Out and About

Packing: The Diamond Hitch

Helped younger son move some furniture to his house today. While I was tying down the furniture in the back of his pick-em-up truck he remarked that this was the fifth time he has seen me do that. I learned how do the diamond hitch at Boy Scout camp when I was in junior high school. (The diamond hitch is a little complicated and requires a certain amount of judgement on how long to make certain sections. It's used for securing loads to the backs of pack animals. We never got to the live animal stage, I think we practiced on barrels.) I learned it well enough to pass the class / earn the merit badge, but I forgot it soon after. Never used it. Use it or lose it.

Steps for tying a tautline hitch

I still know the square knot, the bowline and the taut line hitch. The taut-line is the most useful knot in the world. Simple as sin, easily adjusted and holds tight. Great for securing loads in the back of pick-em-up trucks.

Went to Walmart this evening so me wife could get her second shingle's shot. A complete shingles vaccination requires a series of two shots. She didn't have to pay anything but somebody paid the pharmacy $167 for this shot. Seems there is a waiting list. The pharmacy got a shipment in today and called her. When she asked the pharmacist how many doses they received, thinking it would be the dozens at least, she was informed that they received two doses. How the heck does this make any sense? Somebody put on a big promotional campaign to convince people they needed to get a shingles vaccination, and then they don't prepare enough vaccine to meet the demand they know they have created? Makes me wonder if they didn't create an artificial shortage just so they could pump up the price. On one hand, I can't blame the drug companies. Developing drugs is hellishly expensive and that's just the first half of the battle. Then you have to get them approved by the government, another insurmountable battle. On the other hand, blood sucking vampires, they need to have stake driven through their heart. I mean they are frigging killing the patient with these constant demands for more money.

So I'm sitting there in Walmart, waiting for my wife, and I am looking around and I see all this stuff, stuff that I do not need or desire. And then I got to wondering, just how much stuff is there here? How much did Walmart have to spend stock this store? (Yes, I know they probably didn't spend any of their own money, it's all borrowed or fronted or something. But still, there is a heck of a lot of money tied up in all this inventory.) And how much did they spend to stock all the Walmarts in the country? And what about all the other big retailers like Target and Freddies? Well, shoot, what about all the retailers in the country?

Turns out it is a heck of a lot: $1.967 Trillion. That's trillion, with a capital T. With a population of 325.7 million people, that means there is just over $6,000 in inventory for every person in the US. Not near as much as I thought. I was think it was on the order of $100,000. Scientific notation would have helped. 1.967 trillion = 1.967E11, 325.7 million = 3.257E8, so the rough estimate of the dividend would have been 10^3 or one thousand. (11 - 8 = 3).

China Wok

We stopped at China Wok to pick up some Chinese food for dinner. Little hole in the wall place, half a dozen people hustling to fill an endless stream of orders, most of which were dispatched by a half dozen dedicated delivery drivers. It took a while for our food to be ready, I suspect most people must be ordering over the internet. That's okay, it was great fun watching this crew working at a frantic pace but still having fun. Bonus: the waitress wrote our order in Chinese.

Nicknames

Common Name Abbreviations

This struck my funny bone, hard.

We went to Hawaii a couple of weeks ago. Our flight arrived around 11PM. We rent a car and my wife pulls out her smart phone and it starts telling us how to get to the resort. This works great around home because I recognize the street names, but here it's no help at all. "Turn left at hokohokohooky street", "turn right on hokohokohokohoony street". Wait, what? It was like the phone was speaking in a foreign language. It was no help at all. It wasn't a complete disaster, we only made a couple of wrong turns. I mean it's an island, there are only so many places you can go.

Pic of the Day

Miss NASA in Apollo 8, 1971

HSI

Furnace Start up Hot Surface Ignitor
69colbyt
Messing about with our furnace I got to wondering about the ignitor (Blogger wants to spell it with an e, not an o, but o is correct). I kind of sort of thought that it was a spark ignition device, but when we pulled ours out, I could see that it was not. It's just a resistance heating element. Okay then. So it must get pretty hot, but we use resistance heating in toasters and small room heaters, and you need to careful with them because they can set stuff like clothes and curtains on fire, so sure, you could use a resistance heater to ignite the gas in the furnace.

Hot Surface Ignitor

So how hot does it need to be in order to ignite the gas-air mixture?

Natural gas has a high ignition temperature, approximately 1163 degrees Fahrenheit. - ERPUD

That's a little warm. Paper, as we all know, thanks to Ray Bradbury, ignites at Fahrenheit 451. So our Hot Surface Ignitor (HSI) must likewise get pretty hot.

The HSI heats up to around 1,800°F to 2,500°F and glows red-hot. - The Spruce

That's almost hot enough to melt steel (2500 degree F). So what are these things made of?

In 1993, the furnace industry moved away from the standing pilot light ignition system in all furnaces. One of the most popular styles of ignition used today is a Hot Surface Igniter (HSI). The first HSI’s looked like a “fork” and were a silicon carbide material. While this type of igniter is very dependable, they are fragile. The newer style HSI is made out of Silicon Nitride, which is a more durable material. This is the type of igniter that our technicians stock on their trucks. While they are more expensive to purchase up front, you can expect a longer life out of them. - Santa Fe Air

Update October 2025 replaced missing video with a different one.

Efing Whirlpool

Water heater flamed out again this morning. Fine, time to see if Whirlpool has a solution for this problem that has been going on for years. Call customer service and the first thing Robo-cop wants me to do is tell them my phone number. WTF? Everybody and their dog all over the world has caller ID and these clowns can't figure out what my phone number is? This isn't good. I get to a person in short order, who transfers me to 'water heater technical support' where I get to listen to some horribly distorted muzak. Why do they do that? Is it because they are too cheap to buy a decent radio? Or is it a deliberate attempt to drive people away?

