After a number of power outages I finally decided to purchase a portable generator to power critical loads when an outage was more than a few hours. It was put to use recently during a 38-hour outage and at least kept the house warm and the food cold.
Part of owning anything mechanical like a generator is routine 
maintenance and operation. A generator should not be left for long periods of time without being run, so the oil and fuel don’t deteriorate and other parts don’t begin to corrode. The manufacturer recommends running it once a month. I decided to build a load bank to provide a load for the generator’s output and to prove tht the generator could deliver power. Continue reading “Generator load bank”
We bought a new car that turns out to be longer than the one we traded in, and parking it in our garage could be a potential problem (for both the car and the garage door) if it isn’t pulled in far enough. I wanted a better way to tell when the car was in far enough without using a sonar-based parking light (which I’ve found to be somewhat unreliable) or the old standby, hanging a tennis ball from the ceiling. I wanted a sensor to determine when the back edge of the car was past the garage door, and an indicator to tell when all is clear.