The outlet probably turns outward, so it’s not just vertical movement.

Ah, I did not think of that. So I need to scrap the idea of a rigid pipe going into a rubber bushing. I guess an accordian pipe would be the viable cheap hack, apart from some way to add support just around the drain.

Maybe there was some kind of metal support that got left out during installation?

The toilet fell through the floor at one point because (I’m told) the house flippers neglected to use backer board wherever they layed tiles (kitchen and bathroom).

well, not sure how that helps. When the showerpan flexes, the drain still moves. And if the drain is an elbow fitting, I would think it’s harder to manage the movement when it’s a horizontal pipe moving vertically. The accordian pipe should work with that, but if the drain is vertical then I think i have a choice between accordian piping or rigid.

Nonetheless, thanks for the suggestion.

(update) someone mentioned that the drain is probably not moving only vertically… it would be moving outward, both vertically and horizontally. So apparently a hack would need to use an accordian style pipe.

no, I have never maintained a pool so I don’t know anything about that. Though someone mentioned there is some kind of material in a brick form that goes in the cistern. Not sure if that does the same thing.

I have seen those blocks of something that go either in the cistern or hang under the rim. I was never quite sure if they were for aroma, disinfecting, or if they did something to control limescale.

I don’t suppose they would all be created equal. Guess I need to look into it.

That was one of my questions. I am looking for min effort. If a quick brushing simply prevents the limescale, that would be less time and effort. But if limescale would still build up anyway, then I would not be interested as it would just add to the big effort every few yrs.

Brick acid may be hydrochloric acid.

Ah, that reminds me… I do tell guests when a party is getting a bit edgy to obviously do their vomiting in the toilet, but to not flush since vomit is rich in hydrochloric acid… to just leave it there to work on the scaling. I guess it doesn’t happen enough.

Water softeners are a bit of a double edged sword. They solve the limescale problem but then soft water is more conducive to corrosion in appliances like hot water tanks. I guess I would not run a soft water circuit just for toilets. OTOH, a friend has a rain water harvesting tank which feeds the cisterns. I suppose that’s not just a water savings but probably solves the limescale issue.

Good to know. But so long as both the stock client and Alexandrite push a garbage shit pile of a preview, it’s important to be able to remove an URL. OPs should always be able to remove an URL regardless.

In that case, it sounds like I should try using the PSU to hotwire the universal motor in my washing machine.

I have an Arduino kit with a variety of resistors. Would I just take any resistor to use as a dummy load, or does it matter which resistor I use?

The PSU is rated at 2A 12v, so would I take 2A÷12²v? Should I look for a resistor that’s 0.0139ꭥ? My EE class was decades ago, mostly forgotten.

I also have a 12v LED lamp that I pulled from a dumped refrigerator which I could sacrifice.

I’m often in a situation of needed to repurpose dodgy PSUs with dodgy appliances, so I’d like to generally know how to do this.

It’s a lightweight switching power supply.

But I also wonder why you say it sounds like the linear transformer variety. My understanding is the linear transformers give a more clean and stable output. I think transformers are more robust and longer lasting. OTOH, it’s not good that they warm up and waste energy (“vampire bricks”), hog space… and not good that they are hard-wired to only handle 110v or 220v, not either/or.

Overall I prefer the small light switching PSUs, despite the fact they are often badly built and have short lifetimes.

Ah, I’ll have to check that. That happened to me recently. I installed a new tube, got a hole, patched it, then got to the other side town before it went flat. And I found a piece of glass likely from a beer bottle embedded and hidden in the rubber of the tire.

My post is 4 months old so I wonder if it was the same tire. I probably need to inspect all my tires quite closely. It could be the same glass shard and tire or a recurrance of the same thing.

For the moment I just disconnected the heating element and wired in a t-stat from a mini fridge. The heatin element could very well have been broken as long as I owned the fridge (it was given to me as a quite old 2nd hand fridge).

I guess I will keep my eye out for similar normal sized fridges that are trashed. Maybe I can harvest a heating element and combined t-stat like mine to recover the auto-defrosting function.

It’s a non-US fridge. But I’m curious about you calling it a heat pump fridge. The one thing all fridges worldwide have in common is using a compressor for refrigeration (or so I thought), which is the same as a heat pump but stressing that the goal is to cool rather than heat a space. Are there US fridges that do not use a compressor?

The mystery component is hiding behind the plate. If I follow the two white wires from the thermostat, they go behind the plate and make a loop that attaches to the backside of the plate.

I mean, you could also say the plate is a mystery to me as well. I’m quite baffled by this fridge because it’s nothing like the videos I’ve seen on fridges. The plate must be cooling the fridge compartment because there is no vent coming from the freezer.

I should mention that the /load/ wire that the mystery component connects to is the /return/ load going to the compressor. But that connection jumps to the t-stat. So I think it cannot be a cut-off because it’s wired in parallel to the compressor’s load input.

So from how it’s wired, I think it’s expected to be a heating element. But it’s not warming the plate when hotwired. So maybe is a broken heating element… but yet it has continuity (14.15 kΩ). So I am baffled for sure.

I guess I can only hope that someone has seen this bizarre Zanussi/AEG design before.

resistence measures at 14.15 kΩ

In that case, I suppose I should wire it in series with the “new” (harvested) thermostat that will be the replacement. Then both the t-stat and the mystery component would be able to open the circuit.

I suppose I could test it… if I warm up the plate with a heat gun, I could see if the mystery component acts like a thermal breaker.

I posted a pic in a reply but the component is hidden behind the metal plate.

I wonder if it is a thermal fuse, then I don’t know what would warm the plate. It has a coil of refrigerant which you can see in the pic… just one loop of coolant. I’m baffled that it’s enough to cool the whole fridge compartment. As far as getting warm, I wonder if the compressor could somehow run in reverse and push hot refrigerant through the coil to defrost things?

