16-channel solid-state power controller for military and aerospace applications introduced by DDC | 19mm Momentary Push Button

http://www.canadiantire.ca/en/automotive/interior-auto-accessories/winter-accessories/automotive-accessories/polar-pad-engine-heater-125w-0300004p.html

That’s how you may get some serious, even life-threatening, internal RF burns without noticing anything.

I was tasked with doing this last week at work and spent considerable time researching the best/safest way to do it with consumer equipment. As far as I can see the best solution is to use one of the many 433MHz RF controlled power adapters (Watts Clever sell them for as little as $10 each) and use the same record/playback trick used to record TV remote IR signals and play them back with an Arduino. Unfortunately the project requirements changed and I didn’t get to actually implement it but I see no reason why it wouldn’t have worked. Apart from being very cheap (~20 per unit) it keeps the mains voltage completely isolated from everything else, which is particularly important from a liability perspective when you have to deliver the units to an external client.

If you had a mains-voltage shock once and got away with it, you were lucky, that doesn’t mean the voltage is safe, you were merely playing a game of Russian Roulette with Ohm’s Law and a low impedance high voltage supply. Your domestic mains can dump the hefty amounts of current your home heating, your cooker, or your electric kettle demands, so if it finds a low resistance path through you then it is going have no problems dumping whatever current Ohm’s Law allows it to through that path. The chances are if it happens to you the path will be a high enough resistance that you’ll only get a very nasty jolt and live to tell the tale, but if it’s not your lucky day the resistance will be low enough that you’re just going to sit on the end of it twitching until the power is turned off, whether you’re alive or not. That’s the gruesome truth. Mess with this stuff and you can die, end of story. You are responsible for keeping yourself safe, and this is not a joke. OK? Now to work!

Varistors, also called metal-oxide varistors (MOVs), are used to protect sensitive circuits from a variety of overvoltage conditions. Essentially, these voltage-dependent, nonlinear devices have electrical characteristics similar to back-to- back Zener diodes.

On Wednesday, Flake voted against advancing controversial nominee Thomas Farr, a North Carolina lawyer who is up for a district court spot, during a Senate floor vote. And since then, Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley canceled a committee meeting that would have included votes on more than 20 judicial nominees, apparently due to Flake’s key vote in committee.

You like many others here can wallow in their own baseless opinions, meanwhile millions including myself very safely charge up using 120 volts almost every night. I usually use a higher voltage for the BOLT, but the ELR mostly just charges on 120 the same as most VOLTS.

Given my long-term dislike of EVFs, I was surprised to find myself as comfortable as I was with the one on the Sony A55 and A33. It by no means corrects all the ills of the genre, but does go a long way in the right direction. It still loses highlight detail in scenes with both deep shadows and strong highlights, but I found it workable most of the time. I could generally make out clouds against the sky, important for framing landscape shots. It also seemed to do pretty well under low light conditions, although as of this writing, I haven’t done a lot of night photography with the camera. Still, the large pixels of the Sony A33′s APS-C size sensor mean that its EVF is much more able to form a usable viewfinder image under dim lighting than is that of a typical digicam. Under really dark conditions, I’d still like to see it gain-up a bit more, though, even at the cost of slower refresh rates.

I’d like to know how this does around town and also on the highway (independently) when the battery is exhausted. Maybe we should get standard EPA measurements with the battery starting empty in addition to the eMPG test.

It can take 15 to 20 minutes for your air conditioner to get up and running after it’s tripped a circuit breaker or the power is turned off. Be patient and wait it out before trying something else.

I think Brian’s point was that if the bond between the earth ground and the neutral return of the incoming premises power isn’t good enough, then the short to earth might *not* trip the breaker. Of course, it would likely start a fire instead (the resistance may not be zero, but it will be low enough to sink a great deal of power in most cases and a 15A breaker will tolerate a couple THOUSAND watts), but I think that if you can’t trust that the building is to code, then all bets are off.

“International” power supplies usually are specified for 100V (Japan) to 240V +/- 10%, i.e., 90-264V.