Daily Archives: October 14, 2005

The last of the several independant F1 Teams

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Come this weekend we will bid farewell to several independant F1 Teams. Two teams namely Minardi and Sauber will be taken over by Redbull Racing and BMW respectively. Coming to 2006 will also see the Jordan team loose their name to a new outfit.

With F1 becoming very competitive and having more and more races each year, it is becoming more difficult for such independant team to keep up with the escalating cost. Last year we have 17 races and this year, the number of races increased to 19. The ban in tobacco adverting in many racing track will also see many teams gaining less sponsors. Even BAR, British American Racing that feature their tobacco brand 555 and Lucky Strike in their racing car think it is better and wiser to sell their stake to Honda.

In the past, we too notice that it is generally difficult to keep independant team afloat. The Prost Racing Team formerly owned by Alain Prost went out of business, out of F1 without even able to find a buyer.

The departute of Paul Stoddart will no doubt have big impact on F1 arena. Paul being a very out spoken person often speak his mind loud and clear on many F1 issues. The recent one being his strong remark against the F1 President Max Mosley on US GP debacle. We are surely going to miss him.

Power backup for Koi Pond and Aquarium

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After keeping koi for a while and invested thousands on koi, ensuring continuous supply of oxygen to koi pond and aquarium water become extremely important. Otherwise, your investment may perish after a power breakdown that cut off the supply of electricity to compress air pump. Apart from occasional power breakdown due to TNB problem, there is always a possibility that the main circuit breaker may trip after a heavy thunder storm.

Running a 120 watt and a 40 watt Hi-Blow compressed air pump to supply compressed air the the main pond drain a lot of electricity. To cope with the possible power failure, my first investment was a backup system that is connected to two giant battery that we normal use for big lorry. During normal time, the backup unit will keep the battery charged and in the event of power failure, the power reserve in the battery unit will be used to power the 2 Hi-Blow that serve the koi pond.

We soon realize that such power backup system is only good enough if you will not be away from home for more than 2 days. Even if the backup system is used to power only the 40watt Hi-blow, it can barely last for one day. For longer period of absense, such backup system is no longer good enough for ensuring continuous supply of electricity.

Finally, we concluded that the best way to counter such problem is to rely on neighbour or friends who are willing to come to your home to turn on the power supply if the circuit breaker trip. Having to have friends of neighbour come to your house everyday is quite troublesome. We solve this installing a fax machine at home.Whenever we are away from home and wish to confirm that the power supply is alive, we will just call our fax number to see if the fax machine respond. In the event that the fax machine fail to respond, we will then call our friends or neighbour to check the power supply physically and turn it on if necessary. I have been replying on this simple, cheap and effective method to ensure that compressed air is alway available for our pond and aquarium water.

In the end of the day, the question is do we really need a power backup system ? My answer to this question is my do not need one at all. The reason being any power supply failure caused by TNB rarely last more than a few hours these days. In my absense, my koi are not fed at all and even without any oxygen supply, they should be able to survive by at least half a day.

October 14, 2005 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia