Comments by "Stephen Villano" (@spvillano) on "Andrew Lam" channel.

First, the photoelectric aren't a panacea. Period. Fog, such as from my neighbor's meat locker set air conditioner and her cigarette smoke would set one off incessantly. Dust will set them off incessantly. Mist and steam will set them off. Now, the magic sauce has been available for as long as both types of detector, ionization and photoelectric and it ain't Harry Potter's magical fuck stick, it's a combination photoelectric and ionization detector, which is commonly used in commercial grade detectors in businesses. Downside being, the cost a fair amount more. My ionization detector failed silently, which is plain evil of it, silent failures are bad. Maintenance tried just popping a battery in and running, I poked it with my cane, it stayed silent, maintenance was annoyed in having to go back up the ladder and pop a replacement in. In irritation, he handed it to me. Good, I'm an electronics guy, component level, I stripped that board down. In mid-build for a radiation detector and cloud chamber for the radioactive source, the rest are loose components. The ionization circuit unchanged in well over 30 years (and basically the same detector for photoelectric or ionization, it's a comparitor and well, it compares the level read, say a quarter second before and now). The Americium source shrank by over half, which is fine. Oh, my sense of smell has been out on a powder for decades, awake or asleep. So yeah, I need that detector and well, if some food is dodgy, someone to sniff it... No cheap detectors for that yet. But, 90% of what he said on ionization, hyperbole, likely for pay. The rest, overstated, but loosely accurate. Get the dual model, minimal falses, it'll detect great. Oh, figured out the silent failure by spilling some instant au gratin potatoes in the oven unnoticed, then was reading e-mail. Looked up to see a pall of smoke and had an "Oh, shit!" moment, as I really didn't want to set off the entire apartment building alarm system over a cooking mishap. So, popped the windows, ran the fans and ignited some fumes with profanity. OK, maybe not that last part, but profanity was involved. Aired the place out, no annoyed neighbors and fire department, a wee bit less of a red face. Detector was replaced by maintenance, mischief managed. And thanks to maintenance, a new science project was born that'll make a great conversation item at parties, as the radiation detector I'm building is of a CERN design for a particle spectrometer, so it can identify the element based upon its radioactive fingerprint (specifically, energy level). Not too shabby for $50 in parts. The cloud chamber is just a couple of shitty busted lid Amazon food storage containers that are getting repurposed, a chunk of heat sink, some blue freezer packs and that super secret ingredient, hot water. Shhhhh... See PhysicsHigh for details on the cloud chamber. CERN's education outreach website for the experiments. Me for a 62 year old guy with a cane on a stripper pole, I need the money putting it back on again... OK, not the last, really, I've no desire to end up in traction for the next six months. Yeah, dad humor meets EMS humor, deal with it.
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Another difference is Japan supplies 100 volts three-wire single-phase, the US 120 volts three-wire single-phase. One potential issue with the Japanese system is a neutral fault, as both require the neutral center tap be grounded at the transformer, the US also at the home and neutral and ground bonded. That lessens issues, but fails to completely eliminate them in the US system if a neutral fault occurs, from your description, the Japanese system would exasperate the problem by a fair amount due to load imbalances in that same scenario. Given the technical descriptions I've read thus far on the Japanese electrical distribution system for residential power, it looks pretty much the same until the breaker panel, although the neutral - ground bonding is likely done at the service entry/meter, rather than at the breaker panel. Still, it makes greater sense to GFCI the entire home electrical system and Japan had an advantage in doing so early on, given the nation had to essentially rebuild most of their infrastructure after a bit of an unpleasant disagreement back in the 1940's. The US, well, we tend to hold onto things, so we've got parts of Edison's original DC system still in place, retrofitted to AC, terracotta water pipes in some cities (I know for a fact Philadelphia still has many) for water supply, lead pipes still persisting in the water supply in some cities, etc. Total Frankensteinian systems here, bastardized to pseudomodern "standards", with tragic results at times and pretty much an attitude of "let someone else pay to upgrade things to modern standards" until they fail utterly. So, we'll get water main breaks in 150+ year old pipes leveling parts of city blocks by undermined foundations, an electrical system that's a century and spare change old and don't get me started on our sewage systems in older cities... And occasionally, somewhat comedic events, such as when we had a power outage in my apartment building, where half of the building remained lit, somewhat chaotically (some floors had no lights, others had half the building lit), my own apartment in the dark, but the 220 volt AC unit behaving rather oddly due to logic failures, LED night lights operated, nothing else did and really odd voltages, as the outage was due to a neutral fault from pole to building. So, the entire building of hundreds of apartments lost neutral to the pole, the neutral then completing a circuit back via ground and/or via conduction between loads from hot to hot via the 220 hots. There are videos here on youtube about "neutral fault". Can create interesting issues, to put it mildly, each circuit's hot-neutral voltage was entertainingly different in different parts of the building and well, it took me a couple of minutes to figure out the problem and call the power company about it, as it was at the pole and not the building's service lines that the apartment owned and I'd have had to explain to rather sleepy maintenance personnel what was wrong... It was fairly late and I don't sleep that many hours, rarely have. And I was bored anyway... I suspect that the Japanese system would trip the power and protect the equipment in such a scenario. If anyone is intimately familiar with the Japanese power system and the precise protections of the main breaker, please do respond on if I'm correct. It would be quite along the philosophy of Japanese engineering, "why solve one problem when we can solve three with one solution?". I'd also be curious if arc protection is also in the standard or soon to be.
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@hccheng6248 way cool! I suspected that was the case. It's a shame that the video's CC didn't work though. Alas, I speak only a couple of words of Japanese, not even enough to gain cardinal directions. I'd still go with outlets with the grounding screw though, for specialized equipment's protection usage. Always better to have more options than less, as long as one properly utilizes those options when called for and not just to just use something that's available for no valid reason.
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