dixiedrifter

easy to sterilize soil, right in your kitchen oven Generally that is a bad thing to do, unless you are trying to rid of weed seed. Organic matter is good. Bacteria are mostly good because they keep the bad bacteria at bay. In fact, beans, peas and other legumes such as clover and alfalfa form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil. Healthy soil is not sterilized soil. Part of the reason people nowadays are getting sick so easy is because everything is antibacterial this and that. Simply put, the cleaner we make our environment and what we consume, the less natural resistance people have to disease causing agents.

Well I ust say that my prior posts in this thread were meant to be humorous, but think about it. I'm serious about what I'm about to say... no attempts at humor. Honestly if I had to point the finger at something it is the only logical thing that comes to mind. I have been growing cantalopes and watermelons since I was still small enough to ride on the fender of my grandfathers tractor. Cantalopes and watermelons are a high dollar crop. Each vine only produces a certain amount of melons. You let varmints and wild animals run thru your crops and they will flat out wipe your fields out either by damaging immature melons or stepping on the vines. Yup you step on a vine and it can kill the runner. Imagine a herd of deer going thru your field stepping on things. There is no mechanical harvesting of cantalopes or for that matter most most produce... its all done by hand. And many farmer's hire migratory workers, many undocumented illegals on a cash basis. Trust me your average farmer isn't going to do background check on every single worker they hire to get their crops in or tend... they need their crops harvested in a certain window of literally a period of days and when your crop comes in, its over and done with pretty quick. When I say that from what I hear mexicans have some weird potty habits I'm not trying to be disrespectful to anyone who has anything to do with anyone orginally from south of the border. I have heard too many horror stories from people I know who work in construction about what goes on under houses, even with a porta-john sitting on the worksite. And speaking from someone who has been there and done that, when nature calls in the field, you either hit the woods or the tractor cause you ain't got the time or money to stop what your doing and run to the house for a potty break. I dunno about anyone else, but personally I have never even seen a porta-john in a field. Furthermore, unless you keep some T.P. in there well you just have to use leaves or whatever you can find when mother nature suddenly calls, and usually there isn't any soap and water to wash your hands with. Been there, done that, not fun. Do honestly thing that a few critter turds are capable of sickening as many people as the last round of cantalopes considering the nature of how curbits are grown? I highly doubt so unless one takes a poo directly on a melon. But you take one person who had to #2 out in a field and didn't wash their hands who touched hundreds of melons, and after washing the dirt of said melons I could easily see how foodborne illness could easily spread. Even worse what if said fecal contamination was intentional? You take some overworked, overheated, disrepected, underpaid individual and it is definately not beyond the scope of the imagination. Turd terrorism at its finest. Just sayin.

I still think it would be cheaper to keep illegal aliens and varmints from pooping in your garden. And just remember if one does slip by and does its business on your melons you can always box it up and send it off to Oprah for analysis.

Somehow I get the feeling this is all about illegal mexican migratory farmworkers sh**ing in the fields and not washing their hands after they do it.

Whats so great about macs? You get to spend a ton of money on a computer that you can impress all your yuppie friends with!

*le derping in Wal-mart. Notice x-mas trees. Look at date on cell phone September 14th.

Enter her into the Red Bull Flugtag contest as the official test pilot. Problem solved.

It should be a no-brainer... read the contract! Sheesh.

Seperate circuits is a definate must. If you tried to plug both plugs into the same outlet and pulled too heavy a load your circuit breaker would in theory trip, but generally its considered "bad form" to rely on a circuit breaker for over current protection. But like I said before, you have two 120v legs running into your house, each one is 120v. If you hook both hot legs up to the same outlet, one leg to the hot side of your outlet and one leg to your neutral, you will have a 240v outlet. In the case of the device, if one outlet fails, then of course it is going to shut down as the circuit would become open, or in the case it uses a switch mode inverter(which is different than a big clonkity huge linear transformer) then it should shut itself down but hard to say exactly how it does it without looking inside it. Edited to add: it appears to be of the type where you have to hunt down and find two seperate outlets that are "out of phase" which would indicate it is simply a box that lets you take two "legs" and tie them together to get your 240v with a bunch of additional salamander proofing circuity so you don't kill yourself in the process.

Almost sounds like a shot relay somewhere to me either electromagnetic or triac based. Would have to poke around in its brain with a multimeter before I could really figure out what was screwed up.

