A Reddit Refugee. Zero ragrets.

Engineer, permanent pirate, lover of all things mechanical and on wheels

moved here from lemmy.one because there are no active admins on that instance.

  • 8 Posts
  • 259 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

help-circle





  • Special care has to be taken in whatever house you live in to protect your plumbing from freezing. Generally most places in snow zones will be built with freeze protection in mind so you won’t need to do too much. But exposed faucets (even frost free types) can freeze and burst back inside your walls, as can any other exposed pipe, or even those not exposed if your house loses it’s source of heat. A burst pipe floods everything and will ruin your house.

    • Cover any exposed faucets with a foam cover (any hardware store will have them)
    • Never let the inside of your house drop below 55F/12C; that internal heat seeps into the walls and floor and is what keeps your plumbing working.
    • Check if the house has a crawlspace that requires additional heating to prevent freezing, and make sure any pipes in said crawlspace are fully insulated with foam tape and ideally have “pipe tape” or cable heaters under the insulation and plugged in.
    • If you’re in an area that relies on ground water wells rather than a city supply, you may also have a pump house outbuilding that requires heating.
    • A chicken brooder lamp like this with a 100w incandescent lightbulb or 250w infrared heat lamp (depending on level of insulation and outside temperatures) in it is the best way to safely heat these small spaces with minimal fire risk.

    Additional prep should be taken to make sure you can maintain house heat even if the power goes out for an extended period of time due to snowfall taking out trees onto power lines. Should have some form of non electric heat that can be used indoors safely, e.g a wood stove, or have a generator with at least 24hr of reserve fuel that can run your furnace for a few hours at a time (assuming propane or oil furnace, and not a heat pump or electric resistive furnace).












  • Fusion free has a ton of limitations though, namely on model exports and drawing creation and commercial use (so e.g in my case, I can’t use it to make contract models to print and recoup my costs from buying the printer, and I also like to make drawings for everything I model esp. if it requires machining). And I’m extremely not fond of the “cloud” model stuff it depends on.

    It admittedly is one of the most affordable subscriptions out there, but it is still a subscription. I use it if I have to, but Autodesk is liable to pull the plug on the free part at any time.


  • Modelling really is the difficult part. I’m an engineer and CAD is a large part of my day job so I use printing almost exclusively as a way to refine my modelling skills, but it’s taken me years to get good enough at it to be quick. Then on top of that, most “good” software is gated behind insane subscription costs that no normal user can afford. So you get stuck with stuff like FreeCAD, which admittedly is OK but very very clunky for anything other than simple geometric shapes, and it makes it much harder than it needs to be.