Did you try backing out ALL the tension first and starting over from scratch? That was the ONLY thing that finally clicked for me, I wasted three afternoons before someone told me to just reset everything.

Respectfully, I gotta disagree with you calling them just "artists' impressions mixed with colorized data." The colors are real, they're just mapped to wavelengths our eyes can't see naturally. That's not making stuff up, that's translating what the telescope actually detected. And those thousands of galaxies in a tiny patch of sky? That's straight raw data from photons that traveled billions of years. I get being skeptical of flashy space pics online, but the Deep Field is different. Every single dot in that image is a real galaxy we confirmed with follow up observations. It's honestly wild that we can even capture that much light from so far away.

Exactly. I was the same way for years, just using whatever was cheapest or what I had around. Then I got stuck with a dead battery on a road trip and had to wait three hours for a jump. That was the moment I started paying attention to the little stuff people warned me about. Now I check my battery terminals and keep a spare pack in the trunk, never again going through that headache.

Honestly, that buzzing noise is the part nobody's talking about enough. The short cord and slick base are annoying but manageable, but a buzzing heated coaster is basically a fire hazard waiting to happen. I had a space heater once that started making that same low hum and two days later it just died mid-use, no warning. So yeah, I'd send it back just for that alone. As for the Ember mug, my buddy got one and said the battery on the base dies after six months and then you're just stuck with a $100 regular mug. You're not bad at beverage management, you just bought a dud.

And the thing nobody talks about is how cheap meters handle voltage under load versus no load. Your Harbor Freight special was reading open circuit voltage just fine, but the second that compressor tried to draw current the cheap meter couldn't handle the sag. The Fluke reads true RMS and actually accounts for the waveform distortion from a failing compressor. I had basically the same thing happen with a well pump where the cheap meter showed 240 but the pump wouldn't run. Borrowed a friends Fluke and it showed 205 volts under load. Now I keep a decent clamp meter in my truck just for motors and compressors. You really can't trust those budget meters for anything with a inductive load like a fridge or pump.