Electrical Safety Standards Slipping

Where do I start? Two years ago, in the course of my job, I was testing some plugboxes on the school’s PAT tester, and one failed with an earth continuity problem. And it turned out, the plugbox, which carried the HPM brandname, was so poorly designed that the earth contacts became bent on plug insertion and therefore contact was unreliable. After years of doing this testing, these particular type of plugboxes, this particular model and not other models of the same brand, always failed the test and we had to ditch them. So I talked to Energy Safety Service, part of the Ministry of Economic Development. And they said “We can do nothing”. My extrapolation from what they are saying is that there is nothing in the electrical safety standards and certifications for plugboxes that requires them to be designed for an endurance of any particular number of insertion cycles. In the computer industry, insertion cycles are quite commonly found in standards for computer connectors like USB and hard disk plugs and sockets. What is standard in our industry, worldwide, for some unfathomable reason cannot be put into such a basic piece of electrical equipment as a plugbox in its design requirement.

Now fast forward to this week. I bought a couple of heaters, and I ended up with questions about the electrical standards for these. Most people in the electricity industry know about Class 1 and Class 2 appliances; I know about them because I have to test them as separate processes on a PAT tester. Class 1 is an earthed appliance, which is quite common for devices with a metal case, because it can be tricky for the metal to be insulated from any electrically live parts inside an appliance. This is especially true of heaters, because metal is often the only material that can withstand the heat of operation. Class 2 is a double insulated appliance, and for a heater this is generally a plastic body, which is usually a fan heater, because the airflow carries the heat away and prevents it building up, and because often enough inside that plastic body is some metal such as the grill and element supports which help contain the heat inside the body and prevent it melting.

So it was a great surprise to me to find that De Longhi has started to produce a line of convection heaters, metal bodied, which are labelled “double insulated” and have only a two wire cord. As you will see in the picture below, what is the difference between one of these heaters and a cheap clone, which just happens to have a three wire cord and an earth terminal on the body?

Clone	De Longhi

You can see that the clone has a terminal, and there is a wire going to it on the inside. The De Longhi has the hole for the terminal, but no wire. Those wires you can see in the right hand picture are all carrying mains current, and they go onto spade terminals which are generally exposed. In addition, the heating element on these types of heaters, like fan heaters, is generally uninsulated wire. Once again the Energy Safety Service have been helpful in explaining that, these days, double insulation means air can be used as an insulator. So there is no innate requirement for that metal chassis to be earthed, if all the live parts are insulated by enough air from the chassis. So what’s the hitch? Well, wires can break or come loose and end up touching that metal chassis, or if the chassis became bent it could touch the element – and that’s why traditionally, metal bodied heaters have been earthed and in most cases still are. I was in another shop today and had a look at a  lot of metal heaters. All the De Longhi convectors were “double insulated” and all the other various brands were earthed, including the ones that were obviously very similar, maybe copied from a De Longhi design. Yet, they are all the same basic design, almost identical inside.

Who decides these standards? They are international so they are not decided in NZ and I expect that because of some treaty that in NZ no ordinary citizen gets any input into them. Heaters are classified as a High Risk item and therefore more rules apply, but these rules appear to rely on a manufacturer providing the correct documentation. Once again there don’t appear to be any standards for the way these heaters are designed, just some vague expectation that they are supposed to meet a standard but not how that is achieved.

The big picture doesn’t stop at electrical safety standards. It goes on into any standard for anything that is traded in New Zealand. Our governments negotiate and enter into international treaties which do their best to wipe out any restrictions such as minimum standards. In a case such as these we are talking about a few cents difference in the manufacturing cost. Does that translate into a lower price for the consumer? I doubt that very much. The few cents over hundreds or thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of appliances, adds up to a significant difference in profit for the manufacturer. Does that trickle down back into the local community? That I also doubt greatly. Food for thought…

The Great Heater Hunt Part 2

The Great Heater Hunt is one man’s struggle to try to buy an electrical appliance that lasts 10 years or more… if such things are even possible these days at a reasonable price.
(I have one of these old clunker F&P 380/400 washing machines, you know, the ones with a concrete block inside them… they last forever if you can put up with how they don’t have all the bells and whistles)

I must be too picky over heaters, but these days it’s hard to know what will last. Ceramic and mica-thermic are two newish technologies that I haven’t been able to find out much about, and these days a lot of heaters like everything else are not made to last; there are stories even of oil columns that leak their oil. So I am just trying to find something that is made to last and will give me at least 10 years of use, of course it has to be safe and reliable. There is a surprising range of pricing, starting from $16 for a cheap fan heater at the Warehouse and going up to $450 for a panel heater at Harvey Norman. Why would anyone be prepared to pay that much?

