this is our solution

September 30, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

This got pretty badly stuck in my head yesterday for…. reasons

I figured out the root cause of the issue I posted about earlier on with the crazy fan circuit…. waaaait for it:

The pin was never securely inserted and latched into the housing of the fan connector! Welp. Lacking the correct tooling for this connector series (I have yet to be able to identify it!) I broke the rounded end off one of those plastic stirrer sticks from Starbucks and used it to prod the thing into place. It snapped in and I plugged the fan in and it’s happy again. Speaking of fans and drama, this greeted me with a rhythmic pounding noise from the office roof yesterday morning. I sent the HVAC contractor a photo of it and he arrived at the door at 9 AM laughing with a replacement propeller in hand. The cause of this one appeared to be that the “belly band” mounting Trane uses for the fan allowed it to slip down.

By design, these Trane units have a behavior that I consider to be just this side of “broken by design”. When the thermostat calls for cooling, the compressor starts and pumps gas (R-410A in this case) into the condenser, where it gives up heat into the metal finned tubes, condenses into liquid, and is sent to the output lines and into the building to boil inside the evaporator coil, cool the air down there, and come back to the outdoor unit as gas… the usual vapor compression refrigeration cycle. As the condenser heats up, the gas head pressure leaving the condenser starts to rise due to thermal expansion. You can hear the sound the compressor makes change as the head pressure rises, and I’m guessing the motor current starts climbing too. Once it rises to a certain point, a pressure switch trips and starts the fan, which cycles on and off based on the head pressure.

This causes it, in practice, to cycle in about 5-10 second intervals, repeatedly flexing and stressing every part of the nasty stamped sheet metal assembly up there.

The first time I encountered a unit like this in the wild, I thought I was hearing it repeatedly overheating and tripping a safety cutout. I had to ask an HVAC contractor if that’s normal. They said that (sadly) it is. Why?! I guess it might save a LITTLE power, but I don’t think it’s worth the reliability problems.

On a side note, my parents’ house had some ancient Sears “Good Neighbor” condensing unit that was made by Whirlpool, part of a retrofit from the 1970s or so (best I can find from trying to Google the thing). It claimed to be a two-speed condenser, but in reality, was a single speed compressor paired to a two speed fan that’d switch between high and low as needed based on the compressor discharge line temperature/pressure. It never outright STOPPED if the compressor was on. Yes, this was done… better… over four decades ago. Sigh.

It may be worth noting this was a pretty small R-12 system, couldn’t really fight the Florida heat well, but lasted a LOOOONG time. The condensing coil was much smaller than it is on modern high efficiency systems and I remember the temperature of the air coming out of that condenser being fearsome. You couldn’t comfortably touch the top of the unit after it’d been running.

2014 Subaru Forester Fan Relay Diagram For The Rest Of Us

September 28, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

I hate cars. They’re just giant expensive pieces of cost-engineered crap that cause horrible anxiety. Apparently, the service manuals for them pile confusion on top of that as well.

I don’t know WHO this diagram was designed for, but it was clearly not to be seen by human eyes and minds. OUCH.

From the factory service manual:

Ow. My brain. I mean— this IS a schematic, but… ow.

I redrew it to make it easier to understand and follow. The scanner in my office doesn’t understand the orange I highlighted the wires that should be energized off +12V ignition switched and turned it kinda beige-ish. Whatever.

I omitted the “Through Joint Connector” points shown here. I have no idea what those physically are – my best guess, being that I didn’t see a bunch of connectors in the circuit, is that they mean those are internally connected on the ECM harness plugs or in the fuse/relay holders.

Fuse F22 is a horrible mystery. Check it for yourself – the factory schematic suggests that the ONLY thing it powers is the “Sub Fan” relay coil, not the actual fans themselves. Why? Actually WHY ANY OF THIS???

In general I have a love/hate relationship with any cooling fan control system that incorporates a low fan speed for pretty much no good reason, and by that, I mean, I love to hate every single one of them. I’d rather hear a single loud fan cycling on and off than knowing that the whole control system is a ball of spaghetti wrapped around a meatball of ticking time bomb complexity. I also love that when I was trying to figure out how this works (the manual doesn’t really explain it) I found that there’s a reasonably useless possible state for the system of running one of the two fans.

I’m having an issue with one of the relays causing one of the fans not to spin. Specifically, it’s the “main” fan on the driver side, suggesting an issue with Main Fan Relay 2, which I was able to get the cover off of and look around inside… it looks like it’s gotten hot and both contacts looked pretty raunchy. It is not the logic state that you’d get to if the ECM were to ground pin B12 and not B11, which would cause the main fan to run only, at high speed.

