Depending on your location, you would have to balance storage amount to last between rains, and as the storage gets bigger it gets extremely heavy. (A 50 gal drum of water is over 400 lbs, or ~190kg) A pump you have to service/replace every few years is way easier to deal with than trying to set up a structure to safely hold hundreds of kilos/pounds over your head in a place where leaks could mean heavy water damage to the house.

There are small 50 liter hot water tanks that hang on the wall. There are just two bolts going into brick. When I first saw that, I was suprised that it was safe to do but it is in fact how they are meant to be installed. I think these are even bigger than 50L:

If someone is uncomfortable with the factory design, there is this aftermarket mounting system that uses 4 bolts:

People throw away hot water tanks like this all the time, which I thought could be repurposed for rain harvesting. All my cisterns have two inputs, left and right, depending on where the pipework is. And they are already connected to tap water with a valve. So I could easily pipe rain water to the unused cistern input and turn off the tap valve, and turn the tap valve on if the reservoir is empty. I guess gravity fed water would be slow to fill, but probably fast enough if there aren’t many users.

I was thinking I could cut a hole in the top of an old tank for the input then on the top side have an overflow hole near the top that feeds the downspout.

Indeed I do the same. Clean acid to descale kitchen appliances, usually muliple times. Then that gets recycled for dirty (bathroom) jobs. Though the kettle cleaning acids tend to be weak, I think. Vinegar is not potent enough for tough jobs. And I probably would not try hydrochloric acid in metal kettles.

I wonder if it makes sense to mix recycled vinegar with hydrochloric acid in a toilet – or whether that’s playing with fire.

Citric acid is less commonly available, but since you say it can work in metal kettles and also the toilet, it piques my interest… I’ll have to consider tracking some down.

This sounds interesting. It makes me wonder why no cisterns already have built-in softeners.

OTOH, if I am willing to accept the extra home improvement effort and complexity anyway, I wonder if I am better off harvesting rainwater, which I presume is soft water. A friend does this. After flushing, we hear a pump turn on to pump water from the rain reservoir to the cistern. A pump does not appeal to me, but I wonder if I could do a ceiling mounted reservoir on the top floor and then rely on gravity to feed the cisterns.

If I have a device that needs 12v at 8 amps but each pin is rated for max 5a I can deliver 12v at 4-5 amps through two pins and tie them both to the power rail on the pcb to get a full 8a capacity

That’s interesting and perhaps it explains why there would be two 12v pins (so they can be combined to give double the current). But the question remains as to whether “5A max” on the label implies 5A max per pin, or 5A max total when combined.

This image below is not the PSU I have, just something I dug up, but it suggests a purpose for 4-pin connectors that I can understand, as there are two different voltages supplied:

Although I don’t understand what it means to have prohibited signs on two of the pins. Is that a suggestion that they be used as negatives, despite being called “gnd”?

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