratory and proceeded to fix my Hanns-G monitor, the upper-left one in my five-monitor array. It had begun doing that thing where it powered on to a blank white screen and had to be power-cycled several times to get it to display anything. I'd last had this problem only three months ago, and so the fix seemed like it might be identical (and different from the first capacitor replacement I'd done nearly nearly three and a half years ago). I wondered as I was removing it from the wall/ceiling and popping open the clips if there was some other capacitor that had failed. But when I had it open, I saw with my own eyes that the failure was in the capacitor I'd installed back in November (it was bulging visibly). It was a 2200 microfarad/16 volt unit made by a company called Fuhjyyu, and when I did a Google search on "Fuhjyyu," disparaging posts were the first results. Evidently they're somehow a worse capacitor manufacturer that CapXon. The source of this specific Fuhjyyu capacitor had likely been a power supply that had failed. Today I replaced it with a 2200 microfarad 25 volt capacitor made by "Wellcon" (which is unfindable on Google). This was also salvaged from an old power supply, but it was made in Taiwan, thus probably in the 1990s, likely before the dreaded "capacitor plague" years of the early 2000s. Since the new capacitor was too physically large to fit in the cramped space available to the monitor's power supply, I attached it to a pair of wires and zip-tied it against some cables where there was room. The fix worked on the first test, so I reattached the monitor to the wall/ceiling. As I worked, I re-listened to the amazing opening statement by the prosecution in the Chandler Halderson double-homicide case.
This afternoon, my hangover was making me just want to lie down, so I ended up in the upstairs bed, snuggling with Diane the Cat and eventually falling asleep. After I woke up, I watched the waxing gibbous moon rising through the gaps in the white pine foliage. It moved more than a moon width in the time I was paying attention, though at times it was obscured by pine branches not pushed out of the way as the breezes died down.
Before dark, I went outside to walk around in the fresh air. It was still unseasonably warm (with temperatures in the upper 40s or perhaps even the 50s) and much of the snow and ice had melted. This revealed a hazardous archipelago of dog shit in the yard, which I spent something like a half hour cleaning up while listening to a YouTube clip about another parent killer, Grant Amato. Then I hiked up the Farm Road a little ways, then down to the Stick Trail, and walked around in the vicinity of the stone wall and shale cliffs above the Chamomile looking to see what kind of damage the recent ice storm had inflicted. The worst damage was to the white pines, though I only saw one whose entire top had snapped off; mostly the damage was a few lost limbs and a thick new ground cover of pine needles torn off by the shattered ice. Hemlocks are the other major evergreen, but I saw very little damage to them; their branches are better at drooping under load and are much less brittle. I also encountered an ironwood tree (Ostrya virginiana) that had been broken over by the weight of ice; possibly this was due to its relatively large overwintering catkin buds, which held on to enough cumulative ice to exceed its structural capacity. But ironwood wood is extremely tough and it doesn't really break. Instead, it had twisted and delaminated, ending up more ropelike.
This evening Powerful cooked a meal of corn fritters and pasta with pesto sauce, though dinner was delayed by a Zoom meeting Gretchen had scheduled. By the time that was over, Powerful was napping. So Gretchen and I ate dinner the usual way: in front of the teevee while watching Jeopardy! and a very entertaining episode of Shark Tank.
The stone wall today, looking northwest. Click to enlarge.
The stone wall today, looking northeast. Click to enlarge.
A small cave in the shale just north of the Chamomile. Click to enlarge.
Between the icicle fangs in front of the shale cave. Click to enlarge.
Icicle adjacent to the cave in the shale cliff.
Moss adjacent to a small icy waterfall.
Ironwood twists and delaminates but doesn't break.
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