So here’s the adventure so far—-

I’ve been through one radiator fan which might not have even been bad in the first place, though it spins kinda rough and probably needed to be changed even if it WAS functioning (that being the case, it may have been drawing too much current and pitting the relays).

Pictures from this silly adventure ahead (let’s keep this post from making the main page a kilometer long!)
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Have You Driven A F[n]ord Lately?

September 22, 2020September 22, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

I swear, every Ford Econoline is just powerfully cursed. This one sharted out its coolant somewhere on the passenger side. Good times waiting for the tow truck, at least it’s a nice cool day so far with no heavy smoke.

What the fuse??

September 21, 2020September 21, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

Fuses are wonderful electrical protective devices. They work till they don’t, and in the case of glass cartridge fuses, looking at the remains when they blow can give you some insight into what happened at the moment of fault (prolonged overload, dead short, slow overheating, etc).

Or in this case, uh, what

Today’s contestant: a 1.25 amp with some delay characteristic out of a switching power supply in a bookshelf stereo.

One look at this told me there was no need to fear a big nasty fault with the power supply. It went out very, very gently, in fact, STRANGELY so.

If you see the element slumped, that indicates it was running hot a while.

The element blowing up and becoming silvered to the glass indicates a high current fault. Often that’s a shorted rectifier bridge or caps when it happens on a switching supply.

What follows is an attempt to get a photo of this under the microscope.

VERY unusual. Note that the fuse wire itself looks perfectly fine and the fault looks like it occurred without any serious heat.

I really just don’t get it. My best guess is the fuse wire actually cracked instead of melting, possibly due to long term thermal cycling or vibration.

The alloy bead is a heat sinking feature to give the fuse element a time delay curve. As heat builds up on the fine wire it will be absorbed through the connections to the end caps and to this blob. Once it gets the blob hot, the delay time ends and a sustained overload will melt the element. Of course, a high current fault can always blow the element to slag in a very quick instant.

See, this all makes sense, right? Here’s something that doesn’t… a CrapTrex Freedom SW unloading undocumented fault codes like a bag of soda cans at the recycling center.

My official title is now “Spoopy Funfetti Cake”

September 21, 2020September 21, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

Yeah now I’ve done it

Second try on that green. It’s more, you know, there now– but not as vivid as I want.

I never could figure out what the tiny pencil thin long black dress coordinated well with before. The answer is… this

Barney ain’t looking too great these days

And now, some fairly dank memes:

And now, back to cats and electronics as usual.

Poor thing is gonna need a spa vacation at Orban… It’s under warranty

Still getting the hang of this

September 18, 2020September 18, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

I’m pretty good with paint and watercolor, in general, though I haven’t been doing it enough in the past few years.

Hair is confusing as hell.

Some pigments want to take better than others, and with my hair, well, it’s inherently evil and doesn’t want to listen to any chemical intervention. Somehow it seems like pink and red work better than anything, which is fine by me because I love how pink looks in there.

The new colors are florescent…

Surprisingly, a standard blue LED sets it glowing better than this UV penlight that was made for detecting a/c leaks.

The plastic the fan is made of glows too. Funky.

I must be the most colorful engineer out there nowadays

2020.jpg

September 17, 2020September 17, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

High Thoughts

September 7, 2020September 7, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

Turns out I finally found a way to enjoy the wonders of THC without it totally knocking me out. The magic seemed to be a tincture mixed into strong iced coffee. Sure, why not. Wonder if anyone’s ever tried that with Cuban coffee? It’d probably break the universe.

High thought #1:

I’m gonna start at least internally calling that specific kind of crazy logic-resistant insanity that’s all the rage “Chicken and Stars”.

High thought #2:

This picture of Cassie makes her look a lot like a super happy friendly cat in a Miyazaki world.

I mean just look at this face.

Look at it.

Also I generated this look alike in the e-girl doll maker.

I need more short skirts and fishnets in my life. I’m so divided though because long dresses look so awesome on me.

be that cryptid in the checkout line you always wanted to be

Current weather is too hot for the delightful shiny PVC looks. Come on fall

Colorful silliness and kitties

September 2, 2020September 2, 2020 kg4cyxLeave a comment

I figured out an important piece of cat logic today: the tail pops out once she’s full

Getting ready to launch!

Gingy is getting really affectionate lately and asking me to pet her… Always. She’s following me around again, isn’t she? I had also called her Sandy Beach in another post which is very cute and she seems to answer to that too.

As I walked into the core to figure out why I was observing what I thought was an unwarranted audio delay, and went to have some words with the Optimod 8685, it occurred to me I have no idea what my hair looks like from the back so I took an action shot of this vital conversation with said machine and it was grand.