Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

Wood fired?

The sauna that is

 

Sadly not, it has an 8kW electric heater with stones over the top section.
It’s the highest wattage that you can run at home on a single phase supply.
It heated up really well and felt as good as any commercial one I’ve been in, the wood has that authentic smell too, which helped the overall experience.

 

Ah ha, did wonder.

Being a Finn my OH has always wanted one in the garden but will only do the 'proper' wood fired ones. I think that's part of why we're still looking for a new house, for one with plenty of room and privacy...

The benefit of the electric though is you don't have somebody like muggins here spending time cleaning it out and firing it up.

If she really wants 'proper' we also need a blummin lake to jump in after but I think that will just have to be left for summers. Not sure my budget stretches that far!

 

I had to google that, seems they're quite substantial? I was thinking perhaps it was the sauna equivalent of an inflatable hot-tub at first

 

It is pretty solid, 42mm thick wood for the main body and thinner rear panel with a glass front.
The outside of the eood was a good 25 degrees cooler than the inside after about an hour. I did wander round like an idiot with my IR thermometer to see how hot it all got.
The stones were just over 200' at full power.

Looking forward to enjoying this all year, just need the garden shower for the cool off part, buckets of water aren't that handy!

 

Whisky does it for me

 

I wanted an Elegoo Saturn 4 (12K) resin printer, but can't justify the £450 for one, so:-

Upgrade kit to convert my Elegoo Saturn 2 8K resin printer to 14K for £120


EDIT:- I also pre-ordered the collector's edition of "Quatermass 2" that's out next month. (To go with the earlier "Quatermass Xperiment" that's arriving tomorrow)

 

A river cruise on the firth of forth on a (so far) beautiful day.

 

Yeah it is glorious up here today - much better than at the weekend Set to be sunny all day, so enjoy.

 

There is talk of some somewhat more lively weather heading up towards us by tomorrow. Looks like it might have started on its way already:

https://map.blitzortung.org/#4.33/47.57/-3.46

 

Quick, get the lightning protection kit out

 

When I take the dog out tomorrow, I’ll get him to wear a tall copper spike on his head.

 

I'm sure @Almightyrastus could advise you or supply something at the right price

 

Just think, if we could harness lightning energy all our power requirements would be met.

And green.

 

Of course you have @Gareth Halfacree !

I'll definitely give that a read. As a basic idea nature provides all the energy we'll ever need (or can be encouraged to).

It's just a matter of harassing it. Easy!

 

Why, what's it done to you?

 

Lol, maybe that's where we've been going wrong.

We should be harassing it rather than harnessing it.

 

It'd add an interesting aspect to my job, that's for sure. For the last 18 years I have been working as a lightning and surge protection design engineer (as well as doing earthing systems for substations), and the thing that makes thoughts of capturing lightning difficult is the speed that it occurs.

When designing a surge protection device (SPD) to handle partial lightning currents, such as those used at service entrance points for power and data lines, we design them to work with a 10/350 us surge waveform. That is 10 microseconds to reach maximum intensity and 350 microseconds for that pulse to decay off to about half the max level, and we design the units to take up to 25kA per phase for power or 2.5kA for small signal lines.

When we test the components such as clamps and bonds, we use the same waveform, but instead push 100kA through them. We design systems to deal with up to 200kA which when you consider a simplified waveform to last about 500 microseconds would need not only a massive amount of energy storage, but would also need a huge electrical "bandwidth" to be able to dump that into storage in that timeframe. Also the somewhat random nature of strikes and strike points doesn't help - it is not a case of lightning always striking something metal or the highest point, the really big current strikes actually go up from the ground to the cloud and strikes can bypass the tallest part and strike the side of buildings. it all depends on the atmosphere and the upward leaders from the building or object in question.