Why do circuit breakers go up for on and down for off?

Kids playing with 110V? I thought yanks were scared of electricity.

Isn't a square motor like a square wheel?

Why do you say yard when it's a garden? Yard is concrete, lawn is grass, flowerbed is flowers, garden is a mixture of the above.

When I was a kid we went on holiday to a cottage which was part of many being built. For some reason on the rough ground nearby were loads of loose bits of wire, I collected a tonne of it. Lasted me for years for all sorts of things.

And also of course there's the local tip, where you can get interesting stuff like old tumble dryers and take them to bits.

I collected more motors than I ever used, ended up putting a box of 150 miscellaneous motors on freecycle. A young enthusiast took the lot.

Never take things apart when they work. Just get more bits. Or use part of what you made to start a new project.

An example pulled out of thin air which will probably never happen. Anything producing enough heat should blow the fuse anyway, since anything less than that is the intended consumption of the appliance.

And if we didn't earth the chassis of everything so much would be better. Like touching a live wouldn't conduct through your leg to the earthed washing machine. I de-earthed my microwave incase my pet parrot chewed the flex while stood on the microwave.

Apparently those namby pamby ELCBs don't like microwaves, since they deliberately leak to earth. At my work, someone had put an ELCB for a large section of the building, and a single microwave tripped it. The microwave was functioning just fine, but this stupid breaker kept cutting power to a large number of offices. They removed it.

Why do people keep changing the names? It was always Earth Leakage Circuit Breaker. Now we have RCD and GFCI. WTF? They mean the same thing! Stuff goes to earth and it switches off.

I remember a friend had been given a pair of field telephones which used hand-cranked magnetos to ring each other. He wired the magneto to the aluminium loft ladder and to a bit of tin foil on the floor of his bedroom (*) and turned the handle as I reached the top and instinctively put my hand on the foil. I nearly fell down the ladder. What a jape ;-)

Moral: be suspicious if you see a strange bit of tinfoil, and hear a frantic winding of the magneto handle and suppressed laughter - and don't go up the ladder in bare feet. I'd guess those magnetos produced about 80-100 V - a nasty belt :-(

(*) When his sister was born, his dad converted the loft into a new bedroom for my friend, reached by a retracting loft ladder past which everyone had to squeeze to reach the bathroom and separate loo. It stayed like that for as long as I knew him afterwards - no room for a proper staircase.

"Oooo Matronnnnnnnnnnn!"

I've heard of discreet hand-operated pumps for that condition, but I've never heard of a motor-assisted dick.

I collected more loudspeakers that I knew what to do with - from old radios etc. I also found a really good one in a wooden soundbox, at the local tip (*), and connected it by a long length of GPO telephone "drop cable" that the GPO man gave me when he changed the cable from the pole to the house due to crackling on the line.

So I had this speaker in the garden shed, fed by the GPO cable from dad's record player - I must have driven the neighbours mad.

I also went armed with a screwdriver whenever we went on holiday, and if I found a derelict car in a "car dump" (**) I'd remove the speedo and switches. I mounted a Ford Anglia speedo with the cable connected to a Meccano motor, which was switched on and off by a Mini ignition switch (using the key number stamped on the switch). The Anglia speedo thus registered about 50 mph when the key was turned on. I also had a Mini headlamp as the main light in the den that I built in the loft, and another motor to raise/lower a cardboard gullwing door on the den. All powered from a mains-to-12V transformer.

(*) Near where we lived, the council used to put out a couple of skips in a layby for people to dump anything they no longer needed. People were always rooting through the skips, Womble-like, to nab anything that looked interesting from the "things that the everyday folk leave behind". Wouldn't be allowed nowadays: all skips have to be supervised rather than just being left unattended, and taking things from skips has been criminalised: even though someone has left an object there to go into landfill etc, it is still deemed to belong to them and to be theft if you remove it.

Incidentally, and I kid you not, there is a recycling centre in North Yorkshire at a place called Wombleton:

- how very appropriate.

