River Bank is the stackable battery for everything you power, everywhere you go | Lrd12 Overload Relay

Why not use a silicone pad block heater for cars? You glue them on, they run on 120v and work good. It’s robust enough to sit on the bottom of your engine, in elements and gravel spray from the road, for years. They even come with a little tube of aluminum adhesive. Seems like a pretty good fit.

I would say however that relying on the relay coil is not reliable at all, and there are a variety of somewhat more accurate methods that I would prefer to rely upon.

That’ what I was thing one simple resign feature could make it as safe as most electrical appliances. Assuming heating element isn’t subject to contact. For me the phonographs weren’t clear in that regard. .

Solar water heaters are nice. Sadly, when one gets far north, the sun isn’t a common sight during the cold parts of the year.

While we don’t currently have details on the precise viewfinder type employed by the Sony A33 — Sony describes it as a 0.46-inch diagonal (0.43-inch effective) Xtra Fine LCD Tru-Finder — it clearly employs a time-multiplexed method to display red, green, and blue color information at every pixel location, suggesting it is likely a ferroelectric LCD. This differs from traditional LCD displays, which mostly create color information with a cluster of three adjacent red, green, and blue subpixels (commonly called ‘dots’), for each pixel location. When compared to standard LCD electronic viewfinders, ferroelectric types bring both advantages and disadvantages. They’ve proven somewhat divisive in the past, due to their tendency to demonstrate RGB "rainbow" artifacts when you blink or move your eyes, or with fast-moving subjects. On the positive side, though, since each pixel provides full color, ferroelectric LCDs tend to look much smoother and more detailed than their traditional LCD siblings, with less obvious pixel structure. They also tend to have higher refresh rates, and indeed Sony specs the EVF used in the A33 as offering a 60Hz refresh rate. It’s not surprising to see such a display adopted by Sony, since Konica Minolta — the company Sony absorbed to create its DSLR division — was a particular proponent of their use.

This is an important enough point that I felt it deserved its own heading: High speed shooting isn’t just about sports photography; it’s about capturing the perfect moment, regardless of how fast the subject is moving. This is a point I’ve been making since I first tested a prototype of the Casio FH20 a couple of years ago: The difference between the perfect moment of blowing out the birthday candles and one that’s a near miss can be a small fraction of a second. When shooting candids of people chatting and interacting, facial expressions and mouth positions change in literally the blink of an eye. A camera that shoots at 7 frames per second vs. one that only manages 3 frames per second can mean the difference between dozens of "keepers" and just a few.

Besides the overexposure bias, I also found the A33′s metering system was prone to more variation than I’m accustomed to seeing in an SLR. The few times I had it locked down on a tripod, shot to shot exposure seemed pretty consistent, but on several occasions shooting handheld, I found significant variation between successive shots, apparently resulting from fairly minor changes in framing. I’d of course expect exposure to vary to follow changes in the scene, but the amount of variation I saw between very similar shots taken with the A33 was unusual.

Not always, you have to think on a global scope here before saying generalizations! In the UK a lot of houses are on what they call PME or protected multiple earths, where the earth bond goes back to the substation as a extra conductor. If you are in one of these properties and are not aware of it, and have your own ground system or leakage you can end up being lower impedance than the substation ground and grounding out faults in your neighbors properties which are also on the same bond. Where I am in europe, all the houses are individually bonded to their own low impedance earth, and the inspector comes out with a megga tester and tests its impedance before they will sign you off to connect to the public supply. It has to be below 50ohms total from any gnd pin on any socket in the property I remember from my inspection. I laid a load of mesh subfloor before pouring the floor so I had no problems with meeting spec. A nice low impedance earth will make your rcd and protection devices even more sensitive also.

The controller board for the heat pump in our “3 Season porch” fried last January during a cold spell. All of the house plants we were keeping in there froze to death. SE Minnesota

No, that’s not a typo in the fact box up top. I drove the Niro PHEV a total of 253.2 miles, and topped off the tank with 3.107 gallons of regular unleaded. 81.4934 miles to the gallon very nearly doubles the mileage I observed last year in the standard Niro. 26 miles of all-electric range makes a serious difference — there were many days where the gasoline engine never fired.

Sonos isn’t saying exactly when AirPlay 2 integration will be ready for release. Apple itself has yet to officially launch AirPlay 2 for iOS yet; it’s still in beta testing. So that part obviously needs to happen first. But Sonos has made enough progress to have finalized a list of which of speakers will get it. The Sonos One, second-gen Play:5, and Playbase will be updated with AirPlay 2 support. Older Sonos products — the Play:1, Play:3, and Playbar — won’t be. To help ease the pain and frustration of that cutoff, Sonos says that so long as you’ve got one speaker that can do AirPlay 2 in your Sonos setup, you can group it with older models to make that audio play everywhere. Mac Observer first reported the list of supported devices.

Video capture is an area where the Sony A33′s translucent mirror technology makes a huge difference relative to pretty any other SLR currently on the market, and relative to even fast-focusing SLDs. Every other interchangeable-lens camera currently on the market either doesn’t autofocus at all when recording videos, or has to resort to slower and/or more obtrusive contrast-detect focusing. Because the Sony A33′s phase-detect AF system is always looking at the subject, fast autofocus during video recording is no problem.