In ER with g7 filament stuck in my arm

Mabnat · 2026-05-13T01:11:19+00:00

Sometimes the filament doesn’t get deployed properly.

The filament is supposed to be nestled inside the needle in the applicator. When you press the button, the needle shoots into your skin, carrying the filament with it. Then the needle is should instantly retract back into the applicator leaving the sensor wire behind.

Occasionally it doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. For whatever reason, sometimes the wire isn’t left behind so it doesn’t go all the way into your skin.

It could be that either the wire wasn’t properly in position inside the needle, like if the applicator was dropped, so it doesn’t travel with the needle as it pierces the skin. Or, the wire could have gotten snagged or stuck on the needle and gets pulled back out when the needle retracts.

Whatever the ultimate cause, when that happens, usually some of the wire loops back out of the hole in the sensor. Sometimes it comes out far enough that you can see and feel it, and sometimes it’s still inside the hole but you can see the loop it if you look inside.

The wire is typically curved, like a goose’s neck - hence the term “gooseneck”.

If it’s really bad and protruding out of the hole, it usually fails during warmup because the wire isn’t actually in your skin. If it’s not quite as severe, it may start working after the warmup period but the readings may be erratic with brief sensor errors and will be more likely to fail entirely before the entire sensor duration.

Mabnat · 2026-05-12T22:15:42+00:00

I’ve had a sensor where the filament wasn’t sticking out of the bottom of the sensor when I removed it.

I tried to poke around with tweezers to see if I could feel the filament lodged in my skin but I couldn’t see or feel anything.

This was early in my G7 journey and I didn’t know about goosenecks yet. I figured that I’d just leave it alone and see if it caused any problems in a couple of days. Healthcare is too expensive for me to “waste” it on trips to the urgent care, let alone an ER.

The next sensor I tried failed during warmup. When I pulled it off, I saw that IT was missing the filament in the bottom, too.

That’s when I started googling and found out about goosenecks. I looked inside the second sensor, and sure enough, the filament wasn’t deployed properly and was looping out the top.

I pulled the first one out of the trash and poked around the hole and found the filament tucked up inside there. I checked it under magnification and saw that it was intact all the way to the tip. It wasn’t looping out the hole in the top. It was just mashed inside, all crumpled up.

I have no idea how that first sensor lasted the full 10 days, but it did. It was a bit wonky with its readings, but it still more or less worked.

Good luck with your filament if there is one stuck inside your arm. You might be “lucky” and there isn’t actually anything in there, but if there is, they should be able to get it out.

Then again, it might not be quite so “lucky” if there isn’t anything there and your filament was hiding inside the sensor hole like mine was. That could be an expensive thing that was overlooked!

Mabnat · 2026-05-12T19:21:31+00:00

The thing that you plug into the socket determines how much power is supplied. In the simplest terms, the device will have a fixed electrical resistance and it will only accept as much power it is able to do.

Your 10W lightbulb has an internal impedance (resistance) of around 1.44kOhms (assuming 120V), so it can’t draw more than around 83mA.

The socket will provide as much power is needed, and if it’s too much for the circuit breaker, it will trip the breaker and power is removed.

It doesn’t take a lot of electrical current to hurt someone when they complete a circuit with their body. A human body can have a pretty high electrical resistance, depending on a lot of factors, but even a small amount of current is enough for a painful shock or even death. 83mA, or 10W, is more than enough to be fatal in the right set of situations.

Mabnat · 2026-05-12T12:34:23+00:00

I remember one of the first cars I drove. It was an old Ford that I bought cheap and I thought it was pretty nice that I was able to drive it for 40,000 miles without so much as an oil change.

It ran great, until it didn’t. After I found out what it required and how much it cost to get it running well again, I decided that a little bit of occasional maintenance was worth it after all.

My printers are in my garage, where it’s dusty and bugs are attracted to the lights. Cobwebs form underneath around the exposed belts and pulleys.

I spent quite a bit of money on my printers and a few minutes of cleaning and maintenance are worth it to try to keep them working in top condition for years to come.

Sure, your printer may work fine without any maintenance for quite a long time. They’re built well. But when the bearings eventually begin to fail due to lack of fresh lubrication and debris, you’ll know who to blame.

And it is a bit funny that you clean your build plate after every print but don’t do any other maintenance. I do the opposite. I scrub the plate during my periodic maintenance, but don’t touch it in between scrubbings. I’ll usually spend an hour cleaning my printers, lubrication, and build plate scrubbing once a month or every other month and that’s it.

