The bad water heater that wasn't: A Disconnect

 We were out of town for a few days when my parents, who were puppy sitting, let us know that our water heater stopped producing hot water.  "Great.." is what went through my mind.  When we got back, I did some checks on the water heater.  The smart controls were blank. My non-contact voltage tested (which is all I could find that second) indicated that power was getting to it at the wires entering the water heater. I even verified that power was getting to the elements - but no hot water output.  So I assumed that lighting or a surge fried the electronics. 

I would try to fix myself but no replacement parts at the local store. I didn't want to call a plumber - the cost at that point would be close to replacement cost of the water heater.  So I did the next best thing. I bought a new non-smart water heater. I turned off the breaker and installed over a couple hours.  Hours later, as I went to test and enjoy the fresh hot water - I was disappointed.  There still wasn't any hot water.  What?

I searched around and finally found my multi-meter and checked  the electrical.  I was only getting a few volts instead of the 240v I expected.  So it did have power but just barely.  So I checked the breaker and it had 240v as expected.  I also had a disconnect switch for the water heater that I had installed next to it.  I went to pull the disconnect out and wasn't able to. At that point, I figured that was a bad sign and related to the issue. I ended up breaking most of the surrounding plastic face for the disconnect. I finally was able to get to the internals and found that they were melted and the metal switch pieces were not touching correctly. 

Once I finally extracted the rest of the parts, I could tell that one of the screw terminals must have loosened and then heated excessively - melting the supports and causing the remaining metal to lose further contact.

A trip to Lowe's got me a new disconnect box. After installation and a "good tightening", we finally had hot water.

Here is a picture of the melted disconnect switch parts.

This was an inconvenient problem but we were blessed by the fact we didn't have a house fire which this could easily could have produced.

Hope your day is blessed. Thanks for reading!

Scott

JSR 376 / Java Platform Module system and Service Loader experience

 I have some pet projects I work on and I decided to convert one from a plain Java project over to using the Java Service loader and the Java Platform Module System.  The project uses a few well known libraries but isn't using Spring or other giant frameworks. I figured this should be pretty straight forward to do.

I started by converting over to the Java Service loader and after a bit of refactoring I got that working pretty well.  I expect anyone trying to convert an application or service over to it will find plenty of things that should be refactored to make it work well. It was a good experience though even though it was a good amount of work initially.

And then I started the conversion to the Java Platform Module system.  This was pretty difficult to get started and required more work and refactoring.  Some issues may simply be tooling issues in Eclipse or something along those lines.  For my first attempt, I eventually bailed on it and started from scratch again. 

At this point, I did make lots of good progress. I had things pretty much sorted out except for one thing. I had a problem with the Infinispan cache and the module system.  I didn't expect that and I tried all kinds of things to get past the issue.  I eventually ended using the JSR 107 Cache-api to abstract as much as possible from Infinispan specifics.  At this point, I expected it to work but I finally ended up at a particular error. The error indicated that there was an Infinispan package name that existed in two different jar files (with different classes) and that isn't supported by the module system.  I thought maybe it was a regression or small oversight - I mean, the module system has been around for some time now.  

I did a search of Infinispan issues for JSR 376, Jigsaw and platform module system but found no issues.  I finally put in an issue and the next day the tech lead closed the issue as a duplicate.  The original issue was reported by that tech lead back in 2019 as a high priority ticket.  If I had searched for "module", I probably would have found it.  Anyways, being that this was known since 2019 and the original ticket mentioned more packages that were split between jars - I am guessing this won't end up fixed anytime soon.

I removed Infinispan and am just using the JSR-107 support as a way to hide my use of a simple map for in-memory use for now.  I wanted to persist my data (which was a key benefit of Infinispan) so I briefly looked at creating my own file based persistence layer using some plain IO stream support along with protobuffers but even that had some issues.  

I'm planning to switch to ASN.1 - that is more standardized and has better "enterprise support" than most of the other serialization frameworks. Try finding active open source projects for "serialization" from google results related to that.  There are a few but there are many more that seem pretty dead. ASN.1 isn't going away anytime soon and there is an active Java project supporting it (along with many other language projects).

Thanks for reading!

Scott

[2023/06/11 Update] I'm coming to the conclusion that using the Java Platform Module system is both too high of a risk and too painful to do for any large software system. It is a risk because you can't guarantee it is going to work in a fully modular system because so many libraries and transitive dependencies are not modularized and/or have split packages. Based on how long the feature has been around, I don't see the situation improving without some major push that forces it. Trying to use Maven plugins such as "moditect-maven-plugin" and the "jlink" tool is way more effort than a short or mid-term payback would make worthwhile. Working with this tooling and trying to resolve the issues one at a time is a huge headache - certain errors are not found in a deterministic fashion. This means that you add a "fix" into the config and rerun your build and you don't get the error but you end up with a different one.  This doesn't mean you fixed the original error, it just means that it didn't pick the same problem point to report on.

I'm also rethinking the ASN.1 conversion. I was able to get the asn1bean project compiled (i.e. the ASN1 Compiler part) with Java 18 with some effort. I'm still determining if the generated code will really work the way I need/expect it to.  I've got some other things I want to work on now so maybe I'll come back to it later.

Jokes for my kids

My kids like to grown at my "bad dad" jokes. I come up with quite a few but I tend to quickly forget them before sharing.  I hope to capture many of the jokes here so they can be shared later.

• What did the sheep say when a pig told them that all the cows got stuck in the mud by the pond?
• The sheep said that is a "Cow-tastrophe".
• What did the carrot say to the mature green onion when it saw containers of new onions?
• You should be proud of your bunches of "bunches of [baby] onions"!

Here are my Chick-fil-a jokes from some time ago.