Regulated

Honestly, I'm boring myself with the heating system. Tomorrow, if I don't do anything else, I'll go out and take a photo of a boat or something. But today was more heating-related messing. The controller for the underfloor heating. 

Here's the problem. The transformer has two outputs - a 12v rail and (nominally) a 24v rail. After the bridge rectifiers that make the AC into DC, they go through smoothing capacitors. The one on the 12v rail is rated at 16v, which is good(ish) but it's busted - swollen and measuring 400-odd uF rather than its rated 2200uF. So I replaced that with one rated 25v for some extra headroom. The one on the 24v rail is also rated at 16v, which not good at all, especially when there's 29v on that rail. But it's not busted. I'm replacing it anyway for one rated 35v. 

There's a couple of resistors that have literally vaporised, which is a little concerning though there's nothing to indicate why but they are linked to a couple of LEDs that should light up when something is happening. Those LEDs are also busted. Not sure if I need to bother with them. Nothing seems to depend on them. So I think I'll just put the controller back and see if it works. It seems massively complicated for what it's being asked to do and it has 6 channels and we've only used two. Possibly, if the channels we've used are broken we can just move along to two of the unused channels and get another 15 years out of it and, realistically, by that point I'll be close to death and it'll be someone else's problem.

Other than that I did the shopping and made a giant pot of chicken bhuna, had a nap and watched a couple of films. 

The photo is a 5v regulator - put a higher voltage in and get a steady 5v out. It's working fine. I only took a (terrible) photo of it because it's so small that I couldn't read the text on it. Sorry, I'll do better tomorrow.