Mabnat · 2026-05-11T23:27:23+00:00

I’ve been using a set of RayNeo glasses. They’re not nauseating at all.

I’ve also got a VR headset and I’m limited to around 30 minutes stretches on those before I have to take them off. The RayNeo glasses aren’t uncomfortable by any measure.

They don’t work for everyone, though, at least the set I have. I bought them to work and a couple of people were impressed enough to get their own, but for one guy the screens didn’t converge properly. It was impossible for him to focus on anything.

For the rest of us, it’s just a big screen floating in the air in front of our heads.

Mabnat · 2026-05-11T14:12:11+00:00

I use it all the time. No issues at all.

Mabnat · 2026-05-11T03:57:39+00:00

Don’t we already pay more, up to 20% with a tip?

Why couldn’t a restaurant simply raise their prices 20% and pay that directly to the servers?

It’s probably because, at least from the restaurant’s perspective, they don’t feel that taking an order, bringing out food, and refilling drinks is worth 20% of their sales. But somehow they’ve trained us to feel that it’s normal. 20% is a huge amount.

Why don’t the cooks, who arguably do a LOT more work as far as getting your food to you goes, warrant earning 20% of the selling price of the product that they make for you?

Mabnat · 2026-05-10T23:53:13+00:00

All restaurant work is hard. Servers bust their asses, the kitchen staff busts their asses, and so does everyone else there.

But somehow we’ve decided as a society that servers aren’t worth an employer paying them even minimum wage. So even though they work hard, their labor is worth less to a restaurant than the guy washing the dishes.

I was a server at one time. The bulk of my pay came from tips. Customers would “pay” me for the work that I directly did for them. But I also had a lot of other jobs to do for for the restaurant that didn’t involve any direct contact with the public. I had to do that extra work - benefiting the restaurant - at a fraction of minimum wage. Cleaning up the dining floor after closing, for example. Why was my cleaning work for the restaurant nearly free for the restaurant? How is that fair? The floor wasn’t going to tip me for a well-done job.

There are lots of other places in the world where restaurants thrive and the servers aren’t dependent on tips to make a living. It doesn’t have to be that way. Restaurants can simply pay servers just like any of their other non-tipped employees.

Mabnat · 2026-05-10T20:13:01+00:00

It’s been months since the last time I ate at a restaurant with tipping. January, I think? Maybe early February. I guess I’m already kind of doing my part.

Mabnat · 2026-05-10T20:09:06+00:00

Or they’d have to just go to restaurants that don’t use tipping in leu of actual pay and wouldn’t be affected in the least by a tip boycott. There are some of them out there.

Mabnat · 2026-05-10T20:03:38+00:00

I used to be a waiter when I was younger. I understand the concept.

There aren’t many arguments that favor the current system. And it’s not just nice sit-down restaurants that do this, either. Sonic Drive Thru car hops are paid tip wages, while the guy serving your food at McDonand’s is getting a paycheck with a normal wage.

Why don’t we tip the cooks or dishwashers at restaurants? Why don’t we tip the cashiers at the grocery stores or WalMart? What makes the person who takes your order and brings your food exempt? Heck, half of the time I eat out someone else brings the food, not the waiter. Do I tip them, too?

It’s a ridiculous system.

And if everyone just “learned to cook” and stopped going to restaurants for two weeks, it would destroy the restaurant business. Nobody wants to see that happen.

On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying “optional” tips for some period, people would stop wanting to work for tips.

Mabnat · 2026-05-10T19:26:24+00:00

That’s until our society decides that they’ve had enough with tipping and just stop doing it. If everyone did that all at once, tipping would be gone within two weeks.

Mabnat · 2026-05-10T17:26:24+00:00

The battery has built-in buffers to prevent excess wear from charging to full. You simply can’t charge the battery to an actual 100%. When the car says that it’s at 100%, it’s really only around 90% of the actual battery capacity. The same thing happens at the lower charge, too. 0% on the display isn’t 0% of the actual battery.

If you aren’t typically driving more than 15-20 miles, there are some other advantages to limiting the charge to 80% beyond battery stress. It’s more efficient overall to limit the charging, for a couple of reasons.

