PVC and ingenuity for the win
Challenge accepted! When she who has a solution that doesn’t match the problem, I get to play. This time around, we have four small light fixtures with solar panels attached. Meant to be used outside, but in a warmer climate, I suspect. You see, the fixtures come with ground spikes, made from the same rigid plastic as the actual gadget, and once the temperature drops to (our) normal winter range, things get broken. This time around, we’re blaming the dog on a rope, but it could have been anyone or anything that stumbles around in the snow.
At the hardware store, after careful measurements, a sale of two sections of PVC pipe was concluded. At home (perhaps due to shrinkage, or something) there wasn’t any chance that this would provide a replacement ground spike. To my credit, I keep OTHER diameters of PVC pipe around; the last time, I needed to determine the height of a local RV, and something “ten feet long” is sold as conduit locally. With some careful saw technique, and a session of “bend until it breaks”, we now have four possible contenders for me to test, tomorrow, in daylight. It might work. If not, I now have a shorter pole to use for measuring the height of nearby objects. And the store sells more of the same.
I think that’s the bigger half of home ownership: finding how to fix stuff at a minimum price. We can’t buy new indefinitely, what with fixed income and other constraints. I’ll see if I inherited any of those blacksmithing skills from my grandfather.
I sorted my RPi collection this evening. Dating back to the fall of ’12, I’ve believed that you can solve many needs with a bit of SBC (single board computing). And I have managed to get a wide cross-section of the product line, it appears.