The particular need is more efficient winter heating. On cold mornings it is adding to cost to have an oil column on timer coming on before getting up, to warm up the room. Therefore I am looking to save power by eliminating that warm-up time, choosing a heater that warms up instantly, because in a morning I’m not here for long enough to justify the fact that the oil column works most efficiently for longer periods of heating operation.
Therefore the choices narrowed down:

• Mica-thermic is pretty new and so far Consumer NZ has not reported on it. The longevity of some of these heaters is questionable, as is their ruggedness. There have been reports overseas that the mica sheets break relatively easily. Low to midrange pricing.
• Ceramic is also relatively new. All ceramic heaters I have seen are fan heaters. Do they have the other disadvantages of fan heaters? Low to midrange pricing.
• Lower end convector heaters have elements similar to fan heaters and often have a fan as well. How rugged or long-lived are the cheaper models? Low to midrange pricing.
• Oil columns main disadvantage is the slow heatup time. Low to high range pricing. Some more expensive models have fan or other technologies to heat up faster. However the DL2401TF from De Longhi is not available any more. Like other fanless convectors, basic oil columns are poor at distributing heat evenly.
• Oil less columns are available from Dimplex. It is basically a conventional convector heater in a column form factor. How rugged is it? Low to midrange pricing.
• Panel heaters, although made in a range of models, tend to be sold in the more expensive models with electronic controls in the examples I have found. Mid to high range pricing. (Goldair make models with manual controls but I have yet to find anyone selling them)
• Standard fan heater only if you can get a good quality one. Goldair have gone back to making higher quality ones, Delonghi always have but both are hard to find. Briscoes have the Goldair fans. The main issue with fan heaters is they dry the air out too much.

Here is my narrowed down list:

• Dimplex ECO oil less column. Prices vary $109.95 to $199.95 at Smiths City depending on model.
• Dimplex ceramic fan heater. May buy one of these for the 2nd bedroom, prices start at $79.95 from Smiths City.
• Kent aluminium panel heater $149.95 at the Warehouse, or any reasonable panel heater under $200.
• Delonghi convector heater HCS2030 $149.95 at Harvey Normans, or any reasonably good convector heater under $200. Try to find one with a fan as they are better at distributing airflow. (Briscoes have one on special at the moment, $79.95)

It’s possible I might buy two new heaters over two months, for the two bedrooms. The better quality heater for the main bedroom which I spend a lot of time in, and a ceramic fan for the 2nd bedroom which is used less. Goldair have a ceramic fan going for $50 at Briscoes at the moment.

Also looking at draught proofing the lounge and keeping an oil column there as I would not be in there for short periods much, a lot of the time I don’t use it at all.

UPDATE: Ended up buying the Delonghi convector and a Goldair ceramic fan from Briscoes for a total of $117. But I think any notion these days that you can buy something that will last – forget it unless you are prepared to pay much, much more. ‘Cause it’s obvious the idea of that has gone out the window to the point that manufacturers are dispensing with repair centres and parts supplies in countries like NZ. Your heater returned under warranty will get swapped out, and the old one may be shipped back to China for repair at the factory – and then put into the swap-out pool for other warranty claims. That doesn’t mean I have a gut feeling that I have bought a heater that will last 1 winter only – it just means that we have very little power to change what is becoming a throwaway marketplace even for major appliances, and few manufacturers can be bothered with making something to last that long or be repairable near point of sale.

It looks like as far as the living room goes I should consider another option, a radiant heater as these are better in draughty conditions since they directly heat you rather than the air. However I will go ahead with draughtproofing as much as possible but this might be tricky to do. Move flat and buy all new heaters, LOL …

Joining the e-music revolution

Surprisingly perhaps I haven’t rushed to join the e-music revolution. Until I got my phone with its music player a year or two back I didn’t own a device other than a computer that could play e-music. I always used a computer at home or at work to play music and videos. This is partly because I don’t in general put headphones on and listen to music anywhere I go, and because when my old Walkman cassette player broke it got replaced by a radio and I never got around to buying an MP3 player.