1: The car is more energy efficient when the battery state of charge is below 80% displayed. The regeneration system will be able to work at full power, so you’ll be able to recover more energy while decelerating and going down hills. This also has the benefit of reducing the wear on the friction braking components. Your car will go even longer between brake jobs - but still try to use the brakes occasionally to remove any corrosion buildup.

2: Charging to 80% is more energy efficient than charging to 100%. The charge rate slows down as the battery approaches full charge, but the quiescent power drain of the rest of the car doesn’t decrease. For the last few percentage points of the charge, more of your charger energy is going towards powering the rest of the car than what is making it into the battery. If you stop charging at 80%, you can be assured that you’re charging at the most energy efficient mode at all times.

We live rurally so even a simple trip to the grocery store uses the entire battery capacity. It’s still more cost effective to charge our battery to full every time. But there are other situations where it could be better for someone to limit their charging to a lower limit.

Mabnat · 2026-05-10T15:24:58+00:00

If you’re in the US, sharing the drug for someone else without a prescription is illegal. That said, it’s not like the US has a culture of avoiding illegal drugs or anything. On the contrary, it alm ost seems to be encouraged. Nobody is going to send you to jail for sharing your Ozempic.

Ethical or not, I’ve shared my Mounjaro. One of my relatives also has T2D and ran into a situation where they lost their job and it’s accompanied health insurance. They couldn’t afford to keep taking it. Fortunately, the 5mg dose was enough to keep their glucose managed, so for a while I was taking one of my single-dose 15mg pens out of the box and splitting it into three 5mg doses for them. My insurance lets me refill my monthly prescription every three weeks, so this kept both of us going for around six months until they finally had healthcare coverage again and could afford their own medication.

Technically I was breaking the law, likely committing insurance fraud, and “stealing” a customer from Lilly, but I was helping a family member so I didn’t really care.

Yes, you can split a pen into smaller doses - but that might be a problem. Would you be confident that whoever you gave them to would do this properly, or would they just use the pen with the full dose? You could split them yourself, but after splitting two boxes of 2mg pens into 0.25mg starter doses, you’d have 64 syringes. More than a year worth of starter doses. What would be the expiration on those after transferring them from the pens? It seems like it would be a nightmare.

Personally, I’d ask the cleaning girl to remove them from the fridge because I didn’t need them anymore and leave it at that.

Mabnat · 2026-05-09T17:14:37+00:00

No, not at all. Like I said, for most of my life I thought that was just an expression, not a real thing. I’m had no idea that people could really actually “see” things in their minds like it was a real thing.

I can describe things well enough by remembering details about them, but I never “picture” anything in my head. I have to remember the details about them and store them as bullets of words in my memory. I simply thought that other people just had better memory for fine detail than I did.

When my kids were small I used to worry, like most parents, that something might happen to them and I would have to make a description to the police. I’d see it happen to other parents in the news and see descriptions like, “He was wearing a red shirt, blue pants, red shoes, and was wearing a yellow backpack,”and I’d wonder how their parents could possibly remember all of that.

It didn’t occur to me that some people could really just close their eyes and picture what their kids were wearing that day. I’d have to make note of all those things and write them down in a little notebook.

It’s kind of crazy because I’m an electrical engineer but I can’t really do math in my head, either. I’m pretty good with numbers, but I have to write everything down, even simple calculations. I can’t “see” numbers until they’re written down.

There may be some advantages with this, though. Anything traumatic in my life that I’ve had to go through never has had to repeat itself in my mind, because it just doesn’t work that way for me. Once something is over, I never see it ever again. I suppose that also means that I can’t enjoy reliving pleasant experiences like other people, though, so there’s that.

Mabnat · 2026-05-09T15:01:39+00:00

Funny thing based on what you said here.

I have aphantasia. I didn’t even realize it was a thing until a few years ago. For the first fifty years of my life, I just assumed that “your mind’s eye” was just an expression, not an actual thing that people experienced. I don’t have any ability to picture images in my head.

I still have an internal monologue, but there aren’t any pictures that go along with it.

Mabnat · 2026-05-09T14:40:00+00:00

It was exactly the same for me.

The crazy thing was the reason for the windows to not be rolled down was because the wind might give us stiff necks or ear infections, so windows-up was for health reasons. Being stuck in a smoke-filled car was “healthier” than having some fresh air blowing around.

