2-17-2017

Well, a minor setback here in "Snowed-In" Snowden! A few feet more of snow, and had to pretty much crawl through about 5 feet of snow to read the meter...again! And 2 feet of snow slid off the house roof onto my car, causing over $5000 damage, that may set back my discretional spending for playing with electrons! But, fortunately- or rather, blessedly, as a good friend likes to remind me- I do have good car insurance which will pay for most of the repairs to the car.

Meanwhile, I had to go back to Radio Shack and buy a new pair of IR LEDs, as I accidentally let the magic smoke out of the first one! Part of the problem of how that happened, is that I have multiple projects and repairs going at the same workbench, and I got distracted and set the power supply voltage too high.

I am looking for another power meter that I can set up on the bench so I can have an easier way to figure out how to actually make the LEDs line up correctly and function as I intended. I have a couple friends who work at the local PUD whom I can ask if they might have an old one I can experiment with. I work at a power company too, but we measure our power there differently, as we deal with magnitudes more power than a PUD does- PUDs are to my company as a residential customer is to the PUDs. We deal in gigawatts and megavolts, and PUDs deal in kilowatts and volts. I wish my local PUD would switch my house meter to a digital one, that would make this project much easier, but then, where is the challenge in that? :)