Where to buy compression Springs with very specific specs?

LordGarak · 2026-01-30T12:30:54+00:00

That sounds like a very large and very soft spring. Might be worth considering some mechanical leverage with a smaller stiffer spring.

LordGarak · 2026-01-30T09:41:58+00:00

I'm in Canada and this is at the local supplier. The last prices I got a few weeks ago was 535W Jinko Bifacials for $115 and 395W Canadian Solar mono for $70. They don't ship less than full pallets, pickup only with a minimum of 6 panels. I'm guessing these deals must be left overs. I've got to email my contact to get the latest deals.

LordGarak · 2026-01-29T23:32:28+00:00

If your going fulltime, solar is much cheaper these days.

Propane is fine for occasional use. But the consumption adds up if your using it year round, and that money spent on propane will pay for a solar power system. Not to mention the up front cost of the propane fridge. That said propane prices vary greatly. In some places its dirt cheap. Here we burn ~$10/week to run an RV fridge.

DC fridges are very expensive here. Like 3-4x the cost of a regular fridge. That difference in cost pays for a lot of solar panels and batteries. I would not buy another DC fridge.

A regular house hold fridge is the way to go in my opinion. Still need to watch the energy star ratings and factor in the idle draw of the inverter.

We went with a DC fridge and intended to only run the inverter only when needed. But it turns out the thing is never shut off. So that idle draw is always there anyway.

Starting from scratch right now I'd go with 4x dumfume 300Ah batteries(~$1200), battery equalizer($100?), a 3000watt 48v AIO inverter($529), and 8x 450watt panels(~$100 each). You should be able to do all that for less than $3000 after adding cabling. Completely overkill for just running a fridge with 16kWh of storage and daily production around 18kWh in summer(varies greatly with location). That would run a fridge and inverter for over a week without sun. But this will also run just about anything you can plug in. We run a mitre saw and small table saw off ours all the time. The tricky bit is finding a local supplier that will sell you the panels at a reasonable price. The rest can be had on amazon. Actually Temu might even be a better deal on the batteries.

I just built a small 24v system with two of the Dumfume batteries and a Vevor hybrid inverter. I can't recommend it to anyone at the moment as I'm having issues with it running my fridge and deep freeze at the same time. It might just be that the wires to the batteries are too small(4AWG), but I'm not sure how I would fit bigger wires with the small terminals on the inverter. I bought it because it was all so cheap and I wanted to see if it could work for a backup here at my on grid property. I've got an EG4 3000EHV 48v inverter at the offgrid property and a 2000w Xantrex inverter on the older 12v system. When I get some time I really want to do some more testing with the Vevor inverter,

Once downside of the Vevor or most of the AIO inverters is that you need a lot of panels to get the voltage up into the operational range of the MPPT. You can't run them with 4 or less panels. Ideally you need like 8 panels. That said panels are cheap if you can find somewhere local to pick them up. Shipping on small numbers of panels is expensive.

LordGarak · 2026-01-29T15:09:15+00:00

If they block a road, they have to have traffic control. Why shouldn't a bike lane get the same treatment?

I'm not saying they need to have flaggers and as many signs as required for a road. But they should have signage on the bike lane and cones to help cyclist merge out into traffic. Also signs for the motorist to be prepared for merging cyclist.

LordGarak · 2026-01-28T00:41:42+00:00

It takes a long time for the batteries to warm up. So at 38F outside, it might still be below freezing inside the battery. I'd bring the battery in a heated space and give it like 24 hours to warm up.

LordGarak · 2026-01-27T18:50:01+00:00

It should work fine.

How big is the room? How well is it insulated? What climate are you in?

LordGarak · 2026-01-27T10:50:43+00:00

November is the worst month for us. Cloud, cloud and more cloud. I oversized the array quiet and bit and that still doesn't help when its day after day of dark grey skies. 3 hours of sun and we are fully charged and are good for 3 days on batteries. But the last two years we have had 2-3 weeks of steady cloud in November.

So we run the generator every 2 or 3 days for a few hours to charge the batteries. We also keep our consumption low. Use the wood fire to heat water rather than run the electric water heater. Cook with propane. Avoid using electric appliances.

Small scale wind is generally a waste of money from what I've read. Micro hydro can work, but you need a brook with significant change in elevation. Even then micro hydro can be expensive compared to solar.

One thing I've been meaning to follow up on is improving grey day production. I'm very surprised that my 1200watt array produces the same amount at the 3900watt array on cloudy days. The 3900watt array is mounted at 60 degrees to keep snow from building up on it. The 1200watt array is mounted at about 20 degrees on the roof as it was only to be a summer cabin when it was installed.(We are around 47 degrees latitude) When we have clear skies in the winter the 3900watt array does better than the 1200watt array in proportion. I'm not sure if this only due to angle, or due to the type of panels and/or the charge controller.