That’s now changing because of my work which will require me to move around different worksites, and also because of the convenience of being able to download music instead of buying a CD or DVD. Up until now I bought most Christian music from the shop and ripped the CD or DVD, but last week for the first time I bought a Hillsong album as a download from their website, which is much cheaper than buying a CD and convenient, too. I remember a few years ago buying a Kent Henry CD from the States. It took months to arrive and with the shipping it more than doubled the cost. Imagine now you can buy any praise and worship music from any artist directly over the Internet without paying the costs of physical media and distribution (CDs or DVDs) and shipping charges.

There are several ways of getting music like this. iTunes of course is king, but Amazon is giving them a run for their money. However, at present Amazon’s MP3 store is unavailable outside the US. This really means either the artists’ site or iTunes. Since I don’t yet own an iPod I will have to get one sometime. I don’t know much about how the iTunes DRM works with M4A files so I hope there is a way I can, in the meantime, get downloaded music onto my phone so that I can keep playing back on that until I get around to buying an iPod.

Well, I got iTunes installed and have managed to create an Apple ID so I could buy a track (Jeremy Camp – Overcome). This came down as an m4a file and Media player also recognised it. Therefore I was able to sync it to my phone. With iTunes I also managed to edit the info fields on the Hillsong God Is Able tracks I bought and downloaded at the weekend, so that they appeared properly in the album listing. I’m not sure why there was a problem with the MP3 ID fields if that is what the problem was, but the phone kept refusing to put 8 of the tracks into any album. At least now I have managed to get it to recognise that 10 of the tracks are in the same album but it still insists on creating another album for the 11th track. So far as the Jeremy Camp album goes, the fact the track is recognised and can be moved about suggests there is not any DRM on it. I suppose DRM is not mandatory on iTunes. With the hassle of the info fields and downloading the individual Hillsong tracks next time I will just buy it on iTunes.

Garmin eTrex 10 / 20

Garmin have a new eTrex range of low end hand held GPS units out. The eTrex 10 replaces the eTrex H (the one I currently have). At last USB is supported on these models. A few enhancements have been added to the 10 compared to the H while the price has been kept about the same. For serious mapping I would go for the next model up – the 20 – which can load and display topo maps with a colour display. How does this compare with a phone or Ipad? Well, there are no data charges which will save a lot of money over a longer distance or time. I will consider updating to the eTrex 20 at some stage.

Here is a review of the eTrex 20

Vacmaster VMVJ1218P Wet & Dry Vacuum

Repcos have had these vacuums on special at $99 in their March sale. This model appears to be at the bottom of the Vacmaster range. The US based company produces a number of models which appear to be solidly made and well designed. I couldn’t find this model on their website so it may be end-of-line.

Here it is next to the Hoover. There are several design differences, one of the biggest is that the Vacmaster doesn’t use bags for dry vacuuming therefore needing a separate filter for the dry operation. Like the Hoover a flimsy foam filter is fitted onto the bottom of the motor unit for wet use. Although the supplied head was smaller than the Hoover’s, the combination of a slightly more powerful motor and undoubtedly better design results in a much greater suction power. Consequently the performance is vastly superior with any water whether on hard surface or carpet vacuumed up in mere seconds. Whilst noisy it doesn’t have the annoying high pitched whine of the Hoover either, and its blowing performance is much better. (The Hoover appears to be a rebadged third party design due to its poor performance which I would think is not exactly a credit to its brand name)

The lack of bags means I can’t replace my standard cleaner with it and thus I will leave it in wet config, while keeping my existing dry cleaner as well; the Hoover gets banished to the garage as a result, where it will mainly be used in dry config (which is as simple as fitting a bag) to pick up sawdust etc.

Canon Powershot SX260 HS Camera

Canon recently announced the Powershot SX260 HS as the replacement for the SX230 (the GPS equipped superzoom compact with manual controls). This will probably be my next camera whenever it gets to NZ. It is interesting Canon have kept the 12.1 megapixel sensor. The lens has been increased to a 20x zoom and GPS is fitted. The non-GPS edition is the SX240, replacing the SX220, which for some reason has not been widely available here. The more recent pricing of the SX230 has been around $550 retail, now it is end of line there is a $50 cashback offer. It will be interesting to see if the SX260 is much dearer. I wouldn’t want it to be as it would be too much to spend on a camera that I would carry around with me everywhere. The SX240 will probably be about $50 cheaper. After all, the idea when I bought my first pocketable camera, which way back in 2005 was an A400, was to have the cheapest model in the range as a second camera to the much more powerful S1. I sort of carried on that way with an A450 and A460 (the 450 had to be replaced prematurely due to getting dust inside the lens) and then when I bought the A2000 I sort of dropped that idea with the jump in price. I imagine the SX260 is probably similar in size and weight to the A2000 and I will give the matter of whether to buy it as my go-everywhere camera some serious consideration.

