Refrigerator not working again

A friend of mine studied electrical engineering at Auburn back in the

1960's and lived in a dorm with a bunch of other typical college boys of the era, no coed in ancient times. The big thing at the time was the big AM station in the state playing pop music all day. When my friend wanted to sleep or study, he would switch on his low power AM transmitter he had hooked to the dorm's rain gutters and silence all the radios in the dorm. When he grew up, he wound up being in charge of the communications division of a major utility company.

TDD

Reply to
The Daring Dufas
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Turn about is fair play but outsmarting smart-asses causes them to hate you and they waste countless hours trying to get back at you. I love pranks but draw the line at anything destructive or something that could possibly cause someone harm, like the old gasoline in the fire extinguisher gag. When I worked in a repair depot so many years ago, our individual work benches had a master switch to kill the power to the various magnifier lamps, test gear and soldering stations. One of my coworkers was a REAL gun nut. He had guns everywhere. He had at least two on him at any time so I couldn't resist. I painted his soldering iron with liquid flux then coated it with gun powder. He came into work that day in a foul mood growling at everything in sight, slammed down what he was carrying on his work bench, flipped on the power switch and we all cringed expecting him to go berserk and shoot everyone in sight. After 10 seconds a big flash and puff of smoke came from his soldering iron, he jumped up and screamed like a woman in a monster movie then started giggling. After that he was OK and in a good mood the rest of the day. See, pranks can be therapeutic! 8-)

TDD

Reply to
The Daring Dufas

I used to stuff components for a wave solder. The guy who tended the machine used to say "go with the flow, bro" which we thought was funny.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

When I was in college, one professor used to smoke cigarettes while he taught. Which was painful to me, as I'm allergic. He'd look in the trash can, and find something for an ash tray. Piece of paper, or soda can. I got the brilliant idea to put some flash powder in a dry pop can, and leave in the trash can. He'd put still-lit cigarettes into the pop can. I got the idea, but never did try it. I really should have.

Glad I'm not the only one who thought of gasoline in the fire extinguisher.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

Some of us do, but its not cost effective to do so.

No, control boards are not free, and yes, some of us *DO* know what wave soldering is.

Reply to
Steve

That would make you the exception. Lack of knowledge in one area doesn't make one stupid or ineffective in their chosen field. Ignorance means you don't know but you can learn, stupid means no way. I'm ignorant about a lot of things so I use what my mother taught me, "If it smells bad, don't eat it." I apply this to everything in my life. 8-)

TDD

Reply to
The Daring Dufas

I was of the same mind until I clocked both old and new with a KillaWatt power meter. The old one (admittedly low on freon so working extra hard) ran 4X the kWh as the new one. That's hard to ignore. I was of the same mind as you - IIABDFI! But when the old one couldn't cool well on the hottest days anymore, I had to make a choice and I chose the simplest model in the hopes that reliability is truly inversely proportional to complexity.

Fridges are like classic cars. After 30 years, the plastic and rubber parts are heading off to Jesus, replacements aren't readily available and the patches accumulate to the point of embarrassment. One thing I like about the new one is the absence of a dimpled egg shelf. Never used it, the space was wasted and it collected all sorts of crap that had to be scooped out one $#$%% egg hole at a time.

The new fridge is much easier to clean overall and has enormous shelves built into each door. Good some ways, bad others. Grabbing creamer, condiments and the ice tea pitcher doesn't require a full door opening, which is a very large energy consumer, especially with teenagers doing a IG-level food inventory before deciding what to eat.

We did make one super-size mistake in selecting the capacity of the units. They allege to be the same cubic capacity, but the new one had it laid out in very much less friendly space. It's our fault (well, mine) because we (I) didn't think to measure the cubic space of each compartment. The new box has much less freezer space and turned out to be a biggish sort of mistake.

But now that the government says the recession is over we'll be leaving it behind when we buy our new, fairly priced, equitably taxed house in a stable neighborhood not riddled with foreclosed and empty houses. Phew!

The fridge compartment is conspicuously empty and the freezer, the reverse. It's laid out so where once we could have containers and frozen food cartons

2 deep, now it's 1.75 deep which basically means one deep. The walls are much thicker as well, but that's part of the reason it's using 1/4 the juice. We had a lot of limitations, though, in terms of getting it IN the house. We have very small doors that limited the overall size of the replacement. The two guys who did the install had to put a ratty look sling under the bottom and literally "dance" it into the house.

Will it last as long as the old box? Probably not. What does? Will I save enough money to offset the cost of buying a new one? No, but if I had replaced it when it first started getting quirky, the savings picture would be different. One thing it inspired me to do was take baseline kWh readings on the new one. Armed with that information, it might be possible to spot a problem as insidious as water-logged insulation. I'll at least have some idea what the current draw was when the machine was well to help gauge the severity of future problem. I'll bet waterlogged insulation can really jack up the kWh consumption per day. Where did the water come from?

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Later, I worked at a military TV station, before leaving the service. Years later I was an engineer at a UHF TV station with a 5 MW EIRP signal on a 1749 foot tower near the east coast of Central Florida.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Reflow soldering is a lot more common these days. With so much surface mount, wave solder has lost a lot of market share.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

"We" ?

Is that you + the voices in your head?

Reply to
HVAC

That was the "Close cover before striking" college, right?

Reply to
HVAC

The Daring Dufas on Thu, 23 Sep 2010

22:19:20 -0500 typed >> >>>> >>>>>> The Daring Dufas fired this volley in

Had a co-worker who would respond to request for "a butt load" of anything with "That a standard or metric butt load?"

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

Appparently, you are the only one with voices in your head.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Well, some people DO confuse 'a ton' with 'a butt load'. ;-)

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Oh no, not the butt load again...I remember it being a bulk load. Someone got Trolled :( Randy

(Do not do today, what you shouldn't do tomorrow)

Reply to
Randy

If you could get close enough to the antenna, you could cook hot dogs, in about a tenth of a second. I've tried to explain to a lot of folks that an AM station tower IS the antenna and it sits on insulators. I remember a couple of idiots climbing the TV towers around here. RF is so much fun to play with. 8-)

TDD

Reply to
The Daring Dufas

I don't see that much surface mount on the majority of HVAC control boards. I haven't seen the latest supercalafragilistic uber-efficient HVAC system control boards but the simple ones are mostly single or dual layer with components having leads soldered through holes. I don't have customers who can afford that really high end stuff for their homes.

TDD

Reply to
The Daring Dufas

One of the tower crew found the hairline crack in our waveguide the hard way. He leaned back against it and had a 12 inch long RF burn across his ass and lower back. There was about 190 KW of UHF RF (Ch 55) flowing inside that brass duct. It only took a few seconds before he felt it.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

even the 13SEER condensers and heat pumps that I install have mother boards in them, as do the gas furnaces I install. Lots of surface mount stuff, double layer boards, optical latching relay instead of a contactor, serial controlled, etc.

Reply to
Steve

I was testing and repairing 16 layer reflowed boards that cost over $8,000 for the components. If the board house was careless handling the blanks you could have over 1000 bad solder joints. I spent a lot of time looking through a stereo microscope, with a hot soldering iron in one hand.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

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