Other What's ruining your life right now?

DEHNshield and DEHNguard units plus a load more earth wire and ground spikes as I don't trust the earthing we have to do I decent Job so I will install the new ones in the garden in addition to what we already have for the main unit and another set for the secondary unit. Almost tempted to run an extra earth wire to the farm yard which is fenced with armco the supports of which are buried 1.5m into the ground. The back of a *** packet calculation there gives approx 18 sq metres of buried steel earth. Currently it only earths our farm electric fence.

Also ordered protectors for the RJ-11 and ethernet lines going into and out of the modem which will tie into the main earth points. Interesting fact I discovered is that in France it is the builder / home owner (when having house built or selling) who is responsible for ensuring the house is earthed correctly.

 

This isn't enforced - my dentist friend is doing this kind of work (meanwhile wearing a visor and all the rest). I'm far from knowledgeable on dentists - can you go to a different one?

 

French home electrics are terrible. The in-laws house (they're French) has a grand total of 1 breaker for the whole 4 storey house & sockets next to the bath!

 

Germans like sockets next to water too. There are some an exuberant scrubbing away from our kitchen sink, and this place was built about five years ago.

 

The more I see, I think that the British are either super careful when it comes to water and electricity, or we know something that the rest of the world doesn't! Or is it, they know something atht we don't??
I still flinch when I've been away on holiday abroad and there are sockets so near to a bath or sink

 

It seems to be quite common in many other countries.

Our place in NZ was an eyeopener, looking at the fuse box felt like I should have had sepia toned sunglasses on. It seemed to be full of valves and steampowered.

Or it could have been a steampunk fuse box, I guess we weren't too far from the kiwi steampunk heartlands.

 

new psu i installed on sunday has a dodgy cap, any time i do anything exciting the ******* thing starts screaming like an annoying teenager at a boyband.

scan arent answering the phone either.

fml

 

Not my go-to ones (because I work for their main competitor...), but they do make some very good stuff. We have tested their items in our lab as a bit of "hmm, I wonder how they do" kind of thing and they have given very good results, dependable, robust, not bad at all. Their recent development has been moving away from the more traditional Germanic style (they are a German company) where you would have a type 1 rated unit for big surges (direct or partial lightning currents), then a type 2 unit (indirect or induced surges), and then a type 3 rated unit (type 3 test used to further refine the end let-through voltage) right next to equipment to the style that we have always used in the UK where we have combined type-ratings in a single device.

When they are being installed make sure that you install them using as short leads as possible and also make sure that those leads are tied together for as much of their shared length as possible. This is to reduce the impedance in the lines (something that can affect the let-through voltage of the unit), and also cancels out the fields generated around the lines during the passage of a surge - the earth cable being the path by which the surge current is dissipated, hence will have an opposite field rotation around it to the line that has the incoming surge on it.

If you are fitting any signal level devices then be very careful to route the earth lead from those devices away from the "clean" side of the device and any lines that go away to equipment, last thing you want is to reintroduce the surge back onto the line via induction.

A note on the earthing, you should be aiming to get to around 200 Ohms to earth or less for a TT system, should be easy enough in most cases (I am used to having to get to 10 Ohms or even sub 1 Ohm with HV substations), and if you are driving the earth rods in yourself, a lot of lighter hits with the hammer is better than trying to belt them in, I speak from experience on that.

If you want any assistance on anything to do with this, please give me a shout. My day to day work is designing lightning and surge protection systems as well as substation (and other) earthing systems (don't worry, I don't do sales... ;-) )

 

Online training modules, prior to returning to work in a couple of days.

Well, it's more the sh!tty IT systems of our company than the modules themselves, although they are pretty sh!t too.

The system just randomly refuses to acknowledge that you have completed a module, and you have to run through it again - not the end of the world in most cases, as you can click through some of the them in a couple of minutes. Of course, one of mine includes a 16 minute unskippable video of guy with a kinda high-pitched whiny scouse accent*.

Six times I've had to run through it, before I finally got the coveted little completion tick next to the module number. Six. ****ing. Times.

Obvs, I muted and minimised it after the second run but, jeebus h fooking christ, our IT systems are sh!te.


*No, I'm not anti-scouse. Some of my best friends are black , gay , ginger , scouse.

 

Not really ruining my life, but there's a massive outage on NordVPN

 

At least they won't leak more user data while they're down.

 

German banks are so absolute in their stupidity it's driving me insane.

To add an MFA device you need to either buy or borrow one of those ancient card reading devices (Which also barely works), but you also need two separate pieces of paper sending - But there's no clear path to request these stupid pieces of paper until each step is completed so what should be a five minute process spirals into a two week process because, apparently, some ****nugget loves sending paper using snails.

The bank guy tried to blame data protection. Which was laughable.

 

If you don't like German banks and their efficiency never, and I mean Never consider moving to France. Opening an account is a major exercise and even something as simple as transferring money to pay someone in another country means having invoices and actually explaining why you want to send YOUR money to someone else.

 

Fortunately France and I don't get along, so that's never on the cards, but that sounds like blood-spitting levels of infuriating.

Although opening accounts here wasn't a thrilling prospect either.

 

When I tried to open an account in England it went like this:

"Hi, I'd like to open an account with you so I can rent a house"
"Sure, just give us a copy of the signed rental contract or a utility bill"
"No, I don't have those. I NEED an account before I can sign the contract"
"Okay, gotcha. When can you bring us the contract? We will prepare the paper work and then you'll get the account immediately after bringing us the signed contract"
"I'm not sure you understood what I was saying: I do not have a contract because the landlord won't let me sign it without a bank account"
"Sure, that's how it works. So just sign the contract and bring it to our branch. Or another branch if that's more conv----"
"Excuse me, are you trying to be an arse or just incredibly thick?"

I was then asked to leave. *shrugs*

 

Don't get me wrong, opening accounts anywhere is an arseache (Although, being English I've pretty much only ever walked into UK banks with my passport or driving license, shouted about chips, and been given an account), but the Germans seem to be experts at making it frustrating every step of the way.

 

We have to be good at something now that engineering and poetry sucks over here.

 

Just over 30 years ago, ending up in the UK after some world travels, no one would give me a bank acoount. I went to every bank in London and, in the end, a building society gave me an account after I had to source a letter from my NZ bank saying that I had been a customer there for 5 years. Not one was interested in my UK passport, drivers license, NI number, rental agreement, work contract, employer references etc.

It has got better but, as always with banks, process progress is glacial whilst progress in fancy "apps" and false advertising is speedy.