Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: I have solar power. How can I make the battery charge last longer?

Posted on July 9, 2024

Question from Kelly: After reading your articles about taking part of a house off-grid and going solar, I took the plunge and converted the game room in my basement to solar.

I installed several new lights and outlets and connected them to my inverter and everything works great, but the 12V 100Ah LifePo4 battery runs out of juice before morning.

The only things I have running off the battery at night are a refrigerator and a dehumidifier, both of which keep shutting off at some point during the night.

What can I do to make the battery charge last until the sun comes up the next morning and starts charging the battery again? [Read more…]

Q&A: Why does my new computer keep the wrong time?

Posted on July 8, 2024

Question from Kevin: Hi, Rick. I recently bought a HP laptop running Windows 11, and ever since I first brought it home it’s been keeping the wrong time.

It’s always 1 hour behind, and if I change the time to the correct time it just reverts back to the wrong time all on its own. It’s about to drive me bonkers!

Do you think it might be a bad CMOS battery or maybe a bad motherboard? [Read more…]

Q&A: Why do phones no longer come with user replaceable batteries?

Posted on July 6, 2024

Question from Harris: The battery in my three year old smartphone won’t hold a charge anymore.

I found a replacement battery online but it said I’ll have to disassemble the phone in order to remove the old battery and replace it with the new one.

The replacement battery comes with the tools needed to install the new battery but the video showing how it’s done has me thinking it’s way beyond my skill level. [Read more…]

Q&A: Why are SSDs much larger than SD cards of the same capacity?

Posted on July 6, 2024

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Question from Bobby: Per your suggestion, I recently bought a dirt-cheap 250GB SSD to replace the hard drive in an older Acer laptop.

And you were right – the speed increase is astounding! Thanks for the info!

As I was installing the SSD I noticed how much larger it is than the 256GB SD card that’s inside my phone.

Why is the SSD so much larger than the SD card when they both hold roughly the same amount of data?

[Read more…]

Q&A: How do I keep a new email address off SPAM email lists?

Posted on July 5, 2024

Question from Lisa: My email account is receiving so much SPAM that I’m ready to ditch it and set up a new one.

Is there a trick for setting up an email address so that it won’t end up on some spammer’s email list?

Would something like putting numbers in the middle or along the lines of [email protected] work? [Read more…]