Whatever. After a few minutes Robo-cop comes back on the line and asks if I would like to have them call me back instead of just waiting. Sure, that would put a stop to the noise coming out of my phone. And hey, it appears Robo-cop knows my phone number after all. Bozos.

A few minutes later I get a call back and the operator starts interrogating me: name, rank, serial number, address, blah, blah. I answer her first couple of questions, but then I tell her no more, I want to talk about the water heater. We exchange a bit more and then it becomes apparent that they still don't have a solution for this problem. Call me when you have one.

I suspect there is a 'weak' electrical connection somewhere between the controller and the sensor and any little change in temperature causes the connection to fail which causes the controller to flag the sensor as bad. Then I come out and glare at it, and the connector contracts in fright, contact is restored and the water heater lights up again.

I could be wrong about all this, but I can't imagine what else could be causing these intermittent failures. I suppose it's time to get out the soldering iron and make some new connections.

Norman at Nor-Mon

Failed Furnace Igniter Control Relay

I've had a spate of electrical problems recently. The hot water heater I replaced a few years ago has gone out and I had to relight it three or four times in the last month. Since it seems to work fine most of the time, I suspect a connection in the wires that lead to the temperature sensors is at fault. The weather turned cold about a month ago, the water heater is in the garage, so it's going to feel those temperature changes. The best I can imagine right now is the change in temperature caused the metal in the connectors to contract just enough to lose contact. I unplugged the sensor wires from the the controller today and then plugged them back in. This might have dislodged any insulating oxide that had formed (i.e. corrosion) that could affect this connection. Remember these are very low current, very low voltage circuits so even the slightest barrier to conduction could easily cause failure.

Reliability has always been a bit of a black art to me. To make a machine is a pretty straight forward business. There are numbers and laws for strength and pressure and power, so if you do your math right you can make a machine that will run. How long that machine will run is another matter.

According to one theory of business, reliability is a key feature for gaining sales. If the business leader subscribes to this theory, at least some money is going to be spent on investigating reliability. The longer a product is around, and the more popular it is, the more it will improve. It may take a while, but electro-mechanical devices have been around for 100 years now, and I think they could do better with electrical connections. I am a little aggravated by this, I had to take a cold shower this morning.

A few days ago I fired up the furnace for the first time this fall. It didn't turn on. It's not a big deal, we use the gas fireplace for most of our heating. We only use the furnace when it gets really cold. But if we're going to have a furnace, we should keep it in working order. We might really want it one of these days. The furnace has failed twice before. Both times I called a furnace guy to come take a look at it. Once the only problem was that the filter was clogged. Cost me $100. That was embarrassing. The other time the igniter had burned out. This time Osmany and I opened it, poked around and discovered that the controller was kaput. Specifically the relay the supplies current to the igniter had failed. If I could have found a relay with a 24 VDC coil and 10 Amp, 120 VAC rated contacts, we could have replaced it ourselves. But I looked on Mouser and Digikey and couldn't find one. Maybe I wasn't holding my mouth right.

I looked on the Internet for a 50A50-112 furnace controller, but didn't find anything. Found an outfit in Pennsylvania selling something similar, but when I called them the couldn't find anything that would work. So now I look for furnace parts in Portland and I find two. I think this tells you something about the reliability of furnaces right there. Everyone has a car and there are hundreds of repair shops in Portland. I think furnaces might be a tad more reliable than cars. Of course, furnaces are much simpler than cars.

I called Nor-Mon with my part number and he tells me to bring it in and he'll match it up. So today Osmany and I drive into Portland and visit with Norman at Nor-Mon. The man talked incessantly about everything under the sun, his family, vacations, furnace controllers, devices you strap on your shoes that let you walk on ice (they have little carbide studs, kind of like studded snow tires for your car), the hardware business. I had to drag Osmany away or we might still be there.

There used to be thousands of different furnace controllers. Imagine with a population of 330 million people, we probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of a 100 million furnaces. If a production run of furnaces had 10,000 units, and each production run had their own unique controller, you would need 10,000 different controllers to control all those furnaces. A lot of them were probably minor variations of previous models. Somebody wanted a new feature, or they wanted more or different connection points, or they just wanted it to look different. Anyway,  a few years ago, White-Rodgers saw all this madness and decided to do something about it. They figured out what difference were and made a controller that can be configured as any one of a hundred different models. Now they only need a hundred different controllers to ensure that they will have viable replacement on hand to cover the 10,000 different controllers that have been deployed all over the country. (All these numbers are just supposition on my part.)

Anyway, Norman looked in his file of index cards. He had hundreds, maybe even a thousand, all arranged in cardboard trays and taking up six feet of valuable counter space. He looked in his file and found a replacement that ought to work. It has the model number of my controller, along with about a hundred others, printed right there on the box.I bought it for $200, which included a 5% surcharge to cover whatever tariffs are going to be coming into effect as part of Trump's trade war with China.

All I want for Christmas

Gifts for the Handyman

Shopping for new tools is one of my favorite pastimes. It's kind of pointless though if you aren't actually going to buy anything. Just about every day that I work on my son's house I find I need another tool, which gives me an excuse to go shopping, so I've been having some fun. Even picked up a garden hose at Harbor Freight. It wasn't the combo model with the built in extension cord. Too bad, that would have been exciting.