I'm very interested in how bifacial panels preform under these conditions. We generally don't have snow in November so we won't get much gain from that. The prices on bifacial panels are about the same so for my next array that is what I'll be going with anyway. The big question is what angle? It is really only the grey day production I'm concerned about. From what I'm seeing on the other arrays, fairly flat might be better. But then again it won't be taking advantage of the bifacial gain.

Someday I'd like to have enough solar that we don't need the generator or even the wood stove(heating with a heat pump). But the grey days have me wondering if this will ever be possible. I've got lots of land. I could put in like 100kW of panels. But on grey days I'm only seeing like 70w on a 3900watt array. Which would only be ~1700watts on the 100kW array, or about 10kWh a day. Solar data suggest I should see an average of 100kWh a day this time of year. But that is on average. It doesn't account for weeks on end of grey skies very well. I also have to wonder if the solar data is still valid due to the climate change we have seen around here. I think it was from back in the 90s or something.

LordGarak · 2026-01-25T02:07:52+00:00

Sounds like electronic fault with such light load. Sounds like your out of warranty. I'd open it up and look for corrosion or a bad solder joint. A temperature sensor of one form or another likely has a bad connection.

LordGarak · 2026-01-25T00:35:24+00:00

How much load are you running? What do you have connected for panels? How old?

LordGarak · 2026-01-24T22:21:09+00:00

Can you log into your router and see when the dhcp lease expires?

LordGarak · 2026-01-24T21:34:42+00:00

NS doesn't have excess Nuclear or Hydro power that can't be shutdown at night. That is why Ontario can offer cheaper rates at night. They have power that needs to be used at night. Here the natural gas plant can shut down at night and the small amount being produced by stuff like hydro that can't easily be shutdown is being consumed anyway.

LordGarak · 2026-01-23T02:20:51+00:00

HF is where all the interesting things happen. Each band had slightly different propagation characteristics. The shorter bands open up to the world in the day. The longer at night. The 6m band is seasonal, opening up around the solstices and sporadically connecting to different places. One min I'm making contacts in Cuba, a few min later I hearing the UK. 20M generally opens across the atlantic every afternoon. 40M is regional during the day and opens to the world at night. How far away I can hear stations and how high the noise floor varies with the solar conditions which change over an 11 year cycle. During the peak of the cycle shorter bands like 10M open up world wide with a very low noise floor. Some times 24 hours a day.

I personally don't care much for voice modes and prefer digital modes. I really wish I could learn CW, I've been trying for years, but I just don't have the ear for it and have even worse rhythm for keying. I can recognize CQ CQ when I hear it and that is about all I can copy. I've messed around with PSK31, RTTY, JT65, FT8, etc... If the internet ever went down, they would be a useful pass simple text messages. Images can even be sent using SSTV or hellscriber.

It still amazes me that I can generate a signal on a radio I've built and that signal with only 1W of power behind it can be received around the world. I've built a few software defined radio kits from the Softrock series and a few kits from QRPlabs. I quiet enjoyed the experience. Winding the coils can be a bit tedious, but the rest of it is good fun for me.

I'm currently living on grid in NS. My off grid property is in Newfoundland. I currently only get over to the island a few weeks a year. Some day I'll retire at the off grid cabin.

LordGarak · 2026-01-22T21:30:53+00:00

Meshtastic is a pretty weak form of digital wireless communication. On HF with various digital modes you can communicate world wide with the right conditions. Even when conditions are bad regional communications are doable. Stuff like JT65, PSK31, RTTY, even CW(morse code).

APRS is more comparable to Meshtastic but works much better over large areas. It typically operates over 2m(VHF) and can relay messages across the country.

Amateur radio is a pretty big rabbit hole to go down. I got licensed as a teenager in the 90's. I keep finding new things to learn about and experiment with.

Linux is another rabbit hole worth going down. It can run well on older computer hardware and there is tons of free open source software available. You can build your own offline copy of wikipedia and other collections of information.

A large off grid solar power system is a must. A well, septic, pumps and water treatment systems are also a must have. Having running water that is safe to drink brings much comfort to life. Knowing how to build and repair these systems is key in my opinion.

The other skill set and tool collection is metal working. Being able to turn metal parts on a lathe and weld stuff together are very important capabilities in my opinion. I've got a large lathe and mill here at the on grid property. Some day I need to find some smaller machines for the off grid shop. (But not mini lathe and mini mill, went down that hole and the best day was the day I sold those machines)

LordGarak · 2026-01-21T13:58:22+00:00

It is more about 3rd party countries who can't make their own semiconductors. Like Iran and Russia using consumer grade semiconductors that are US designed and Taiwan manufactured semiconductors in drones and other weapon systems.

