A few weeks back, I posted something about an old phone device I had found under a house.  I kept toying with it and had made some headway.  Then, the other night, I was having trouble sleeping and was flipping through some old catalogs I have.  Very old in this case.  They are reproductions of Sears catalogs from 1906-1908.  Surprise, surprise, there was the device I was holding in my hand.  It is a simple fuse and grounding device for a phone line.  Now, why would you need something so hefty for a phone?  Turns out that back in the day, they used steel wire for phone lines.  In fact, the Sears catalog had special steel line that they were trying to sell as an improvement over the common means of carrying phone signals.  The way it was normally done was by using fence wire.  The catalog sells the wire in 10, 12, and 14 gauge.  To give you some idea, 12 gauge wire is what you use for outlets in a house.  10 gauge wire is for higher load devices (30 amp breakers).  So you can imagine why they felt they needed a hefty breaker for a phone.

Over time, copper became cheaper and we switched to that.  An old copper wire could be as much as 14 gauge for phone lines since the voltages were still high.  You'll still find plenty of this type of wire around in older neighborhoods.  Up until recently, most phone wire is made up of four wires: Red, green, black, and yellow.  A phone runs on two wires, and while it doesn't matter which two, the convention is to use the wires in that order.  Nowadays, CAT5e has become the standard for home wiring.  It uses 4 twisted pairs of wires for 8 wires total to accommodate 4 independent lines.  Each pair one wire that is a solid color and another which is the same color with white stripes.  In a replacement, the general order is Blue, orange, green and brown.  CAT5e is small as well, 24 gauge.  This is in  part due to increased efficiency of data transfer and the twisting of the wires helps to cancel out electromagnetic interference.

If you're not an electrical person but want to start dabbling, phones are a great place to start.  Voltage is low and there are few requirements for wire placement.  Everything is color coded as well.  You can even make your own phone and ethernet cables quickly and cheaply by buying a few tools.

Looks like California was only slightly ahead of the curve.  In news last night, Australia has decided to ban regular light bulbs by the year 2010.
 
http://www.abc.net.au/news/...

Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull is announcing today that conventional, incandescent light bulbs are to be phased out over the next three years and replaced with energy-saving globes.
He says this will save up to two million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in Australia over the next few years.
Mr Turnbull has told AM that new energy standards will be introduced.
"It'll be illegal to sell a product that doesn't meet the energy standard so that'll happen by 2009, 2010, and so by that stage you simply won't be able to buy incandescent light bulbs because they won't meet the energy standard," he said.

California legislators have considered this move as well, though I can see it being truly enforced in Australia since they will be banned from the whole continent.  Of course, there will probably be special cases allowed for medical use, theaters, etc.  Still, by the account of the Australian government, a world wide shift away from incandescent could save as much as 10 percent of the world's energy use.  Since they also are not proscribing CFL's, they are also opening the door for LEDs to come on the scene.

Funny to think about a future where kids build an incandescent light in science class for historical perspective.

So I was putzing around hanging some doors this week which got me to thinking about locks.  Of course for Valentine’s Day, you’d think something else might be a more appropriate topic here, but a) I’ve never been accused of being appropriate and b) even with our love of loves, there is still a need for privacy.  Nothing says “mine” like a lock.

Locks have always been around in one form or another.  The two basic types of locks are knowledge locks and tool locks.  Actually, all locks are knowledge locks, but in some cases, the knowledge or code is stored in a tool.  We’re all fairly familiar with both. In knowledge locks, we use combination locks, passwords, etc.  They are generally better locks than tool locks.  The lock that prevents spam on this blog works better than some would like.  :) Some of the old knowledge locks are simply beautiful.  You can still buy small boxes today that are like puzzles, parts having to move in specific sequences in order to open.

Mostly when dealing with doors, we use tool locks.  They are easily copied and yet can be controlled more easily.  Most of the locks I’ve keyed in my day were Schlage, just because I ran some buildings that used them.  The idea is very simple.  A cylinder is connected to a paddle that turns and moves a bar.  The cylinder is held in place by five pins that rest on top of pins of different heights unless you have master keys that we’ll talk about in a second.  When a key is pushed into a lock, the pins are pushed up and the top pins are pushed up so that they are level with the outside of the cylinder, allowing it to turn.

Bringing this back around to Valentine’s Day, think about how many locks and locked areas you move through in a day whether it is your home, car, or logging in to email or websites to post comments.  All of these places are special and some are made more special because you need to have certain knowledge to access them.  Keys have meaning to us in many ways.  Giving someone the key to your house for the first time or buying a house for which you both have a key.  In many ways, having the “key to someone’s heart” is what makes love special.  It is the sense of belonging and what makes us ask people to “Be Mine.”

Happy Valentine’s Day.

 

 

Pete’s comment the other day about churches tapping into the power of God by way of renewable energy got me to thinking about writing up another bit on some of the stuff going on in the realm of renewables.  One of the exciting developments that is just getting started is using algae to produce oil.  My understanding is that plenty of the oil we use now was originally pond scum anyway, so all we’re doing is shorting the life cycle.

Of course, in order for it to be profitable, the algae have to be farmed either in open ponds or in enclosed tubes.  In order to speed their growth, CO2 would be pumped into the air.  The algae absorb the CO2 which is released when the fuel is burned.  This is an example of being “carbon neutral”, since the technology uses already airborne CO2 and captures it for work before re-releasing it into the atmosphere.  Another benefit of this idea is that it uses the existing infrastructure including standard oil refineries to process the algal oil and can be turned into jet fuel, diesel, and gasoline.

A lot of the CO2 could also be tapped from industrial sites that would vent it into the air anyway, which is a benefit in that you’d take a purely waste product and reconvert it to energy for another cycle.

There are still engineering problems to overcome, including the desire to genetically modify some of the algae to optimize oil output and protect the farms from being taken over by invasive species.  The idea has been around for a while, but wasn’t economically viable when oil was at 20 dollars a barrel.  With 50 dollars a barrel seeming to be the floor and instability in the Middle East driving it to 80 dollars a barrel occasionally, things like this make sense.