Ohms law. Wiring is generally rated by amperage as to how much electricity it can safely carry without overheating. Its sorta like a garden hose... amperage refers to the amount of water flowing thru the hose, voltage refers to the pressure of the water, and wattage refers to the amount of work the water can do when exiting said hose. The difference is that water when pumped thru a hose generally does not create enough friction to melt said hose if you pump too much of it thru at one time. Electricity on the other hand will depending on the resistance of the material its passing thru. Basically what it boils down to, is that the higher the voltage the less amperage you have to pass thru a wire to do the same amount of work... just like a pressure washer. This is why your big appliances like water heaters and air conditioners run off 240v... they can use wire rated at half the equivalent of that required for a 120v circuit because only half the amperage is flowing thru the wires. If an appliance pulls 15 amps on a 120v line, then its going to put out a maximum of around 6 amps on the output (factoring in some losses from the inverter). 120v x 15a = 1800W maximum safe on a standard household circuit (assuming nothing else is plugged into said circuit). However, the actual amount of current you can draw off any particular circuit is dependant on three main factors... your circuit breaker rating, wire gauge, outlet amperage rating, and duty cycle. If, your wire is of sufficient gauge and you use a 20A recepticle, then you could in theory pull 2400w even though you had 8 gauge wire rated at 30A and a matching 30A breaker. Edited to add: Just noticed it uses two 120v plugs. As long as you plug it into two seperate circuits it should be safe to operate the inverter at its rated maximums. In fact, if you had two 120v circuits, one going to each leg coming into your breaker box (there are three two hots and a neutral going to your transformer, then actually all you would need for 240V operation is to rig you up a project box where you have two 120v hot wires connected to either side of an outlet in said box and presto, instant 240V outlet for less than $20.

Most folks don't understand that Vizio doesn't manufacture their own panels... they source them from major manufacturers such as LG and so on. Like I said before, the panels generally last a looong time unless they get physically broken... its the passive components that determine the lifespan of a particular electronics device. And I don't care how good a manufacturers rep is... the only true way you can determine the quality of a TV set is to take the back off and look at who makes what. Lastly, even if a set does die, its not a total loss, you can easily sell the boards out of it on Ebay and to other sources,and the panel itself is worth good money for folks who accidently break their sets.

Speaking of the devil here is an actual vizio plasma tv power supply board complete with failed capacitors. Cost to repair $10 or so provided none of the fets or voltage regulator ic's (the black things on the aluminum heatsinks) got nuked. The deal is basically this... to save money all TV manufacturers nowadays are putting cheap taiwan, korean, and *gasp* chinese capacitors in place of quality japanese manufactureres. And, if you know anything about electronics, fakes are everywhere. Many of these manufacturers I'm sure overrate the quality of their products... honest to goodness they just about have to considering they sell them for literally a quarter or less of the cost of a japanese cap. Give it another year or so... the word about whats going on is starting to go viral... i see $$$ ahead for me. Also, note to self, vacuum dog's "blanket" before using it as a background for photography.

Pssht. I love it when folks TV's die. Specially the new ones. Why? Cause I know how to fix em. Usually in about 80% of all cases death on a TV set less than three years old is due to one or more bad filtering capacitor on the power supply outputs or RoHS solder joints developing microfractures or just plain old crappy work. An ESR meter and some soldering equipment from radio shack is usually all that is needed to find, remove, and fix them. Replacement capacitors are cheap and easy to get from Mouser or Digikey, just look for Panasonic FM series and match up the capacitance and voltage and you should be good to go.

That reminds of back when I was in my early 20's... Anyhoos, there used to be this flock of guinea fowl that loved to cavort around in the road that I used to take home from work. Well one day I got tired of waiting for them to get out of the way so I "opened it up" to about 75mph and aimed for as many as possible. I will never ever forget the carnage in my rear view mirror. I think managed to count at least six rolling balls of feathers at the bottom of this huge cloud of small feathers. The second worst roadkill incendent was at a McDonalds near the beach. We had just gone thru the drive thru and my friend who was driving goes "hey you want to see something funny here watch this". Of course when a friend says that it usally can't be too good, but sometimes it is funny. I was like "sure". So he circles back around the parking lot and throws out his french fries on the ground. Being near the coast there are seagulls everywhere and of course upon seeing the french fries go flying they naturally thought the all you can eat buffet had officially opened. I was like "what'd you do that for" and he was like "just wait a minute" and he circles back around. Well about that time he guns it right thru the flock. Again, carnage. But what really got me was the look of total shock and horror on the kids and moms faces in the playland area. It was awful but at the same time funny as hell.