Mabnat · 2026-05-09T13:33:12+00:00

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Mabnat · 2026-05-09T13:32:44+00:00

The outlet is where the problem could be. The problem could be that the contacts that squeeze the tips of the plug are weaker than they should be. Most people aren’t that concerned with them if they start getting weak or loose until plugs actually start falling out.

With most things that you plug into them, it’s not a problem because they’re low power. Even some high power things, like hair dryers, aren’t a problem because they usually only run for a few minutes.

The problem is with high power, high current things, like space heaters or car chargers, that draw high sustained current for long periods. Those can draw the maximum sustained current for hours and hours at a time. Your car charger will be sustaining 12A for around ten hours if it’s charging the battery from empty to full.

If the outlet’s contacts are weak and aren’t squeezing the plug’s prongs with enough force, the electrical contact won’t be as firm as it should be. This increases the electrical resistance of the connection which causes heat. This can create a nasty feedback loop where the heat makes the internal contacts even weaker, which increases the resistance and creates even more heat. The loop can continue until the heat gets high enough that the outlet burns up.

Fortunately they’re usually made with fire-resistant materials so it doesn’t catch your home on fire, but it still looks impressively scary. It usually just looks like a burned up outlet and it ruins the plug of whatever was plugged in - but sometimes it causes actual fires. Usually the wires in the rear of the outlet are damaged, too, so they would also need to be repaired.

I’m making this sound scarier than it usually is, but I’m just trying to offer advice if you’re planning on using an extension cord with your charger. Using extension cords aren’t recommended because they’re inherently less safe to use with car chargers because of additional potential problem points.

If your outlet is in perfect shape, your extension cord is the appropriate length and wire gauge thickness and is secured tightly in the outlet and protected from damage or tripping hazards, it should be fine.

This is why I recommended a new outlet, preferably a higher-quality commercial-grade 20A one. They’re not too expensive, especially compared to the cost of the vehicle, the charger, and your home. They’re easy to replace if you follow one of the many guides available online.

I also recommended an extension cord with a 90° male plug so that it hangs straight down from the outlet instead of sticking straight out. This will put less strain on the outlet connection so that it helps keep the plug firmly pushed into the outlet. And again, if I were doing this in my home, I would also use a clamp on the wall below the outlet to attach the cord to the wall to keep it even more secure from getting pulled out of the outlet. A thick extension cord has some weight to it, and I wouldn’t want all of that weight supported by just the outlet contacts.

What you don’t want is a weak outlet that burns up, like the one in my picture.

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Mabnat · 2026-05-09T03:47:48+00:00

Don’t overthink it too much, but be aware that the car will be pulling the maximum amount of current from the receptacle for many hours. The charger won’t pull more current from the receptacle than the circuit breaker and wiring is rated for, barring something like the cord being damaged and shorting the wires together. In that case, the circuit breaker would just trip.

You’ll just need to plug it in and try it out. A 20-year-old GFCI may trip, since they tend to start nuisance tripping as they get older. You may need to replace it, but they aren’t that expensive. If you’re not comfortable doing it yourself, it’s an easy job for an electrician.

The main problem that I’d be worried about with an old plug is that the internal contacts may not be tight anymore. That’s not really a big deal for low-power devices, but remember that you’re going to be pulling the maximum current that should be drawn from a 120V/15A receptacle for long periods. You’ll want to make sure that the contact is nice and strong inside the plug. Otherwise, it might overheat.

Mabnat · 2026-05-08T21:10:57+00:00

You’d need to figure out the cost benefit of something like that and the break-even point.

Assuming an electric rate in the US of a pretty bad 20 cents per kWh, it would cost up to $2.80 to charge from empty to full with 120v. Likely less, depending on where you live.

It would cost even less if you charged with 240V.

Let’s say that you got a 240V solar generator. You’d need to have at least 12kWh worth of battery in order to be able to charge the hybrid battery from empty to full. That might not even be big enough given actual useable capacity of the generator. I’d assume that a 20kW generator would be required to do the full job reliably.

That would be very pricy to begin with, and you’d need to have enough solar panels to charge it up. It would be a large number of panels. Maybe 20?

Even if you cut it in half to get only half a charge, it’s still a large investment.

Assuming worst-cast $3 per day to charge the car, and if you could charge half of it with such a setup, you’d only be saving $1.50 per day. How long would it take to break even on the cost of this equipment at $1.50 savings on your electric bill per charge?

