I've been having intermittent issues with my Polar H10, figured it would be helpful to have a spare HRM. The Coolspo H808S seemed to be pretty well-regarded as a budget HRM. It was $29 on Amazon, but over at AliExpress, with some back to school special and $3 off $15, it came down to $15 ($17 shipped) today. Too good to not take a chance on!
I have a fairly specific use case, and am wondering if something fairly economical exists for this: I have an indoor dehumidifier that's on for a couple of hours a day, drawing about 300w when running. Overnight I think it pulls about 600-900wh/day.
Is there a battery I can plug it into that does the following:
Powers the dehumidifier via battery from 4pm-12am, then automatically switches to AC at midnight (to align with my electricity TOU plan)?
Automatically switches to AC to power the dehumidifier if it draws the battery flat before the 12am cutoff?
Auto-charges itself every day starting at 12am so it's ready to power the dehumidifier again at 4pm?
Also, would this actually be energy/cost efficient? My gut says the conversion and transfer loss from AC->battery->appliance will probably net out any of the cost savings, but I'd like to explore this further.
I've been using the H10 for a couple of years now, still on the original strap, which TBH still looks new to me. I know straps eventually wear out and need replacing, but mine hasn't had any fraying, cracks, discoloration or apparent wear, so I just kept using it, for probably 500-600 miles.
Over time, I've found I've had to be more diligence about wetting it before a workout, or else the first 5-10 minutes would be intermittent. I just put up with it. Then, 50 minutes into a 60-minute run, it'd have 2-3 minutes of "frozen" heart rates. I tried replacing the battery in the H10 but otherwise lived with it. Some runs worked perfectly, others just had dead spots or very obvious "stuck" plateaus where the real-time reading very clearly was not updating.
The random-seeming errors and ineffective wetting just marginally increased over time, and eventually I got wise(r) and bought a $10 Amazon replacement strap. I tested the resistance (dry) against my old Polar strap using a multimeter:
Old Polar strap: 3 kOhm on one side, 100-300 kOhm on the other.
Cheap Amazon strap: 300-500 Ohm on each side.
A couple of runs with the new band confirmed, perfect sync and traces, no drop-outs. I also swear it updates faster now when working normally.
My takeaway: Don't put up with the random, recurring errors/failures. Even if your HRM strap looks fine, if it's been a few hundred miles, try getting a new one. It might save some frustration.
I've had this pond for a while and have "tended" to it once every few weeks, It's spent most of its life murky and brown/green. I've tried emptying gallons of algicide in it, changing the water, and nothing clears it up.
Earlier this summer I discovered a UV light attached the system that was unplugged and buried in the dirt. I plugged it in, and within a week the water became crystal clear. The bottom was still gunky so I spent a few days with a pool net fishing out all the slime covering the rocks.
It looks great now (to my eyes) but is clear actually healthy? Is there something I should do to make sure the plants are getting what they need?
I've been running Zone 2, and usually finish runs feeling like I still have 30-40% in reserve. Of course on some days I'm not up for it, but when that happens my HR spikes way earlier and I have to go to walking speed, or just end the run early. In any case, I try to be SUPER disciplined about never exceeding my Zone2 max HR of 150bpm. But there's always a correlation between tiredness and HR going up.
Today, I went to a track for the first time, thinking the flat ground would be an easier run. Oddly enough, I had trouble keeping my HR up at my target. I'd be running at a pace faster than I normally do, look at my watch and see my HR is 15bpm lower than normal. I then had to speed up and I could feel it was taking more energy than normal, just to get to 145bpm, and at times I felt winded if I tried to breathe out of my nose, which is usually never a problem on these runs.
In the end, I did run 2 miles more than I normally would in the same time, and my average and max HRs were identical, but I felt seriously winded--more tired and exhausted the whole day, whereas normally I'd be fine within the hour.
What component of fatigue am I missing? I guess I just didn't have it in my head that I could be exerting a ton of effort without it impacting my HR?
I haven't run in over 4 years, life/kids/work got in the way. Gained 30lb, feel gross, now looking to turn the tide.
