Category: Other projects

Recently I bought us a portable dual power cooler from Tropicool, 21 liters content.  BUT- as I started it up, the noise was a bit more than I expected.

I already own a larger ‘VRIJBUITER’ 38 liters portable freezer/cooler with a  compressor that I silenced last year.

This 40 liter machine had a 50mm (2 inch) fan to cool the condensor and I completely repositioned some movable parts to get a 120mm (4.8 inch) fan in the machine instead.  The 120 mm fan is a silent fan and this resulted in an almost silent and  better operating freezer/cooler.  But- this machine does not run on the car battery, only on A/C  230 Volts.

So- back to the Dometic machine:  This is the machine

At the front lower  part a large area shows a fan behind the plastic front.  A 12 Volts DC fan is positioned behind this front . The fan is managed by the electronics and only switches on and off. No PWM or similar technique is used.  This cooler is not working with a compressor but with a/some Peltier element(s) and cooling/heating radiators, so a big aluminium block needs to be cooled by the fan to get the machine to work (and cool or warm the inside).  This machine can either cool -25Deg C or warm +25Deg C the inside.  A failsafe mechanism prevents freezing and temperatures above 65 DegC.

The picture below shows the original fan below and the replacement fan above.

The original fan was IMHO rather loud at 53 dBm (at 50cm distance), I presume mainly due to its design.

On the net, I read that most users of this machine are pleased with it and don’t think it makes much noise.

But- I need to operate this in our rented place which can either be an apartment, B&B or hotel room during our visits so I want it to make as little noise as possible. The replacement fan is a ball-bearing super-silent PC fan and runs at 12 Volts. 

The replacement was quite easy: Open the lower front by removing all crews around and bottom.  Disconnect the fan-connector from the electronics board.  Unscrew the old fan.  Screw the new fan in place.  Connect the new fan to the electronics board, replace the housing part and screw it back in place.

So- the result is that this cooler now actually works a lot more silent, AND a lot better.

I could not get a fixed dBm reading with my portable dB-meter due to the low noise level.

Cooling goes faster than before at about 30% as I measured it in difference in the before- and after situation in cooling to 5 degrees C from room temp of 25 deg C.  Another succesfull project!

We’ll see how we like this cooler during our short stay in France this summer, in Granville!  C) JG 2021-06-30.

Afterthoughts:  To be sure that the cooler is indeed super silent at night, I also put in a DC voltage regulator that can regulate the voltage for the fan between 5 V DC and V max (about 12Volt).

During oiur holiday in France, the machine worked awesome.

In the hotel, we experienced no disturbances from the cooler at all, nore in the car.

And it kept everyrhing cool without too much noise.

 

The performance of my larger sites left a lot to be desired, and the costs are running up considerably.  I had over 10 sites running, all with the same provider and the costs per site vary between 185 Euros per year and 65 Euros per year.  For the large sites I have 5GB storage and the smallest is 200MB.

HOMESERVER: Previously I hosted a few websites from home, on a Zyxel NAS with a cheap domain provider.  That all worked fine then.  Based on my previous experience I have bought a Synology DS718+ web server, a few fast SSDs with mirroring in it and up to RAM.  The cost is about 800 Euro.  As a backup I have a DS218 play with a couple of big harddisks in it and extra RAM as a normal local NAS with an extra mirrored wordpress server for emergencies and maintenance on the main server.

So now you see this post from my home server.

My experience is that it is always better to be the only one on your own web server than to rent shared hosting, regardless of the so-called SSD hosting et cetera.  That’s what larger companies do as well: Just a fat server on a fast internet connection.

Just to be sure, I do have a backup (UPS) with battery for the 230 Volt power to the internet modem/router and web servers, and a data connection backup via a mobile connection, in case the internet connection goes down. The autonomy of the UPS is about 6 hours.

 

And… whether I like it?  Actually, I’m mostly very happy with the merging of my various sites into 1 overall site because of its clarity.  Because of my diversity of interests I had just too many sites running which resulted in insufficient attention on the sites.  Now that I only have one for my hobbies and one for my business everything has become much simpler.

And how to proceed? I will cancel my webhosting and I have to see which domains I want to keep.  That also depends a bit on the costs.  If only the costs of the domains are not too high, I can keep 6 or so. Which I then redirect (fixed, 302) to my home server.  Eventually only 1 domain will remain, but which one should that be…?  And then I can make my URL unambiguous again!

That’s it!

Pocket watch ‘Cylindre 10 rubis’

 

I bought this watch on eBay, state to be a pre-WW2 pocket watch.

It does not run and the main spring appears broken.

But- it is in a repairable state and everything moves easily.

Most importantly- it has not been tampered with.

In my search for similar watches i could not find any with identical  inner mechanics, all watches that appear to be alike have different gears and so on.

I will update the repair later.