Careful. These Outlet Wiring Instructions are Wrong.

Today I went to the hardware store (LOWES) and bought a 10-pack of decorative electric outlets.  I picked the “Pass & Seymour” brand.  I pretty much know what I’m doing with electrical, but I always like to read instructions.  That’s when I got stymied.  I sat there for 10 minutes comprehending what it said.  I put down the tools and hit the net.  30 minutes later and I could only come to 1 conclusion – the instructions shipped with it were wrong!

Normally, I’d suspect bad instructions to be from China, but these electrical outlets are stamped “Made in U.S.A.”.  

Take a look … do you see anything wrong with the illustration?  

First off, you can see that the plug appears “upside down”.  Actually, this is normal – and it makes sense.  Sometimes a power cord has sufficient weight to “ply” it away from the wall socket, exposing a small portion of the prongs.  I suppose it’s better to have the ground exposed, than the two contact points that carry the electric current. 

The real culprit here is not the orientation of the outlet, but rather the positioning of the prongs in relation to the ground pin.  Normally, the larger Neutral slot should be on the lower right, and the smaller HOT slot should be on the lower left (in the upside-down mounting).

 

 

Now take a look at the actual outlets themselves, and you will see how it should be. 

Ordinarily, bad instructions results in having to take things apart.  In this case, it could result in a DIY’er burning down the house.  I think Pass & Seymour better consider a recall… 

 

The days are getting shorter – Perl Script to Calculate Sunrise and Sunset

Hi Everyone;

I made a great perl script to calculate sunrise and sunset times in Toronto for the whole year with a graphical output. I wrote this in my dead-time during a work order tonight… so I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Notes:

• my brother’s birthday, which is right around the corner is day 286.  That’s a g33ky number.
• Here’s a day-of-the-year number calendar .
• does not account for Daylight Savings Time changes
• the output is in decimal form (.1 hours is about 6 minutes)

How to understand the output

————-***********************————–      Day: 286 , sunrise: 7.46371983255512 , sunset: 18.6748421708946 

•  
  • The —– is darkness (night)
  • The ******* is sunlight (day)
  • sunrise 7.46371….  is the time local to toronto at GMT -4 (7.46 = 7 oclock + (.46 * 60 minutes) = 7:27am

 

Sample output.  If you scroll through enough lines, an “hourglass” shape starts to appear:

# ./sun.pl
----------------******************----------------      Day: 1 , sunrise: 8.8499964506844 , sunset: 17.8363243941365 
----------------******************----------------      Day: 2 , sunrise: 8.85157917721863 , sunset: 17.8505635052382 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 3 , sunrise: 8.85247026342554 , sunset: 17.8653183755327 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 4 , sunrise: 8.85266811641787 , sunset: 17.8805734993673 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 5 , sunrise: 8.85217187255689 , sunset: 17.8963130190473 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 6 , sunrise: 8.8509813847397 , sunset: 17.9125207658933 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 7 , sunrise: 8.84909720761213 , sunset: 17.9291803019326 

Here’s the perl code to support it.  A lot of it was based on http://www.adventist.org/sun/sun.pm .  Obviously, i did a lot of reworking of the ideas into my own script.  Click MORE for a special suprise (and the code)