It's been around a year since I last did one of these updates. Within that year lots has changed, particularly the move to the DotNetNuke platform and now's a good time to do another update.

Over the years, the site has matured and along the way it's been a learning curve for myself. The main reason for doing these posts is to let anyone who is interested know how the site works behind the scenes.

Until the middle of last year, I was pretty focused on the mechanics of getting the site to work the way I wanted. This was immensely time consuming and clearly stopping me from developing the content – which is the main point of the site. Much of this was historical, with a large part due to maintaining functionality using an older version of Community Server.

We have had the Wiki with us for a long time now, but at last I have decided to say bye bye – more details on why below.

When making an opinion post (or adding a Note) to our site we have a great online WYSIWYG editor and things are pretty simple.  However, if you prefer you can write, manage and publish your posts using any external editor which implements the MetaWeblog API.  A popular free post editor is Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer.

Just added a page to the tools, which will allow you to calculate the synchronous speed, slip and rated torque for an induction motor. Not a particularly complicated calculation, but anything the makes life easier is welcome.

Induction Motor Calculator 

I’ve recently added a special pages section to the Wiki. Here you can find a list of pages (stub pages, dead end pages, etc.) which need a little work. If you are thinking about contributing, but don’t have anything specific in mind, helping out on some of the issues listed on the special pages is a good place to start. 

Our IEE cable sizing was wrote a few years ago and had become rough around the edges. I thought it was time to give the tool a service. Unfortunately when I looked under the hood I found cracked cylinders, broken bell ends and worn cylinders. Rather than a quick service I had no choice be to do a major rewrite on the software. The only thing I didn't touch is the chassis [database], which while suffering from patches of rust, was still usable.

Some colleagues had an issue earlier in the week on sizing conduits to be cast in concrete for some power cables . It became clear that none of us had a clear idea on an approved method. In the end we agreed that selecting the conduit based on a 40% fill factor was a good idea. This may not be the best approach and if anyone has other ideas, please add below.

Before looking at the method, just want to make it clear we are looking at low voltage power cables, PVC or XLPE, single or multicore and armoured or unarmored.

We've been sending out Newsletters on a regular basis for a few weeks now. To do this we have been using Google's Feedburner service. While Feedburner is a fantastic product (and free of cost), to improve our Newsletter delivery we have changed to a paid service. All Newsletter and update emails are now being delivered by mailChimp (http://mailchimp.com).