Home Power System Thermal Imaging and Load Test

A couple of weeks ago I saw that someone on the forum completed a load test on their breakers and use a thermal imaging camera. I quickly found a AccuMEMS thermal imaging camera on sale at Amazon for just over $100. After scanning my house and my wife a few times, I decided to conduct a 5 minute load test with a 1,300 watt space heater on my gear and take some thermal images myself. I wanted to see where I might find an inefficient connection or piece of hardware. I’m not sure that the test was long enough, but it was fun seeing where everything got a little warmer.

BEFORE LOAD CONDITIONS
44 degrees F ambient air temp.
51.4 degrees F battery temp.
91.8% SoC, 13.29vDC

LOAD CONDITIONS
I have a 2,000 watt Renogy inverter. I plugged in a 1,300 watt space heater and started warming things up. It was drawing 113A. After stopping the test, I was at 88.3% SoC.

OBSERVATIONAL RESULTS
The Blue Sea Systems 200A breaker stayed cool throughout the test. You can see the temperature on the thermal images. The hottest part of the system were the pure copper lugs. I shouldn’t even use the word hot, as nothing really started warming up.

IMAGES from LEFT to RIGHT
Back of inverter during load test
Space heater element
T-class fuse (vertical) and 3/0 cabling to the isolation switch
Breaker and wiring

NEXT TIME
More load, longer test. It was a fun mini test that didn’t show any hot spots. Trial and error and experimentation…

Titan Missile Silo SCUBA Dive in eastern Washington

Tucked between farmlands around 45 minutes east of Ellensburg, WA is a large privately owned land swath with scattered heavy machinery, assortments of pipe, and a 1960s Titan 1 Missile Silo. If you’d like to move directly to my latest GoPro video album, find it at https://gopro.com/v/611754f1-6fa5-47fd-88ea-61b8400992a4.

There are three launch tubes, but only two that you will dive.

walking through waist high water to one of the silos

The first part of the silo dive takes the longest. You will navigate through the 10 foot tube sections in waist high water. At times, you will surface swim because the water gets high enough to do so. This tube is mostly void of the walking platforms, which is why there are steel beams across the bottom of the tube sections.

Your first silo dive has the clearest water and is around 1-2 degrees warmer; this trip, the silo was 51 degrees of fresh groundwater all of the way down to 105 feet. You’ll step off a platform and descend. The cylindrical silo has a square i-beam structure all of the way to the bottom, which was used as a maintenance and support structure for the missile.

bottom of the first silo

This Silo dive was on March 15, 2026.

Managed Nextcloud Hosting and Why I Chose Librecloud

At first, Nextcloud was a fork of the groupware ownCloud. However, it quickly rose to a quality level that far exceeded its predecessor. Today, Nextcloud is a full blown collaboration powerhouse with video calling, Collabera office suite, file management and so much more. It is used by government,ents, small businesses and individuals as a replacement for big name software like Microsoft Office and Dropbox.

I’ve used Nextcloud throughout the years, both self-hosted and managed hosting. Most recently, I found LibreCloud managed Nextcloud hosting. It uses the StorageShare.net hosting platform.

Librecloud is wicked fast in Washington state, reliable, and has great value. Monthly user subscriptions offer no data caps, built-in backups – although I backup to an SSD too, and a simple no-frills hosting experience.

https://www.librecloud.host/

After being disappointed by other managed hosting providers, LibreCloud and StorageShare.net have nailed the Nextcloud managed hosting service.