Potluck gospel hour

Last night was potluck night in the park. They do that once a month and its kind of fun in a hokey sort of way. The big thrill last night was that they had some dude lined up to sing gospel songs after supper was done. We made a slight strategic error in our seating location and almost got trapped but we managed to escape. Not surprisingly we weren't the only ones heading for the exits.

They do everything so early - what is it with old people eating early anyway? We were back at the bus by 5:15. They thought it was 6:15 but that still seems early to be done supper. We don't both switching our clocks. Time is such an arbitrary concept anyway. While the rest of the world is frantically spinning their clocks ahead in the fall and back in the spring (or whatever it is they do), Saskatchewanians soldier on secure in their correct time interpretation. We've both lived in Saskatchewan for so long without ever changing our clocks - it seems futile to start changing them now.

Its not just campgrounds full of oldsters that eat early. When we were in Regina to visit father we had to eat at 5:30 too. What's that all about? They've got a whole facility full of oldsters with nothing to do all evening and they have them all fed and watered by 6:00. At Vic Park I put it down to staff scheduling but here in the campground its just weird.

I spent most of my spare time in the last week hooking up LED lighting in the bus. It used to be lit almost entirely with those stupid little teardrop halogen bulbs that make more heat than they do light. They are incredibly popular for decorator lighting but for the life of me I don't know why. They make a harsh yellowish hue light and they get so hot its a wonder they don't start fires - maybe they do & I just don't know about them. Anyway, that was what we had. Whenever we were off the power grid and turned the lights on we could almost see the voltmeter going down. Ultimately we want to be able to spend more time disconnected from the electric utility. That will involve some solar panels at some point but the first step in the process was to reduce our consumption and that meant the halogens had to go. The halogen bulbs are also expensive and fail regularly so it wasn't any big hardship to get rid of them but the question was what to replace them with.

I found some marine LED lighting that claimed to be a plug and play solution for the halogens but they didn't work out well (not to mention being really expensive). I was able to make them work but I was happy that I hadn't bought a bunch of them. I ended up going to Rat Shack to buy a piece of circuit board and then ordering some individual LEDs online. I prototyped an LED array on the circuit board and it worked well. Then I went online and found a place that would build a circuit board to my spec. They had a neat little applet that I could download to design the circuit board and then the applet priced my order and eventually placed it. Those boards were waiting for us when we got back from Canada along with about 500 individual LEDs. I got all the boards soldered up and installed earlier this week and posted a description of my project on a bus BBS that I frequent. I immediately got roundly panned by an engineer because apparently I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

What I had done wasn't nearly as evil as the iron ring type suggested but there were definitely some things that I didn't know about LED design. Initially he suggested that my LED creation was actually dangerous which was just plain silly. My LEDs consume something like 20 milliamps compared with about 1 amp for the halogens that they are a direct replacement for so suggesting that they were an incremental hazard in the same fixtures was so stupid that I initially discounted everything else he had to say. Over time I came to accept that he likely did have some valid criticism despite the fact that he was also clearly a pompous asshole. So now I have a little resistor inline with my light modules which has slightly diminished their light output but the theory is that they will now last essentially forever. I still need to hook up one of the modules with no resistor as a control to see how long it will last in that configuration. We've also switched pretty well every other bulb in the bus to some type of an LED. We've still got a few of the halogens for those times when we are plugged in but we should have decreased our off-grid consumption by a factor of at least 25 times.

This is a good time to stop reading unless you are interested in design information related to LED circuits. I've always been fascinated by physics and electronics. I don't claim to understand the difference between Newtonian physics and Einstein's theory of general relativity but in principal I know that Newtonian physics breaks down at the extremes of small particles or high speeds. Similarly it appears that Ohm's law isn't actually the beginning and end of electronic theory. My little LEDs have a voltage drop which under Ohm's law would imply that they also have a finite resistance but - and I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around this - they don't really have a resistance. They will behave as if they had a resistance under a specific voltage (or alternatively behave as if they had a voltage drop under a finite current) but if that voltage or current changes they may simply burn themselves out rather than responding to the change in a "normal" fashion.

Over the past week I have learned more about this than I ever cared to learn. One thing that I already knew was that all electronic devices use smoke to operate. You may have noticed this in your own life. If you get a lightning strike or you hook something up wrong the first thing that happens is that the smoke escapes from the electronic device. Once the smoke has escaped then the device usually quits working. Some devices have more smoke in them and can afford to lose a little bit and still keep working but generally once they lose even a little bit of smoke they stop working. The risk with my little LED lights was never that they would burn the bus to the ground but rather that they would release their smoke and prematurely cease to provide light. These little guys are suppose to have something like a 100,000 hour lifespan which should be more than enough for the rest of the time we intend to use the bus.