I started running again a couple of weeks ago, but decided on a whim to get a baseline VO2 measurement from something other than my wristwatch, so I have a DexaFit appt tomorrow, which I assume is on a metabolic cart thing. I opted to for the "jogging" measurement rather than the full run, since I'm not exactly in shape.
Other than the "no caffeine water fast," anything to be aware of, or ask while I'm there? Will I get a detailed readout of heart rate zones and stuff? I realize I probably should have done a bit more preliminary research first, but that ship has sailed.
Western US, came out of a shower drain. This is the largest indoor spider I've ever seen, body length w/o legs just under 1". Roughly 2" wingspan.
He's safely outside now, need to know when the babies might hatch.
I'm noodling with the idea of a tablet charging mount that works like a Switch mount - it would be nice to slide in effortlessly without the USB-C connection needing to be pressed/snapped into place. Are there connectors that do this?
It needs to be pretty low-profile (the whole thing would be less than 1.5cm tall) so while I'm not opposed to pogo-pin type connectors, these would presumably add unwanted height to the tablet stand/mechanism.
This is probably a dumb take, but one thing keeping me from going the 8311 route is concern that the ONT on a stick, plus the fiber jack/cable protruding, is going to stick out too far in my rack and the swinging glass door will crimp the fiber when it closes.
Can someone measure how far the SFP sticks out with a fiber cable plugged in at an acceptable 90 degree bend?
I have a mobile GMRS radio, and every so often, usually early in the morning, I'll turn it on and it'll act like it's in monitor mode - every channel will break squelch even if there's nothing transmitting, and the RX meter will show 2/9 on most channels. From what I can see, it otherwise receives signals just fine.
I can up the squelch and that helps, but I find it's very sensitive and that starts to cut out actual transmissions as well as repeater squelch tails.
Another thing - when this happens, usually a few hours later by late morning it clears up and the radio behaves normally.
I'm most worried about whether there is moisture in the NMO housing or getting into the RG58 cable causing a short of some kind. But I don't know how a shorted antenna behaves, what should I expect in that situation?
Is there anything else I can try?
Looked over the manual but still confused about a few things:
What do all the icons in the top row of the display mean? Does anyone have a clear legend of what these mean?
How does "Scan" work? I can start the scan and it cycles through all the channels/freqs in the current group, but it just keeps going to the next channel even if there is active traffic on the current one being scanned. And also I can't find a way to stop the scan at a channel I hear comms on, when I turn off the scan it just goes back to the channel I was originally on.
Looking over my network stats and I see something curious. It looks like every 24 hours and 1 minute, there's a blip in the WAN connection. Like clockwork:
I assume there's some nightly maintenance or cron job going on, but curious if this is a thing.
I never notice any drop or hiccup in the actual internet connection, this is really just log-peeping and curiosity.
I have an NUC in my network rack running Home Assistant, it's connected to my UDM-SE with a direct 1m patch cable. Looking at my network, this is the one device with significant packet loss, roughly 6k rx retries and rx drops every hour.
I tried using a different patch cable, with no change. Next, I plugged the NUC into a free port on my Pro Max 16, which is in the same rack, and now I'm seeing zero retries/drops. Great news, right? Sure, but I'd also like a better sense of what the root cause is. Is there something going on with my UDM-SE? Any suggestions on how to further troubleshoot?
Btw, despite the retries, I never see any major problems or lags/timeouts, and it's not noticeably faster now that it's on the PM16. It usually transfers a consistent 3-10Mbps across the network so it's not particularly high-bandwidth.
Hoping someone can help with a few questions I have:
Can it transmit on 462-467Mhz?
If you get the optional BT mic, do you EVER need the wired speaker/mic connected? If I install the headunit behind a panel, I'm trying to understand if I will ever need to dig it out.
Does the main unit power down when the BT mic disconnects? I'm looking for a mobile install, connected directly to car battery terminals, and I want to know how convenient it is to turn the headunit off with the BT mic (do you just power down the mic and that also puts the headunit into standby mode?)
Do you have to pair the BT mic every time you turn it on, or is it just the first time? And it automatically
There's a speaker in the headunit as well as the handheld speaker/mic, correct?
