Other What currently makes your life awesome?

Just a shame american houses are made out of paper.

 

You get some fantastic lightning storms here in La Creuse, central France. They look fantastic and fill me with dread after the first one we experienced fried an Oven, phone base unit, gigabit switch, modem / router, pool cleaning robot, dishwasher and a few other little bits. It appears the strike that did the damage was within a few hundred metres as there was no appreciable time difference in the light show and painful thunder. The primary phone socket was charred and a few surge protectors blew. Since then we have moved to fibre for the phone line, surge protection in the main incoming box, local surge protection on the almost all sockets plus a second surge protection unit on the solar system power board.

I still unplug and open the main breaker when a large storm gets close, then its iPads and the router running from my PCs' UPS for a few hours.

 

I used to work in a home insurance claims department, and I was constantly surprised at the number of lightning damage claims we’d get. Not necessarily the amount of damage it would cause, but the frequency with which it happened. Always used surge-protected extensions since then, but if the strike is close enough then there isn’t much you can do.

 

This will probably sound very childish to many, and indeed it is, but that does not make it any less f***king awesome.

I have been playing PUBG now for about three years. I take breaks every now and then when my anxiety flares up as I really don't like getting mad any more, but I do love my in game tat. I ignored it all for at least the first 18 months but I really am into it now.

Any way, THE hardest item to garner in PUBG is the Legendary (literally) progressive skins for your weapon and or frying pan. To put it into context many streamers have spent upward of $2000 to get one. As such you can imagine my displeasure (lmao) when @Arboreal got proper jammy around Christmas time and managed to get one. I tend now to spend about £20 on Gcoin every 6-8 months. Mostly because I still play the game a lot (closing in on 1000 hours now which for an oldie is a lot !) but so far the progressive skins have eluded me. There are only about 7 in total, and they get refreshed onto new weapons every now and then but yeah, they are proper elusive and it only tends to be streamers who ***** tons of money that get them.

That all changed two days ago. I stuck in my £19 ($25) into the PUBG coffers, and.....



From my screaming and clapping my neighbours probably thought I was being murdered or something

The nice thing is that for all of those years (mostly when opening free crates and stuff from points earned in game hours) I have been piling up Schematics and Polymers. See, the progressive weapon is called that because you can add to it, change the skin on it, and put all sorts of cool things on it (like a kill counter, head shot counter etc). So I immediately had enough of both to do this to mine.



Today I got the refund on my old mattress. I decided to spend another £19. I almost had a heart attack thinking I had got another progressive skin, but alas it was not. It was a skin for the progressive gun that I don't have. However, my feeling of being skanked was immediately replaced with pleasure when I realised I could break it down and upgrade my gun again (the Dragunov) and then have enough Schematics to upgrade it twice more when I get the polymers.

Winner winner chicken dinner.

 

At first I thought you spoke about an in-game tattoo, and that you decided to get it done in real life.

Not sure I'm glad that's not what your post was about in the end ... But I'm definitely happy for you. Grinding for something and finally getting it is an awesome feeling.

Note: I love tattoos, will get my next two in 1.5 weeks.

 

I have to say that it is finally nice to see a topic popping up that I can chime in on with some sort of authority and a bit of expertise having been a project engineer specialising in lightning and surge protection for almost 17 years... I also sit on 2 technical committees, one of which is responsible for training and accreditation of lightning protection designers and installers (the other being a committee on power earthing for things like substations).

The lightning protection industry in the UK is in a bit of an odd place if you are not familiar with it as there is currently no legal requirement to do much about lightning protection, regardless of the building type and use, it is pretty much up to the building owner and their insurance company as to what they want to do. And even if they do want something, they no need to follow any particular standard to do so. Seems a bit odd, but it does free things up somewhat as strict adherence to the relevant standards might not always be possible.

When it comes to protection from lightning, the risks that are generally looked at are the risk to life within a building, and the risk to loss of service provided by way of the electrical and electronic systems within that building. There are also risks of cultural heritage and loss of economic value, but these either don't have any bearing on lightning protection requirements or just don't produce any meaningful results when assessed.

If an external protection system is needed for a building then along with that is the need to protect every electrical and electronic line that enters or leaves the building with appropriately rated surge protection devices (SPDs), as in you cannot sign off that external system unless these are also fitted as part of the equipotential bonding system.

However, the key thing here is that an SPD is very much a situational specification as in those service-entrance ones are not there to protect internal systems, they are there to prevent internal sparking in the same way that you would put a direct bond onto pipes. To protect internal systems, you would need what is known as a coordinated surge protection system where the aim is to lower the surges in steps as they go through the electrical systems of the building.

There is also the problem that not all SPDs are equal with one of the key parameters for comparing the performance of SPDs often be omitted from the documentation. It is all well and good saying that SPD 1 will be able to handle x amount of joules, or y KA of surge, but the value to keep an eye out for is the let-through voltage, often designated as Up and this will vary according to the role that the SPD will be used for.

Service entrance or equipotential bonding SPDs will typically have a very high surge rating, but also have a higher let-through voltage of around 1500 to 1750 volts, perfect for that type of use where they might be subjected to partial direct lightning currents and are there to prevent internal sparking, but not so great for end electrical or electronic equipment protection.

This is where a lower Up value comes in as a result of testing with different types of surge current waveforms. For single phase mains powered electronic equipment, you want to be looking at a let-through voltage of sub 600v if possible as this unit would then be classed as enhanced, giving protection from damage and destruction but also degradation and disruption. The problem being (of course) that the better the protection you get, the higher the cost of the SPD goes.

Now the reason why there is the requirement for protecting all lines entering or leaving a building is that a surge will affect not only the power, but also the signal level lines such as data, telephone, tv, and so on (fibre being immune - can't really put an electrical surge down a glass or plastic line...). In addition to this any line with a current flowing in it will generate a magnetic field around it. If that field then cuts through another nearby line it will induce a corresponding voltage and current on that line. This means that if you protect only your power lines and you get a surge come in, you "clean" it off the power system, but should an unprotected comms line pass nearby, it can induce that surge back onto the power system.

It's all a lot of "fun" and games to try and work out what is needed and where and indeed what is economically viable for different situations, business vs home use.

 

I… think… I followed that…

 

That was a pretty high level summary of the various bits and pieces that go into lightning and surge protection. I try to make it easy enough to follow with things like training on risk assessment, system design, and surge protector choice, but it is like just about any other technical subject, scratch the surface and there is a whole heap that you can go into, a lot of which most people, even installers, will never need to know. Best not to even think about going into the endless joy that is HV power earthing...

 

Textbook repair, must have been very satisfying.

 

Holiday. Annnnnd relax.

 

The online "dashboard" for the wind farm I bought a share in has come to life.

 

I have just figured out a problem that has bugged me for years - literally years. My other half doesn't care about the detail but I need to tell someone, so I'm telling you lovely people instead

 

Those beers worked very well lol

 

That gives me very nostalgic ceefax feels

 

So do I miss being plastered? Yes

do I miss all the peeing? No, not not at all. I forgot what a sport peeing is when you are drunk.

 

Think it will run Bamboozle?

 

https://www.nathanmediaservices.co.uk/ceefax/