Grinstead Electric

10/04/2018

While we are all big fans of The Block, Carla should never be doing her own electrical work. This is dangerous and illegal.

Electrical work should be done by licensed electricians only. For more → www.esv.vic.gov.au/DIY=DIE

05/16/2017

25th congressional district election watch

As the media sees it, they're just being objective.

08/27/2012

Do-it-yourself types may find this interesting. The video alone is worth a three-minute watch. When you need to get a little more power that 5.5 Volts, give us a call.

Need to charge your phone? Have nothing but a clothespin and some P-N junctions? Have no fear! The (solar) power is in your hands!

08/27/2012

As technology becomes more and more interwoven in our lives, this is an innovation that should makes it much easier to stay up and running.

Researchers have developed a way to turn body heat into electricity meaning your mobile will never go dead again. Power Felt can keep your phone going for up to 20 per cent longer just through the power of touch.

08/26/2012

The aurora borealis (the Northern Lights) provide a brilliant light shows in the earth's atmosphere. The auroras occur when highly charged electrons from the solar wind interact with elements in the earth's atmosphere. Solar winds stream away from the sun at speeds of about 1 million miles per hour. When they reach the earth, some 40 hours after leaving the sun, they follow the lines of magnetic force generated by the earth's core and flow through the magnetosphere, a teardrop-shaped area of highly charged electrical and magnetic fields.

­As the electrons enter the earth's upper atmosphere, they encounter atoms of oxygen and nitrogen at altitudes from 20 to 200 miles above the earth's surface. The color of the aurora depends on which atom is struck, and the altitude of the meeting.

Green - oxygen, up to 150 miles in altitude
Red - oxygen, above 150 miles in altitude
Blue - nitrogen, up to 60 miles in altitude
Purple/violet - nitrogen, above 60 miles in altitude

All of the magnetic and electrical forces react with one another in constantly shifting combinations. These shifts and flows can be seen as the auroras "dance," moving along with the atmospheric currents that can reach 20,000,000 amperes at 50,000 volts. (In contrast, the circuit breakers in your home will disengage when current flow exceeds 15-30 amperes at 120 volts.)

08/24/2012

The U.S. Army is really stepping it up a notch with its latest energy conservation initiative, SAGE (Smart and Green Energy) at Base Camps.

“Supplying power and energy to our Army around the world is an increasingly challenging, expensive and dangerous undertaking. The Army must include energy security as a prime consideration in all activities to reduce demand, increase efficiency, obtain alternative sources of energy and create a culture of energy managers."

A dustup over the U.S. Navy's biofuel program hogged the media spotlight this spring, but under the radar, the Army has been pursuing an ambitious alternative energy program of its own. Aside from $7 billion in cutting-edge and utility-scale projects, the Army's initiatives include a modest but c...

08/23/2012

Imagine being able to store and transfer data in your skin. This article discusses the possibility.

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard's Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data -- around 700 terabytes -- in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

08/22/2012

Not to say "we told you so", but to explain why we feel the way we do.

This article describes the problems associated with aluminum wiring, how to identify it, and suggestions that inspectors can offer their clients.

08/22/2012

“There’s no fundamental reason that we know of why we cannot get up to the same efficiencies with CZTS as we do with CIGS,” he says. “It’s one of the key goals for the field for the next year or two.”

Gobbledegook to you? What it means, actually, is a significant jump not so much in efficiency of solar cells, but in the abundance and availability of raw materials used in the manufacture of solar cells.

An IBM-led research teams says that a combination of copper, zinc, tin, and selenium (CZTS) could meet current thin-film efficiencies with more abundant materials.