Reddit refuge, escentric engineer and serial hobbyist.

  • 4 Posts
  • 114 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle



  • I know way too much about the propagation of plasma in fluorescent lighting. When you first hit a fluorescent tube with high voltage you need some cosmic radiation to rip off the first barium ion off the cathode which causes a tiny little lightning strike of plasma that skitters across the inner surface of the tube. Once it makes its way across the length of the tube to the anode you now have a conductive path. This path then grows tremendously until it envelopes the whole cross section starting from the anode and works it’s way back to the cathode until the whole tube is filled with wonderful plasma that makes light when it excites the phosphor coating.











  • When I bought them 2 years ago power in MA was $0.46 per kWh, this included transmission costs and all the other fees. 15W cost me $4.80 a month, so $57.6 a year and $230 over 4 years. At the time 14TB mechanical disks were about $300 so it was about a $270 ‘premium’ for solid state over mechanical so I exaggerated the ROI, but to me the 2x price premium was worth it for silence and no latency on retrieving my data. So in summary the ROI for me was more like 8 years, ignoring the many advantages of SSD.