The new A4000 is the logical successor to my A2000 (which is a bit old now for me, considering I buy a new camera every couple of years). It has 8x zoom instead of 6x and 16 megapixels rather than 10. One of the major differences is the use of a proprietary battery, so at the higher end of the Powershot range, this is more and more the case that AAs are not used any more. This is of little concern to me (the SX220-260 models are the same) since many of my AA sets need replacing due to loss of capacity. Why the A2000 didn’t get replaced last year (I bought it June 2009) is of course due to earthquakes and financial strain especially when I had to move house and almost doubled the weekly rent. As of now I have taken around 7400 pictures with it.

Review: http://www.digitalcamerainfo.com/content/Canon-PowerShot-SX260-HS-First-Impressions-Review.htm
Announcement by Canon NZ: https://canon.co.nz/About-Canon/News-Events/News-Press-Releases/PowerShot-SX-and-A-series

Home Heating for Winter

With some colder weather coming I have had the heaters on in my flat – almost unheard of for early March. At the moment all my heaters are De Longhi traditional type oil columns. The oldest, a Series 29 2000-watt 9-finner, has served me very well with a life of more than ten years – the reason I was prepared to fork out probably $200 for it at the time. The two new DL series are just as good although made in China rather than Italy. One thing you have to get used to when buying an oil column is the smell – it takes a while to go away but the wait is worth it. With the heaters fairly slow to warm up it is not very efficient to have to turn it on with a timer an hour before in winter so this year I am perhaps looking for something a bit faster.

Here I was surprised to find fan heaters seem to be falling out of the marketplace in NZ as there is quite a limited range produced, let alone on sale, in NZ. Last winter Dimplex had an industrial fan heater on the market, a bit dearer but likely to be longer lived, than the cheap plastic heaters the Warehouse sell, which seldom last more than one winter. Unfortunately the manufacturer does not have any such heaters in their NZ range now. Goldair have a range in their products site but these are hard to actually find in shops.

However, a few different brands including them have ceramic fan heaters which are a bit more sophisticated and dearer than the traditional fannie. They tend to be more expensive but this apparently translates into a longer life, which sounds good to me. You can also find a few oil columns and simple convection towers that have fans in them these days, to make them warm up faster.

Dimplex also have a thing called an Eco heater which looks just like an oil column but it is basically a hollow chassis with a more conventional tube element in it, so it heats up a lot faster than an oil column. Another new technology is the micathermic heater, which has a big surface area with an element covered in mica sheet, it will get to its full heat within a minute or two. There are some claims they are more efficient than an oil column

Therefore all the research I can find suggests there is a place for something that can heat a room up faster – perhaps a ceramic fan unit. Whereas your oil column is good where you are going to have it on all day, this isn’t so valuable just for the morning when you need heat for a short time.

UPDATE: Found Briscoes website and they have three trad Goldair fan heaters. The main issue is they don’t list any other types of heater in their website. In general this is the biggest problem with online shopping – retailers which have websites that don’t show their full range of products. Mitre10 is one of the worst in this respect with many products not shown on their sites.

UPDATE (14/3/12): At the moment the Kent panel heater is looking like the most attractive option. There seems to be a very mixed body of opinion on the merits or detractions of micathermic heaters with some reviewers suggesting they have a short life and/or are fragile, even the De Longhi ones get mixed reviews. Bunnings have this Kent model in their range and I will have to shoot over to one of their branches shortly in order to have a look at one. Looking at all the options over and over, the key thing is something that is safe to use and lasts a long time. Plastic fan heaters are very cheap these days but often have a fairly short life due to the motor seizing up, and are unstable on carpet. I’m not much of a fan of the old style bar heaters. Really that leaves you with one type or another of convection heater made of metal – oil (or oil-less) column or panel are my pick. Since I already have oil columns their slow heat up is an issue for the bedroom on a cold winter morning. So either the Dimplex oil free column or a panel type will be the preferred options I am going to look into now.