litchralee

The funny thing is that a few months ago, I bought a wand metal detector at a ham radio swap meet for $20, as a gag. Now you're telling me that it was actually a prudent investment toward my woodworking projects??

Win!

This might be true, although I do it mostly so I can remove the earplugs and rest them around my neck if someone needs to talk to me.

The best PPE are the ones which have the fewest barriers toward using. Even the minor annoyance of having to set down untethered earplugs is best avoided, if it acts as a subconscious disincentive towards using PPE. Good safety policy adapts and accommodates this aspect of human behavior.

In a home workshop, there is no OSHA, so I'm fully responsible for my own safety protocols.

The electric gremlins and the electronic gremlins have a nasty habit of striking once and then crawling back to their lair to strike another day lol. It makes debugging problems much harder if the problem "went away" on its own.

But in any case, your description of a wet outlet box could be consistent with an intermittent fault. If your outlet was oriented sideways with the neutral (larger pin) facing down, it would only take maybe 1/4 inch of water trapped inside the box to short the neutral screw to the grounded case.

It's also worth noting that GFCI receptacles don't last forever. The nicer ones trip themselves off for the last time when they fail their own internal self-test, never to power back on again. The cheaper ones might become oversensitive with age, tripping for really tiny, harmless current diversions. But 8 or 9 out of ten times -- I'm spit-balling -- recurring trips are due to a real issue in the circuit, rather than GFCI.

Old equipment with motors, such as a fridge, are good candidates for leaking small currents to ground. But it's usually maybe 2 mA or something small. You'd need other appliances that are also leaking small amounts to reach the 6 mA to trip the GFCI.

All in all, since you observed tripping with no appliances plugged in, and I assume all the wiring is readily visible and you've already inspected it for any physical damage, that leaves the outdoor receptacle as the most probable cause.

You might consider looking at how the outdoor outlet box would drain water if it did accumulate inside. Most of those boxes are meant to be water tight, but that also means if water enters, it has no way to exit.

I'm left wondering why the tread direction of a tire would differ if it's on the front vs rear wheel of a bicycle. They're still rotating the same direction, right?

I'm nowhere even remotely comparable to a proper furniture maker, but I can tell you some pitfalls to avoid.

Don't cut wood without eyes, ears, and face protection. The dust, noise, or fumes will get you one day or another, if without protection. I prefer earmuffs over earplugs, but if earplugs then use the ones which tether both ends together. For a face mask, I like low-profile half-masks like this one: https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/respirators/p100-half-mask-respirator-sm

Resist the urge to dive into woodworking by starting with reclaimed wood. For example, pallets are a cheap/free source of material, but it's a hodge-podge of different varieties, all riddled with nail holes, dents, and brown stains from rusty fasteners.

That's not to say it can't be done, but it certainly aggravates the process if you're just starting. I once came across a section of 2x4 recovered from a pallet, thinking that it would cut just like the pine I was used to. Instead, it wrecked two drill bits and burned a circular saw blade as well as itself. I later mailed a sample of it to the USDA Wood Identification Public Service, who informed me that it was Acer (Hard Maple). Up until then, I didn't even know that maple came in both varieties.

It seems hard maple is tougher than ~~nails~~ drill bits. I'm still learning.

From your detailed description, it sounds as though one of the downstream outlets outside the house has a fault between neutral and ground. Follow the white wire which was reading 101.8, and that should get you closer to where the fault is. It might be anything such as: the receptacle got wet, a nail went through the NM-B cable, or something of that nature.

Separately, the white wire that reads 0.7 is fairly normal for a wire segment that should be dead. So no cause for alarm there.

Now to explain how I reached these conclusions. Firstly, a GFCI operates by detecting any difference in current between the live and neutral wire, downstream of the GFCI. If this difference exceeds ~6 mA, then the GFCI will trip.

Secondly, North American grounding systems will bond the ground rod and the neutral wire at only one point, at the service entrance where the main disconnect switch is located. Nowhere else should ground and neutral be bonded except here. In the IEC nomenclature, this is called a TN-C grounding system.

Thirdly, if a circuit has daisy-chained outlets, then any current drawn by upstream outlets will induce a small voltage onto the neutral wire, detectable at downstream outlets, compared to the ground wire and ground rod.

Let me explain a bit clearer: suppose a circuit has outlets A, B, and C, where C is the farthest from the breaker box. Plugging in a space heater into outlet A will cause current to flow to the space heater and back to the breaker. Because current is flowing on both the live and neutral wires, and because house wiring has a small, non-zero resistance, Ohm's law dictates that there must be a voltage difference across the wire, however small. That is, if the breaker box would measure the live wire at 120.0v and the neutral wire at 0.0v, then the voltage at outlet A might measure 119.4v and 0.6v, respectively, when the space heater is powered.

Because outlets A, B, and C are in parallel, we would also see this hypothetical 0.6v at outlets B and C as well, measuring between neutral and ground. This is normally not a problem.... except if outlet B is a GFCI and outlet C has a neutral-to-ground fault.

In this new scenario, the voltage induced on the neutral by outlet A will cause current to flow through outlet C's neutral-to-ground fault. After all, that 0.6v would prefer to flow to the ground wire, which remained at 0.0v (since the ground wire didn't have current until now).

