Month: September 2011

Boiler, Boil, Toil and Trouble

September 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Radiator

It’s been getting cooler (actually it got colder rather suddenly). That means it’s time to figure out the boiler and the radiators. I’ve had forced air my whole life, so this is a bit new to me. The first step was to wash the radiators, since I knew that if fired them up still caked in dust it would likely going be a smelly ordeal. Sarah tackled that, and I assisted her.

Boiler

The boiler was installed some time in the eighties, so it’s not ancient, but it’s hardly new. It has a standing pilot that we had shut off when we did the bug bombing. I got the model of the boiler and the pump and looked them up online. Eventually I found maintenance instructions and started by flushing out the rusty water from the pump “blow down” valve and the drain for the system. The boiler itself also has two drains to get the gunk out. After trying to drain the water feeder so I could remove the filter I eventually discovered the water line wasn’t shut off (turns out the valve was just tight). After that I got the strainer basket cleaned out and reconnected the thermostat (after cleaning the roaches out of it) and mounted it on the wall upstairs.
Gas control valve

With that done, I tried to light the pilot. The reset button was stuck, which is a bad sign. But with some persistence (and no tools) I finally got it lit without burning the house down.

I did a test firing and everything seems to work fine, but the pump didn’t start running to circulate because I’d turned off the circuit weeks ago. At least that was a simple fix. Now that everything is ready to go the weather got warm enough that we don’t need any heat! Oh well, in a week or two we’ll start it up for real and hopefully it will work as expected.

Settling In

September 1, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Wow, Shelving

No updates recently because it hasn’t been very interesting. Everyone is familiar with the post-move-in unpacking and organization. We bought shelves for the closet, as you can see. HOBO had some nice wire shelves on sale. I installed the touchpad deadbolt on the back door, but it won’t do anything cool until I get the control center. That allowed me to play musical locksets, where I moved the deadbolt that was previously on the back door to the garage, so I could install a non-locking handle there and move the locking handle to the basement back door. I also installed the new front door knob, one of the handle variety.

Besides that, I’m running some CAT 6 cable for the phone line to the office. Currently the only working phone jack is downstairs, so we have our Internet router in the foyer and an Ethernet cable running up the stairs to the office. I’m putting a jack in the office, and then we’ll only need to run a cable to the living room so we can hook up the TV, media PC, and Xbox. I measured how much cable I’d need and cut it, got onto the roof of the back porch and lowered one end down the back of the house, and fed the other end into the attic through one of the many, many holes along the eave (see photo for laughably terrible roofing). I still need to fish it down the office wall, but it was getting dark and it was about a hundred and fifty million degrees in the attic, so I elected to finish the project later.

Roof Eave

We installed some really cheap window shades, those accordion-folded paper things. We were originally going to get mini-blinds from IKEA, but they don’t carry the metal ones anymore. Instead they have these wood blinds that feel like balsa wood and yet cost about double what the metal ones did. Oh well. The paper shades were sold in six packs on Amazon and while they’re not the best, like everything we’ve doing upstairs so far, it’s only temporary.

In the mean time, Sarah has been unpacking, putting her library of cook books on shelves, decorating, and throwing empty boxes out the back window so I could break them down in the back yard. Our new double garbage can for the kitchen is in at Walmart, but now that Sarah has informed me we’re now composting, as well as saving aluminum cans separately from the other recycling in addition to the already separate paper recycling, we actually need some sort of mutant five-can garbage sorting station like you see at rest areas.

The previously-promised video will be shot as soon as we’ve gotten the rest of our crap put away. We decided to take a break and go camping this weekend, so hopefully it’ll be next week sometime.