Just need to vent...

Many great Americans, still, out there! I often wear my baseball cap "Desert Storm/Iraqi Freedom Veteran" and have had anonymous folks pay our meal tab....so nice and so appreciated! (To be honest, I do the same especially when I see WWII vets or Vietnam vets.)
Civilians don't realize military folks rarely have enough money to purchase a house while serving so most of us (who serve 20+ years) are 40 or so before we buy our first house. This puts us way behind on the retirement plan as we have a payment when we should be socking away money in our 401Ks. Military retirement pay is not anything one can, actually, live on...need to get 2nd and 3rd careers after getting out.

 

I learned to wear my Retired CPO cap at home, because I dislike the attention, although I do plan on getting a veteran tag for the car.
IYNYN.
We too will try to anonymously pay for meals for vets on occasion.
We used to so the same for LEOs but it's extraordinarily difficult to do this in my home state since they nearly always eat for free anyway.

MUCH easier to treat a LEO to a hamburger while we're on the road, and as these things go, the cop is nearly always a reservist or a vet so we get a twofer.

 

The manual for my backup generator omitted something pretty darned important: information about the governor adjustment.

It's a pretty good manual; covers a lot of stuff. Even includes real electrical diagrams, parts charts and more.

But nothing at all on the adjustment system for the governor.

This was a problem because the power from this generator was upsetting my (ordinary consumer grade) UPS systems protecting a couple of electronic things around the house.

It doesn't fully help to have a UPS protecting something if the UPS rejects the power coming in from the generator. They would keep going offline every couple of minutes until the battery was eventually exhausted.

Well it turns out the specific problem is that the generator was running a little too fast, making 63Hz.

The Australian version of the manual clearly shows how to adjust the Australian version of the generator to make a perfect 50Hz. No similar section in the US literature.

After comparing that manual to my own machine, I found almost the same hardware in almost the same location, tried it and it worked. I was able to dial mine in to 60Hz and the UPS stays online now.

 

I didn't notice this with my yellow dual-fuel genny, but I'm going to look into it for the next one since @ 4500w it was always intended to be portable. I'm doing a small slab and DIY transfer switch for a semi-whole house 10kw replacement from the same company with a much larger propane tank.
Strangely enough, I'm well inside the city limits and in a well established neighborhood but we do not have access to their gas distribution.
For ME this is a feature and not a flaw since I can always know to the penny what my propane will cost before I pay for it.

 

As a non-vent, I was signed in to TIS one day and used their comment link to report some goof in a Prius manual, and somebody got back to me right away.

 

This is why we opted for an inverter type generator so that the incoming sine wave to our backup UPS & other delicate Electronics don't freak out. Mechanical versus pure sine wave; Sometimes they'll work either way, sometimes they won't, sometimes they'll work for a certain amount of time - until they don't.
Since this is a thread on venting, i'll throw this in. Inverter Style generators available at Harbor junk cost less than ½ the cost of our 240V Honda version ... though they look like China reverse engineered it. Even choosing the nearly exact shade of red paint
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I don't really have anything that I would think of as "delicate electronics" in the sense that almost all of my stuff is less than 20 years old and fed through switched-mode power supplies. Those things will take some really mangled power and still deliver the goods.

I use the UPSes to prevent inconvenient shutdowns and clock resets.

When I think of "delicate electronics" I usually think of early solid state stuff, maybe extending up into the 1960s. I just don't have anything like that.

I'd love to get an inverter generator, but a big-enough Honda inverter costs >3x as much as my 'dirty' rig + 3 APC UPSes.

 

Yep.
Google "CHonda"

They may look roughly similar on the outside but my finely honed Spidey senses are tingling about their ability to work like a for-real, Japanese, properly engineered and NOT put together with US Labor HONDA Honda.

I cleaned out an OLD Bell regen site 5-10 years ago and happened on a WELL USED 40-year-old 2kw Honda Generator that was thrown into an outside storage hut probably just after divestiture (84?)
Expecting it to be locked-up I got it running with very minimal carb cleaning and an improvised air filter.
A friend borrowed it for a person with health problems to use following a storm and I'm thinking it ran for a week straight and I've used it a number of times since then.

If past is prologue ChiComms WILL improve their CHonda line of small engines.
They're the Ferengi of near-peer nations, and they understand intellectual property theft means that you can keep stealing the same thing over and over and over....

 

Wow that was pretty sad for japan. My favorite was DENSO solenoids .... Genuine Honda box yet the actual solenoid is inscribed DESNO.
.

 

How about the D'bags that attach trash cans to their truck's exhaust tips .... right up there with Coal rolling smoke switches


.

 

Do those even do anything worth venting about? Reduce ground clearance?

 

I can't see the truck nutz usually displayed by such vehicles.

 

I look at them as warning labels......

Besides, they're incredibly easy to pass.

 

A 4" exhaust pipe on a turbo (which most diesel trucks have) does aid in efficiency, but it doesn't get better when it goes ridiculous size. Same with a smoke switch. If a mechanic is caught modifying a truck to do this, Their fines can run up in the high 5 figures.

 

Also probably not when the increased size is just the last eight inches of the pipe.

The length of the transition may also matter. There are some situations in flue venting where you need an increaser, and I remember learning years ago that the good increaser is one where the transition is gradual and long:



You can see increasers at the hardware store with much shorter transitions, like the one at top right, which apparently just make some turbulence inside that doesn't help the flow. At bottom right, that kind is right out.

 

Would be interesting to see if their is an inverse relationship between IQ and size of exhaust pipe tip.

 

Yesterday, took the Mrs. out to lunch and, when walking back to the Prius to go home, heard a LOUD crash right across the street. Some lady driving a Subaru rear-ended a Ford SUV. Clear day, roads were dry....she must've been looking at her phone. As we watched, the man got out of his Ford with a, "What the HECK" look on his face and the lady came out...her Subaru wasn't looking good...at first, white smoke started coming out (smashed radiator) and her hood must've been buckled up a foot. Coolant started coming down pretty fast. But I did notice no air bag came out for her....fail on Subaru's part! Surprised the Ford didn't show much damage but, of course, I'm sure the little bumper under the plastic cover was crushed.
No wonder our car insurance rates keep going up!!! (Last year, I switched from USAA to Progressive....USAA has been raising their rates too much....I guess Gronkowski isn't a cheap spokesman!!)

 

Never know, could be someone ignored the Takata airbag recall on Toyotas & subarus.
At least the front end worked as a crumple Zone should.
.

 

Ignoring the Takata airbag recall means you get shredded by shrapnel when the airbag deploys.

Subaru "buckled up at least a foot" and "the lady came out" under her own power, without airbag deployment, suggests to me they had the airbag sensor calibrated about right.