I would really be hard-pressed to get a pic of the Zanussi 19/4 that’s worth 1k words in this situation. The backside of the plate is inaccessible. Every time I pull the plate forward to get an eyeball back there I worry that a tube carrying coolant will break. Not sure how many times I can bend it but I’ve bent it dozens of times already.

I found the manual online somewhere but it’s almost useless. Perhaps this excerpt is useful though:

Defrosting

Frost is automatically eliminated from the evaporator of the refrigerator compartment every time the motor compressor stops, during normal use. The defrost water drains out through a trough into a special container at the back of the appliance, over the motor compressor, where it evaporates.

It is important to periodically clean the defrost water drain hole in the middle of the refrigerator compartment channel to prevent the water overflowing and dripping onto the food inside. Use the special cleaner provided, which you will find already inserted into the drain hole.

The freezer compartment, however, will become progressively covered with frost. This should be removed with the special plastic scraper provided, whenever the thickness of the frost exceeds 4 mm.

This is a pic of the front side of the metal plate:

There are two white wires and a ground wire going from the blob on the right to behind the plate. The wires run in a loop inside some coil of tube.

Below the plate is a V shaped trim on the inside back wall below the metal plate. I guess water drips off the plate into the V and through a hole that leads to a drip tray on the back of the fridge. I guess I would expect water to condense and drip… but maybe it needs help. Maybe the mystery component that I can’t get a pic of is a heating element. But I don’t get why the plate does not get warm when hotwired.

Maybe 2 things are broken… maybe the t-stat broke and perhaps the heating element was already broken. I’m tempted to ignore (what I think is) the heating element.

I guess I didn’t read it as carefully as you. But ease of repair is covered:

ANNEX I

Product parameters

The following parameters shall, as appropriate, and where necessary supplemented by others, be used, individually or in combination, as a basis for improving the product aspects:

(a) durability and reliability of the product or its components as expressed through the product’s guaranteed lifetime,technical lifetime, mean time between failures, indication of real use information on the product, resistance to stresses or ageing mechanisms;

(b) ease of repair and maintenance, as expressed through characteristics, availability, delivery time and affordability of spare parts, modularity, compatibility with commonly available tools and spare parts, availability of repair and maintenance instructions, number of materials and components used, use of standard components, use of component and material coding standards for the identification of components and materials, number and complexity of processes and whether specialised tools are needed, ease of non-destructive disassembly and re-assembly, conditions for access to product data, conditions for access to or use of hardware and software needed;

© ease of upgrading, reuse, remanufacturing and refurbishment as expressed through number of materials and components used, use of standard components, use of component and material coding standards for the identification of components and materials, number and complexity of processes and tools needed, ease of non-destructive disassembly and re-assembly, conditions for access to product data, conditions for access to or use of hardware and software needed, conditions of access to test protocols or not commonly available testing equipment, availability of guarantees specific to remanufactured or refurbished products, conditions for access to or use of technologies protected by intellectual property rights, modularity;

(d) design for recycling, ease and quality of recycling as expressed through use of easily recyclable materials, safe, easy and non-destructive access to recyclable components and materials or components and materials containing hazardous substances and material composition and homogeneity, possibility for high-purity sorting, number of materials and components used, use of standard components, use of component and material coding standards for the identification of components and materials, number and complexity of processes and tools needed, ease of non-destructive disassembly and re-assembly, conditions for access to product data, conditions for access to or use of hardware and software needed;

(e) avoidance of technical solutions detrimental to reuse, upgrading, repair, maintenance, refurbishment, remanufacturing and recycling of products and components;

(f) use of substances, and in particular the use of substances of concern, on their own, as constituents of substances or in mixtures, during the production process of products, or leading to their presence in products, including once those products become waste, and their impacts on human health and the environment;

(g) use or consumption of energy, water and other resources in one or more life cycle stages of the product, including the effect of physical factors or software and firmware updates on product efficiency and including the impact on deforestation;

(h) use or content of recycled materials and recovery of materials, including critical raw materials;

(i) use or content of sustainable renewable materials;

(j) weight and volume of the product and its packaging, and the product-to-packaging ratio;

(k) incorporation of used components;

(l) quantity, characteristics and availability of consumables needed for proper use and maintenance as expressed, inter alia,through yield, technical lifetime, ability to reuse, repair, and remanufacture, mass-resource efficiency, and interoperability;

(m) the environmental footprint of the product, expressed as a quantification, in accordance with the applicable delegated act, of a product’s life cycle environmental impacts, whether in relation to one or more environmental impact categories or an aggregated set of impact categories;

(n) the carbon footprint of the product;

(o) the material footprint of the product;

(p) microplastic and nanoplastic release as expressed through the release during relevant product life cycle stages,including manufacturing, transport, use and end-of-life stages;

(q) emissions to air, water or soil released in one or more lifecycle stages of the product as expressed through quantities and nature of emissions, including noise;

® amounts of waste generated, including plastic waste and packaging waste and their ease of reuse, and amounts of hazardous waste generated;

(s) functional performance and conditions for use, including as expressed through the ability to perform its intended use,precautions for use, skills required and compatibility with other products or systems;

(t) lightweight design as expressed through reduction of material consumption, load- and stress-optimisation of structures, integration of functions within the material or into a single product component, use of lower density or high-strength materials and hybrid materials, with regard to material savings, recycling and other circularity aspects,and waste reduction.

I seem to be missing where this is in the video,

Sorry I gave the wrong link. It’s the threadless stem replacement where I saw it:

https://archive.org/details/how-to-replace-a-bicycle-stem-threadless