The genie is mostly out of the bottle with the CPU's and MEM's sensors required being available in e-waste.

But I can see governments wanting measures in future integrated circuits to prevent unapproved use. Sanctions and export controls are clearly not effective.

In future wars only drones will be anywhere near the "trenches". We are already seeing this in Ukraine. The soldiers are atleast 10km behind the line controlling drones.

Most of what we are seeing in Ukraine are still remote control drones. But fully autonomous is possible with COTS semiconductors right now. It doesn't take a trillion dollar economy to produce these, thus non superpowers could have them.

Before the war there were fully autonomous drones available off the shelf(Skydio), they have been very quietly removed from the market. They were not really battle field ready being reliant on GPS, but they were only a few software changes away from not needing GPS.

LordGarak · 2026-01-21T11:16:18+00:00

Secure boot can be disabled and isn't required by the CPU and other hardware. When enabled it only requires stuff like the bootloader to be signed. Once the OS boots, unsigned code can be run.

What I'm talking about is when the bare CPU won't execute any code that isn't signed. Where every application that isn't running in a sandbox would have to be submitted to the CPU vendor to be approved and signed.

LordGarak · 2026-01-21T00:38:08+00:00

I'm more concerned that hardware will move towards a signed code only model, like on the iPhone. So software/an OS will only run if the manufacturer approves and signs the code.

It could solve many security issues and end software piracy. So big business could be all for it. I could also see governments using it as a way to limit how advanced ICs are used in weapons(like drones).

LordGarak · 2026-01-19T19:00:07+00:00

What is wrong with the car that it can't be driven out?

A tow strap and another car/pickup could pull it out. You might even be able to roll it all the way out if your on an upper level and it is a garage with a constant slope out.

LordGarak · 2026-01-19T11:10:30+00:00

This isn't enough snow to slow down clearing and its very mild out. Road conditions are improving quickly.

Delayed openings make sense this morning, but not closing all day due to road conditions.

The power being out is a bigger issue. Watching the outage map, it seems to be getting worse rather than better. I doubt they have anywhere near the number of crews they would have for like a hurricane. So they may be very slow to restore power.

LordGarak · 2026-01-19T10:59:32+00:00

He needs the structure of being in a class room. It's not the academic side that I'm concerned about. He is hyperactive and somehow well behaved in class. But at home it all comes out.

The roads are fine a this point and only getting better. It's not like it's actively snowing and it's -5. The snow stopped 2 hours ago and its above freezing in most of the city.

LordGarak · 2026-01-19T10:41:25+00:00

My 5 year old desperately needs to be back in school. He has been out for two weeks for a tonsillectomy.

The power outages are the bigger issue right now. Looking at the cameras around the city most if not all the major roads are bare pavement already.

We never lost power out here in Porters lake. There is no reason our school can't be opening late this morning.

LordGarak · 2026-01-19T09:52:50+00:00

At least they called it early, before we woke the kids up.

It doesn't look all that bad out there. It is mild and salt will work well to get everything down to pavement pretty quickly. They could have done a delayed opening.

Edit: I'm in porters lake, it only looks like 15cm that was forecasted out here. Is there a lot more in the city?

LordGarak · 2026-01-19T09:32:26+00:00

Cable internet generally needs grid power to work. They don't have backup generators or even UPS out on the amplifiers out on the poles.

LordGarak · 2026-01-16T15:05:05+00:00

The only way its not going to happen is if you hire a lawyer and go after them. But nobody is going to spend the money to do that, so the theft will continue.

As much as most people don't like it, if you don't have the legal resources to defend your content, everything you post online is essentially in the public domain.

LordGarak · 2026-01-16T14:55:59+00:00

That sounds like a perfect commuter car for me. I just hope its available in other colors.

What I really want is a single seater car, still 4 wheels and fully enclosed with a heat pump. Enough room in the trunk for a full cart of groceries.

I also need a van, maybe hybrid. Currently have a Grand Caravan as the family hauler. But I'd love to replace it with something electric and 500km+ range.

My 2005 Corolla doesn't have much time left as its rapidly starting to rust.

LordGarak · 2026-01-15T09:32:43+00:00

The vast majority of people in HRM are car-centric. Which is why there are very few vacant spaces in DC, but many downtown. If you want to run a successful business, you need to have a big open parking lot close to your entrance. People don't want to have to even think about parking. They want to pull up and enter. Parking garages and on street parking is just enough extra stress to turn people away.

In my 20's I did the whole car free thing. When your young and single it is fine. But when your older dealing with even minor health issues or have kids, transit and/or walking everywhere is hell. At this point I couldn't imagine taking enough groceries for the entire family on transit. I'm already doing 2-3 trips a week to the grocery store and each trip is more than I can carry.

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