(**) A scenic little valley just down the road from a caravan site where we were staying had been used as an unofficial car dump and there were various Minis, Austin 1100s, Cortinas and Corsairs loosely stacked. It must have been incredibly dangerous for me to go clambering over and in these cars, but no-one really cared. My dad even helped me. I remember being very proud of the "knee-capping stalk" from an early Ford Consul Cortina/Corsair (pre-Aeroflow facelift) - this was a metal (or else very hard plastic) tube that stuck out from the steering column with tab switches for indicators and lights, and a button on the end for the horn. In an accident, it was ideally placed to take your kneecap off :-(

Why were they never made of something more grippy than highly polished steel?

ROFL, there's still people wearing masks here. I went to hospital with a suspected broken thumb and everyone had a mask on. They glared at me sternly when I refused.

And here.

I did too, to get a skin cancer removed.

The reception staff didnt, but all but me of the patients did.

No one said anything to me, including the surgeon and he wasnt wearing one either. Just an initial consult, he hasnt done anything yet.

Do people still listen to AM radio by choice? I'd like to say I last tuned an AM station in about 1972, but it was probably closer to 1977.

I suggest you read up on how a RCD Residual Current Device works, ELCB are rather olde hat now.

An RCD measures the current flowing on in one wire and that going out on the other as long as they are in balance, then all fine.

However if they are not then they will trip. That is caused by some current leaking to earth somewhere that could be a simple leakage fault such as a heating element breaking down or it could be through your body not good!

Its simply stupid to un-earth things like microwaves and the like what if they developed a fault with current was leaking to the metalwork of the unit that would then be live and is then capable if a shock not pleasant! i had one once very very painful and I couldn't let go thats the worst part this was in pre RCD days!

It is possible for a large number of PC's on one ring main to cause a trip to go but it has to be quite a lot as they have capacitors in them which are from live to earth and will introduce some leakage usually much less then that the 30 ma RCD is designed to trip at.

When I was working I'd listen to our local AM station for five minutes on the way to work for the local news and weather. Sometimes on the way home for the 4:30 news.

Some months back I was waiting for someone so I hit the AM dial to see if there was anything. All I heard was some commercials, a couple of preachers. FM was not much better.

Every car since 2010 has SiriusXM and that is my choice. You can get some deals on subscriptions. Plenty of other options with Bluetooth today too.

That was exactly the trouble we had - far to many electrical devices, with leaky filters on the power supply input. It would work fine for weeks and then randomly trip once in a while. Solved by splitting the leakage, by ditching the RCD and changing out all the MCBs for RCBOs instead.

The article I remember mentioned storm warnings. Not much good if no one is tuned in. I don't have any idea how things are if a hurricane is approaching the Gulf.

My own musical journey consisted of 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, CDs, mp3s, and now SiriusXM, with some limited FM scattered in there somewhere. No AM for me since at least the late 1970s.

I used the SXM free trials that came with new vehicles, then I used the free trials that came in the mail, (code required), and of course the free trials that were open to everyone with a SXM radio. When they would call me to pressure me to subscribe, I would tell them they need to hit the $5/month point. They finally did, so I subscribed for real about a year ago when the price dropped to $4.99 plus tax. It only works in one vehicle, but they also provide an app for my phone, so using the app I can listen via BT in any of my vehicles, on the stereo in the garage, on the stereo on the back patio, and the stereo in the living room. I pretty much have it anywhere, and use it quite a bit. At this price, it's a very good deal.

If you're not completely off the grid, you'll probably know about approaching hurricanes. Typically, 10-14 days out you start getting probability forecasts with those noodle graphics. As the days pass, the noodles converge and things get pretty settled with plenty of time to prepare. We see forecasts and warnings on local TV, national TV, on our smart phones, and on social media. Worst case, you might see the neighbors buying cases of water and canned food or covering their windows.

Yes, if we're in the forecasted storm track.

There are about six stations I listen too. One nice thing, no matter where I am, the channel is the same. Favorite songs and favorite artist will pop up too, no matter what station they are on.

Remember the old days on a trip, every 50 miles or so you had to find another station. I has stations for Boston, Hartford, New York and Philadelphia.