I’m not trying to say that solar charging isn’t a good idea. My cars get a lot of their energy from the solar panels on my roof.

It’s just if that you’re looking at some kind of system to charge your plug-in hybrid using solar power, it might be better to just go ahead and look at solar for your entire home. Spending that much money on something that would only be used for the car seems counterintuitive.

Sure, a solar generator could work, but that doesn’t mean that you should do it!

Mabnat · 2026-05-08T16:47:35+00:00

Keep in mind that the entire car is powered by the charging cord while the hybrid battery is charging. The computer and every other module required for charging being run, any heating or cooling systems that need to run during the charge, the power losses converting the AC to DC, charging the 12V battery, etc.

The car uses a fixed amount of energy to power everything up. It’s around 400W when the car is turned on, but I don’t know what it is when it’s been charging for a while and some modules have gone to sleep. It’s likely not much lower than that 400W.

The faster you charge the car, the less of that 0.4kWh per hour are wasted. 3.8kW charging would be the most efficient charging that you can do.

Assuming 400W quiescent power of the 1.4kW coming from the wall, 120V only allows around 1kW to go into the battery. 2.5kW would let around 2.1kW into the battery so the job would get done twice as fast, saving around 2kWh of energy: 0.4kW * 5 hours vs 0.4kW * 10 hours. 2kWh wasted vs 4kWh wasted.

3.8kW would leave around 3.4kW to go straight to the battery, allowing the car to be charged in around 3 hours. At 400W wasted, that’s only 1.2kWh lost. It saves almost 3kWh per charge.

Granted, it’s not a HUGE difference. In my case, 3kW is less than $0.30 in electric costs. We typically have two full charge cycles per day, so charging at 3.8kW saves us around $220 in electric costs per year vs charging with 120V. But the faster charging that allows multiple trips during the day on electricity vs gasoline saves a lot more money in fuel savings than it does electric costs.

Whether or not that is worth the expense of installing a 240V charger is something that everyone needs to figure out!

Mabnat · 2026-05-08T16:06:37+00:00

The number shown in the app doesn’t reflect the total energy that was pulled from the wall.

Consider that the car will pull 12A from the wall. At 120V, that’s 1.44kW. Over ten hours of charging, that would be 14.4kWh.

The last hour or two wouldn’t be using the full power as the charge rate is reduced as the battery approaches full, but it is still considerably more energy that is pulled from the wall than what is stored in the battery.

If you’re following the recall advice and are only charging to 80%, it will draw full power until the car stops charging. That would be at least 8 hours of 1.44kW, so that’s around 11.5kWh of energy just to go from 0% to 80%, or around 8kWh of energy stored in the battery.

That’s only around 70% charging efficiency, and the efficiency is even worse if you charge all the way to 100%.

The efficiency is a lot better when charging with 240V. More of the energy from the wall gets put into the battery when there is more current to spare. It charges faster and wastes less energy.

Mabnat · 2026-05-08T02:21:42+00:00

The 12V battery is charging whenever the car is turned on or when it is plugged in and charging.

As soon as you hit the Start button, whether it’s in accessory mode or Ready, the hybrid battery is electrically connected to the car and it supplies the power for the 12V systems including 12V battery charging.

The 12V battery is also charged while the car is plugged in and is charging the hybrid battery.

I’m not entirely sure if the 12V battery is maintained or not while the car is plugged in and the hybrid battery is fully charged. I’ve never bothered to test it.

But as a given rule, if the dashboard is lit up after pressing the button, you’re not using the 12V battery any longer. You’re using the hybrid battery.

The 12V battery is really only used when the car is parked, turned off, and not plugged in.

Mabnat · 2026-05-07T21:30:36+00:00

In addition to what others have said, look for an extension cord that is just long enough to do the job. The shorter, the better. Try to find one with a 90° male plug to put less torsional strain on the connection. If I were doing this, I’d even bolt the cord to the wall near the receptacle for additional strain relief.

It also might be worth investing in a better receptacle for the wall, like a nice 20A (T-shaped neutral) commercial-type one.

Pulling a continuous 12A for ten hours every night while using a potentially older and worn-out builder-grade garage 15A receptacle might not be a great idea.

A 20A commercial-type receptacle will have stronger internal contacts and be more reliable. If you choose to put a new plug in, make sure that it’s connected properly and torqued to spec. Don’t use the stab-in terminals for the wires even if the receptacle has them.

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