How the neon-filled glow lamps came to hold a special place in enthusiasts’ hearts

UPDATE 18 JAN. 2024: The nostalgic desire to experience the mid-twentieth-century aesthetic provided by the glow and design language of Nixie tubes has still not gone away. But this niche demand has not been nearly great enough to keep them in production. And now, the last backstock versions of true Nixie tubes, produced in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1980s, are at the end of their lifespans. At this point, anyone seeking that old-school glow can find it only in lookalikes made from more contemporary display technologies, like OLEDs that run on much lower voltages and whose manufacturing processes are much less labor intensive. //

Original article from 25 June 2018 follows:

On a cold December morning in the Czech village of Březolupy, a man stops his truck in front of a 17th-century castle. He puts on some heavy gloves, steps out of the truck, and opens the back hatch. Carefully, almost lovingly, he unloads crate after crate of heavy equipment and supplies—an industrial glass lathe, a turbomolecular vacuum pump, and glass. Lots and lots of glass.

The man is Dalibor Farny. In 2012, Farny began working to revive the manufacture of a display technology called the Nixie tube, the last commercial examples of which were produced when he was still a child.

These neon-filled glow lamps were ubiquitous in the late 1950s and 1960s, illuminating numbers, letters, and symbols in scientific and industrial instrumentation. Born in the basement of a German-American tinkerer in the 1930s and later commercialized by the business equipment maker Burroughs Corp., Nixies displayed data vital to NASA’s landing on the moon, lit up critical metrics for controlling nuclear power plants, and indicated the rise and fall of share prices on Wall Street stock exchanges, among thousands of uses. For many people, the warm glow of the Nixie came to evoke an era of unprecedented scientific and engineering achievement, of exciting and tangible discoveries, and of seemingly limitless progress. Remarkably, it continues to do so, even for people who, like Farny, grew up long after the tubes had faded from common use.

Head produced by a pump drops off by the square of the speed. Pumps that must lift a certain distance or produce a specific pressure (or TDH) have a minimum speed that will accomplish this task. The speed of a correctly sized pump can only be reduced a small amount if a static head or constant pressure is required. Horse power reductions by the cube of the speed can be insignificant compared to a full speed pump simply pushed to the left of it's curve. Before you can use the Affinity Law the following steps must be taken to determine the minimum speed possible from your pump. The affinity law can then be used to determine the minimum horsepower possible from your pump when using a VFD.

AcuteFinder will help you to find duplicate files on your system and delete them. It's simple, easy, and safe to use, and costs as little as $14 to buy.

AcuteFinder not only takes into account items like file name, size or timestamp, but reads through possible duplicates and calculates their checksums. This way, it is guaranteed that the files are really identical, and you can delete the extra copies with full confidence.

AcuteFinder can find files that have different names, like "my.doc" and "Copy of my.doc". Basically, if files are of the same size and have the same checksum, they are considered identical. AcuteFinder uses by default CRC32, a 32-bit checksum, but you can choose to use MD5 hash (128-bit) as a final step in file comparison for even more accuracy.

In a real world application, which is a house with a garden hose, heat pump, sprinkler system or the like, Amtrol's lab results would show the devastating cycling that has long been the cause of pump system failures. A worst-case scenario would be a continuous demand of 7.5 GPM. Using a 15 GPM pump with a tank having 15 gallons of draw down as in Amtrol's "study", there would be continuous cycling every 4 minutes. That would be 360 cycles per day or 131,400 cycles per year. It does not matter if the old pressure tank only system saves any energy or not, the equipment would not last long enough to get a good test. Even if these continuous demands were only required 25% of the time that would still be 32,850 cycles per year with the old pressure tank only system compared to 3,000 cycles per year when using a "cycle control valve".

The biggest "green lie" of all is that VFD's "save energy". When the pumps speed is reduced using a VFD, the Affinity Law states, "horse power is reduced by the cube of the RPM." Many people use this to try and show energy is being saved, by reducing the RPM. This is absolutely not true (See figure #3)).

Figure 3
When running the pump at full speed and maximum flow, the energy used by the VFD itself, along with motor losses from the VFD's sub-standard voltage wave form, causes more energy to be used per gallon. //

The only real energy savings, comes from the system that will last the longest. It takes a lot of energy to mine, manufacture, transport, and install pumps and controls. The longer a system last, the more energy and money is saved. It is very harmful to the environment to install a system that was designed to only last a short time. Our landfills are being filled with electronic components like VFD's, and non-recyclable pumps and motors. This waste a lot of energy and natural resources, leaches heavy metals into our water supplies, and drains money out of your bank account.