The amount of current through the fault could be sizable, and almost certainly above 6 mA. This current flows through outlet B's neutral but not its live wire. Accordingly, the outlet B GFCI detects the difference and trips off.

This situation is only possible precisely when: a) there is current on the neutral wire somewhere, and b) there is a neutral-to-ground fault. The fault may be new, or perhaps you haven't used this circuit in a while.

In any case, the course of action is to identify which of the downstream 14 gauge cables leads to the fault. Since you measured 101.8 v through one cable's neutral, that is probably the direction of the fault, since the fault means you're measuring from live to ground, which should be somewhere in the ballpark of 120v.

The usual course of action to diagnose GFCI issues is to slowly reattach downsteam circuits until the GFCI starts tripping again. That gets you closer to the true issue that's causing the GFCI to trip.

Good luck and stay safe!

At this point, the bill has already passed the Senate and the Assembly, so it'll soon head to the governor's desk, as is the norm around June of even-numbered years.

If you are a California constituent who cares about bicycle and ebike legislation, I would encourage you to sign up for Calbike's email updates on impending legislation of great significance to bicycling in this state. This bill is fairly minor, but who's to say something more momentous won't come next year?

Likewise, if your region has its own bicycle advocacy group (eg San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates, BikeSD), get updates from them too.

Today's ebikes have only been legalized since 2016, so what is advocated for now will set the tone for decades to come.

I've been tracking this bill since it was first proposed, and the author never got back to me on exactly what is within the scope of the bill. The relevant part of the bill reads:

(e) A person shall not sell a product or device that can modify the speed capability of an electric bicycle such that it no longer meets the definition of an electric bicycle under subdivision (a) of Section 312.5.

For example, would a generic serial programmer device fall within the definition of such a "product or device"? How about software that is used with that device to modify the top speed of a specific ebike model? Common sense would say "no" to the first, and "maybe?" to the second.

But we can look to the author's own comments before the Assembly Transportation Committee:

According to the author, “AB 1774 will ban the sale of electric bicycle (e-bike) speed modification devices (i.e. tuning kits) in California. These devices modify e-bikes far beyond the legal definition of an e-bike in State Vehicle Code.

But the committee staff already see the obvious flaw:

While this bill would prohibit the sale of devices that allow an e-bike to go beyond the speed permitted by law, many e-bikes can be modified to bypass the speed limiter by reprogramming the bicycle. The limiter can be tricked by changing the tire size on the panel on the bicycle. Other e-bikes, like the Super 73, allow you to change the speed of the bicycle using an app that comes with the e-bike.

I would hazard a guess that ebikes manufacturers might start to do the same trick that e-motorbikes do, which is a wire that -- if severed by the owner -- would disable the speed governor.

As is somewhat typical now in the Legislature, these bills written against ebikes tend to come from SoCal, ostensibly because ebikes are an exceedingly popular alternative to driving on congested roads. What bothers me is that these representatives are not taking in the whole reality, which the committee staff report kindly summarized:

• Ebikes are outselling electric automobiles in the USA, by double digit percentages
• Ebike injuries are up, although the LA Times reported it as the low three digits in a 2023 article
• The best way to increase safety for all cyclists is through sheer numbers: more cyclists

Given that reality, legislative effort apparently isn't following evidence but rather towards clumsy distractions that emulate a "tough on ebike" stance, as bizarre as that sounds.

If this is the only receptacle in the house that is causing some unease, then it's simple and cheap enough to replace the receptacle. Around me, the cheapest UL-listed duplex receptacle at the home improvement store is less than $3. For the "commercial-grade" receptacle with my preferred backwire terminations, about $6. For TR-rating, $8 out the door.

Someone that's handy (and careful) with electricity should be able to swap it out in 20 minutes, and then you won't have to worry. Of course, as with all home improvement, don't do it yourself unless you're reasonably confident. And opening the outlet box might reveal new issues. But there's only one way to find out for sure.

This sort-of happened in the USA, in a small way, during the fallout of the 2016 Wells Fargo scandal. Public sentiment of the big-name, national retail banks was awful and credit unions capitalized on the moment with advertisements contrasting profit-centric national banks with local, cooperatively-owned credit unions.

In this article where consultants to credit unions were queried a year later, there's still some questions as to the long-term effects that may have benefited the credit unions.

I once came across a comment somewhere online that suggested -- sadly without hard evidence -- that the scandal may have been a win-win, since the sort of customers willing to uproot themselves from Wells Fargo tended to have smaller balances while still incurring the bookkeeping costs. And that credit unions were able to scale up to take in new customers while saving on advertising dollars.

It's a plausible idea, that a new equilibrium would be found in the banking market. Logically extending the idea further, though, would lay bare how much additional integration credit unions would have to do with each other to achieve a truly seamless customer experience. Of course, with more young people mostly sticking to online and mobile banking, this might come in the form of backroom operational improvements, rather than a revamped brick-and-mortar experience.

Point taken. I've edited the title to include both measurements in inches.

It's the curse of being engineering-minded in the USA. Much of homegym stuff here is in US customary units, but competition-inspired weightlifting equipment and anything engineering-related is in metric/SI.

Best I can do is to start with the original units (for search engine indexing), provide the conversion for people using the opposing unit system, and then try to do my work consistently within just one unit system.