Albany is the capital city of the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Albany County, and the central city of New York’s Capital District. Roughly 135 miles (217 km) north of the City of New York, Albany sits on the west bank of the Hudson River, about 10 miles (16 km) south of its confluence with the Mohawk River. The population of the city was 97,856 at the time of the 2010 census.
For simple rugged power distribution it's hard to beat these rugged Ceeform connectors. They're available in a range of current and voltage ratings with suitable colour coding and keying. They're so common that they literally only cost a few pounds each in quantity for the basic blue/yellow 16A plugs/sockets.
They can be dropped from height, dragged across rubble and left out in arduous weather conditions without too many problems. The fact they're made of resilient plastic with long overlapping lips means that they can be handled relatively safely in wet conditions.
One thing I didn't mention was that the black bodied connector is specifically designed for the entertainment industry where it blends in better than coloured connectors.
I love these connectors. Easy to wire and super-rugged. The most common problems I have with them are broken wires or very rarely a welded contact on higher current connectors. They're cheap and common, so easy to keep spares in stock. Swap or reterminate and they're back in action.
I have seen these in the Empire Plaza and was wondering how they worked and the benefits of them for connecting and disconnecting high voltage, high current loads.
It's often okay when building small electronic projects to use inexpensive Chinese-manufactured microprocessors and electronic components. If they go bad, especially in self-build projects, you can replace them. But you should never cheap out on power supplies, as the built in isolation of the power supplies is what keeps you safe from fire and potentially deadly shock. Good quality USB phone chargers aren't that expensive, and buying them a reputable source like a big box store is much safer then getting them over the internet.
High voltage direct current is superior in many ways to alternating current, as it has no losses from impedance, but the arcing problem is a severe one -- high voltage DC has no "zero crossing point" -- so ultra-hot plasma arcs can be hard to extinguish with a poor connections. Normally, when you break alternating current, every 1/120th of a second the voltage drops to zero, which means plasma arcs are not sustained for long in a broken connection with an air gap. But that doesn't happen with direct current. Of course the fault could have been purely resistivity without plasma arcing -- a poor connection could have increased resistance in the line and created heat, and that can happen with both AC and DC.
Mechanical DC switches -- even at low voltage -- have to be built quite a bit thicker and have wider gaps to extinguish plasma arcs compared to similar AC switches. Transistors are much better at breaking DC arcs. The bad thing with transistors is they have a voltage loss, which means electricity is wasted as heat. The 200 amp DC relay in my truck between the batteries makes one hell of a clunk when you disconnect the load. It has to disconnect and connect quickly, and over a decent sized gap to minimize the time the plasma is burning the contacts. And that's only at 12-15 volts DC, where the amount of arcing is limited. This Technology Connections video does a good explaining why switches go "click" and why it's good thing -- you want switches to open and close quickly to break the connection fast and extinguish plasma arcs that burn the metal in the contacts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrMiqEkSk48
A ram pump is simply a boost converter for water, although I guess a boost converter came after the ram pump. But regardless, it's a pretty neat technology for pumping water uphill.
