1202 ALARM

Okay green energy fans and cheapskates who love getting something cheap, here is my quick guide to getting a home electric vehicle (EV) charging point installed. First of all you are entitled to a grant of up to £500 against the installation from the Office for Low Energy Vehicles (OLEV), which your installer will process for you. After some research we went for the EO 32-amp charger installed by Baird Electrical and this cost us £250 after the grant was applied. The installation was very straightforward as the charging point is beside the meter box on the outside of our house which itself is on the driveway. The EO charger is the simplest to operate and all that was required in the meter box was a 40-amp RCBO in a separate consumer unit.  After getting the charging point installed we decided to switch to a Day/Night meter to get half-price electricity at night to charge the car. Our supplier is Airtricity and the night rate in the summer runs from 12:00am until 9:00am...

Another broken television, this time a slimline 32-inch Bush which had suffered a cracked LCD during a house move. So I took off the LCD panel and dumped that and behind we have 22 high-output LEDs as a backlight. These are 3-volts each and wired in series so that the current can be kept constant and relatively low, which means the power supply has a 66-volt feed out to the backlight. Luckily the power supply is working fine so it was easy to rig a test (always being careful not to electrocute oneself, kids) and even control the light using the power button on the old remote. It is very bright and looks amazing. The only downside is where to put the power supply so that it is out of harm's way and earthed because the remnant case is metal. Unfortunately it is just too wide to sit in between the 2 rows of LEDs inside the box, but I'll work on it.

We've been collecting the last remnants of the Wow-Wee Light Strike series over the last few years because for home laser tag these are great fun. http://rgwni.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/i-bought-couple-of-these-light-strike.html Unfortunately, the prices on eBay have got completely out of hand and there are very few items left in the UK, so finding this working pistol in the Barnardo's charity shop in Carrickfergus for £1.99 was a stroke of luck. It means we can have a side arm each to go with our pulse rifles when we're playing Starship Troopers!

In a fit of nostalgia I ordered up 'Making A Transistor Radio' from a second-hand book seller on eBay a couple of weeks ago. This wasn't entirely necessary as the book has been scanned, PDF'd and uploaded several times over the last few years, but I wanted, no, I needed a copy. Why? Because this is where it all began, my obsession with technology and anything that needs electricity to run. As some of you are aware my grandfather Bertie Walsh was one of the first radio amateurs in Ireland and had his original licence under Marconi's patents. His callsign was GI4RY and if you Google that you can still find a couple of references and I think a scan of one of his QSL cards. He made his fortune as a cinema magnate in the 1930s and was fascinated by the technology of the time. So I grew up with this wonder for anything connected to radio or television and my earliest memory (aged 3) was the adults (mainly drunk) going mental in July 1969 when a certain man stepped ...

I've been fiddling about with a 40" Samsung LCD television today. I was given this free because the power board had packed in. The previous owner had attempted a repair by replacing the 'Bad Caps' (i.e. blown electrolytic capacitors, Google that one!), but the de-soldering and soldering was a bit ropey looking so I tidied that up and replaced 2 of the capacitors myself as one didn't look right and the other was the wrong value. I managed to find a schematic diagram online for the board (Hansol SIP400B), which was helpful in identifying the capacitor values. Anyway, I put it back in the TV and powered it up and all the voltages coming off the board are correct, but all it does is click. This is the result of a relay on the board switching the circuit from  standby to power on. The red LED on the front panel lights and the set is receiving IR signals from the remote control. This is really frustrating, but as 95% of these boards suffer from Bad Caps, I might just...

I was having a clear out and found this homemade keypad. I built this as part of my computing project when I was training to be a teacher in 1989. I used to go up to the Maplin store in Edgeware on the tube to get parts, or Cricklewood Electronics which was like the Old Curiosity Shop. This wasn't cheap either, I had to buy about 20 of the switches with separate caps, but it looked good when it was done with the Letraset transfer letters. The keypad was wired to a Sinclair Spectrum to allow entry of Logo-ish commands to a Lego Technic robot buggy. Happy days!

(Apologies to Mason Williams) We switched our central heating to a gas boiler in November, which is working out really well, but the stove presented a bit of a challenge. This has been our main source of heat and hot water for over 5 years with the oil boiler acting as a back-up coming on for an hour in the morning and again in the early evening until the stove was lit and up to heat. With the gas boiler the central heating has changed to a pressurised system which is incompatible with the stove's back boiler. The concern was in running the stove 'dry' as we like having a fire in the winter. Would the existing copper pipe overheat or worse? The solution was to create a separate mini gravity-fed convection heating system with one radiator. Admittedly this is the highest-output radiator I could get from ScrewFix at 2.2kW which would fit the available wall space on the landing. The plumber removed the special £600 dual-coil copper tank (groan) and moved the expan...