u/Ill-Button9775

I’m in Wilmington, so the humidity and salt air are rough. The hose reel in the backyard has been a pain.

The regular reel I had never really dried out after the hose was wound back in. The housing stayed damp, then it started getting moldy and smelled bad. After a while the metal parts started rusting too, and the reel got harder to retract. Feels dumb since it’s just holding a hose, but stuff seems to go bad fast here.

I recently tried a stainless wall-mounted hose reel. Mainly picked it because it’s stainless, so I figured it might hold up better than plastic or painted metal.

Not sure if this is a real long-term fix though. Anyone in humid or coastal areas have maintenance tips for outdoor hose reels? Do you spray the moving parts with silicone or marine grease, or just rinse the salt off once in a while and keep it aired out?

I mean tbh even with AI it's still a bit tedious 🫠

Context: I recently switched subfields and my PI asked me to put together a quick overview of where things have been heading over the last 5 years.

Sounded simple enough.

I started with Google Scholar, filtered by year, followed a few citation trails, and somehow ended up with around 80 papers open or downloaded.

Reading the individual papers isn't really the problem. The part I'm struggling with is figuring out which changes actually mattered.

A lot of the work looks like slightly different methods tested on slightly different datasets, and since I'm new to the field, I don't have a good sense yet of which papers actually shifted things versus which ones were just part of a short-lived direction.

I tried keeping a spreadsheet with methods, datasets, and main findings, but pretty quickly it started feeling like I was cataloging papers rather than understanding them.

I also tried putting some of them into mira from deep principle earlier today and grouping the literature by broader research directions. That made it a little easier to see which approaches kept showing up, but I still don't really trust myself to know what's genuinely important versus just frequently published.

How do you usually do this when you're entering a new field?