Create or De-rate?
When the flow is reduced, the amps drawn by a pump controlled by a VFD, and a pump controlled by a CSV are almost the same. The difference is that a VFD creates a smaller motor from a larger one, and a CSV de-rates the motor load.

When a VFD slows down a 10 HP motor, until it is only drawing a 5 HP load, it has "created" a 5 HP motor from the 10 HP. Even though the motor is only drawing half of a 10 HP load, the harmonic content produced by the VFD increases heat in the motor. The motor must be cooled as if it were a fully loaded 5 HP, which still requires 1/2 a foot per second flow. According to the submersible motor cooling chart, a 6" motor in an 8" casing needs a minimum of 45 GPM to remain cool. So a 10 HP pump and motor in 8" casing, cannot be slowed to less than 45 GPM, or the motor will overheat and be destroyed.

The same 10 HP motor controlled by a CSV doesn't need as much flow to remain cool. This is because the 10 HP motor has been "de-rated" to a 5 HP load. When a CSV restricts a 10 HP pump, the amps can also drop to a 5 HP load.

PeaZip is a free file archiver utility, similar to WinRar, WinZip, and 7-Zip (or File Roller, and Ark on Linux), based on Open Source technologies of 7-Zip / p7zip archiver, Facebook Zstandard compressor, FreeArc, Google Brotli compressor, PAQ family of compressors, PEA (archiving and encryption) project, and other Free Software file compression tools. //

When browsing a filesystem the file browser can show file checksum / hash value on demand in last column, allowing to identify binary identical files which have same checksum/hash value.

Clicking the name of the function (after rightclicking the file manager colum header) PeaZip file manager will display hash or checksum value for all (or selected) files. Clicking "Find duplicates" PeaZip file manager will work as duplicate finder utility, displaying size and hash or checksum value only for duplicate files - same binary identical content featured in two or more distinct files - and will report the number of non-unique files identified.

The Cycle Stop Valve or CSV can save money and energy directly and indirectly. A Variable Frequency Drive or VFD system may use a little less energy than a CSV system at low flow, but the parasitic losses and reduced efficiency of the motor running on a VFD, means the VFD uses more energy at high flow. Over the full range of flow, the amp draw or energy reduction that happens as a CSV throttles the output of a pump can be almost exactly comparable to the energy reduction of a VFD system. To verify this you only need to use the standard Brake Horse Power equation. If you know your flow rate, head, and efficiency the horsepower can be easily figured using our Horse Power Calculator.

However, there is nothing more efficient that a properly sized pump running at it's best efficiency point. Any time you reduce the RPM with a VFD, or throttle the output with a valve, a pump is using more energy per gallon produced, than when the pump is running at it's best efficiency point and full RPM. There are cases where a CSV or VFD can save energy directly. When the flow rate required is between 60% to 90% of the max flow, and rapid cycling into a pressure tank causes multiple motor starts with high inrush currents, a CSV or VFD will reduce the energy consumption directly. The lower the flow rate required, the more energy per gallon is used with a VFD or a CSV. Because head is lost by the square of the pump speed, when a static head or constant pressure must be maintained, a pump cannot be slowed down enough with a VFD, to save anymore energy than a CSV.

To see the indirect ways that a CSV saves energy, we must compare it to the other types of pump control. Cycling on and off into a pressure tank is one of the fastest ways to destroy a pump system. Because of cycling, the average life of small submersible pumps is only about 7 years. Those that cycle the most only last 2 years, while those that cycle the least last about 12 years, hence a 7 year average. Even with a fairly large pressure tank, cycling destroys every component in a pump system. Cycling flexes the bladder in a pressure tank, until the bladder breaks like bending a wire back and forth. Cycling destroys pressure switches, start capacitors and starting relays. Cycling torques the pipe in the well, until the down hole wire is rubbed bare. Cycling can strip pump splines and loosen impellers. Cycling also destroys the motor or strips the motor splines. //

Since cycling is one cause of most pump system failures, eliminating 80% of the cycles with a Cycle Stop Valve, can triple or quadruple the life of every component in the pump system, compared to a pressure tank only system. Because a CSV system runs on standard sinusoidal power at a constant RPM, there are no voltage spikes, harmonics, resonance frequencies, or additional heat produced. A CSV system can more than quadruple the life of a pump system when compared to a VFD. A pump system that last 15 years, can save a tremendous amount of energy over having to replace the pump system every 5 years. Taking into consideration that the CSV system uses a pressure tank that is a fraction of the size and cost of larger pressure tanks, can add substantially to the savings. Reductions in square footage needed to house a large pressure tank, and saving the heat required for that extra square footage, can add even more to the energy savings. Lastly consider the energy used to mine, manufacture, transport, install, and recycle the additional pump systems destroyed by cycling or VFD's.