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black magic and cargo cult science
Thursday, October 27 2011
I opened up the electrical circuit breaker panel in the basement boiler room to try to figure out which wire carried electricity to the bathroom where I like to take my baths. I wanted to see if anything could be done to limit radio frequency (RF) noise coming down that wire from its compact fluorescent lighting, which is noisy enough to force resets on my Arduino-based solar controller when it's connected to a computer in standby mode. The lightbulbs in question are first-generation dimmable CF floodlights made by a company named Neptun, and their noisiness is probably a consequence of the bleeding edge dimmable CF technology of 2006.
Once I had the circuit breaker box open, it wasn't easy to trace the wire from the bathroom's circuit breaker to where it left the box. I had to put a little kink in a prospective wire and then tug what I thought might be the other end on the far side of a bird's nest of other wires to see if it straightened. Once I'd figured out which wire it was, I wrapped its Romex cable with tinfoil all the way from the circuit breaker box to the ceiling where it disappeared. Then I broke a ferrite toroid in half and superglued it around the cable. I don't know much about toroids but I know they're commonly put around electrical wires to suppress radio frequency noise. It's all black magic and cargo cult science anyway. Doing all these things, I managed to get the Arduino controller to reset a little less often when the bathroom light was on and my computer was in standby (a pair of circumstances that aren't actually all that common). But I think the only real solution to this problem is to use a different model of dimmable bulb. At $30/each, equivalent LEDs are stil too expensive, though I've already deployed four of those in the kitchen.
This evening after Gretchen came home, I went into town mostly to replenish my beer and booze supplies and Gretchen's Celexa and Ambien prescriptions, and while I was out, I thought maybe it would be nice to pick up some Indian food from our favorite Uptown restaurant. Gretchen thought that was a great idea.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?111027 feedback
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