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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Back in the day your monitor(s) would have been drawing a lot more power (I’m talking way back with CRT monitors). Also, your PC doesn’t draw 750 watts all the time if at all - 750W is the max rating for the power supply. Even if you did have a very power hungry system (read: GPU) it would only draw that while running full whack, most of the time the PC will idle at lower clock speeds and lower power.

    Your soldering irons are probably only 25W, certainly less than 100W (unless you’re showing off). The big things are generally anything involving heating, but many of the things at your desk probably don’t use that much. After heating it’s motors. And, again, these things are generally not all on at the same time.

    Suffice it to say, there isn’t really any higher risk to the volume and type of load we have today than back when electricity was first installed in houses. It certainly should be said that the installations are much safer now than they used to be, where even a faulty install like this shouldn’t lead to a fire - if your cable is installed in ducting or kopex then even if a faulty termination heats the cable up there won’t be anything in contact with it to start a fire.

    But you should still get check these things checked out. The layers of redundancy by design are great, but you don’t want holes in the Swiss cheese to line up - that’s when bad things happen.













  • Squirt/apply lubircant, open and close the hinge to work the lube in.

    WD40 works as a lazyman’s option, for a short time. However really WD40 is more of a solvent and not a lubricant - it will dissolve out any real lubricant, then dry out much more quickly than a proper grease and also possibly attract more dirt.

    You can get plenty of other lubricant sprays. A quick search suggests things with PTFE (teflon) in them can be good. WD40 do a teflon spray can, that was the recommended lube for my crosstrainer.

    Other, possibly better lubricants are silicone or lithium based.

    Petroleum jelly can work also. Any lube is better than none, but this website suggests petroleum jelly < PTFE < silicone or lithium. However I’d defer to some proper science to decide which is really best.