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Boiler Update

October 19, 2011 / / 1 Comment

The weather has been especially fickle as of late. After my initial test firing of the boiler it promptly got warm again and stayed that way for a couple of weeks. When it got colder again, I went to fire up the boiler. Since it worked fine the first time, I didn’t anticipate any problems. Unfortunately, the initial success was not reproducible. I suspected the gas control knob since it had been –shall we say– sticky. In order to find out I had to get a multimeter so I could trace back the electrical connections.

Things seemed to be good. I was getting current, though it seemed a bit erratic, and there wasn’t a clear reason that the burner wouldn’t light. I redo all of the wiring because it was a mess, with old cracked wire and lots of places that could be shorting. Even so, nothing was working. A few days went by and I was running out of things to check and the house was getting cold. Then, Sarah sends me a video while I’m at work.

I ask her to disconnect the thermostat and when I get home I can no longer get any signal from the transformer. So I ordered a new transformer. The house gets colder and colder until we can see our breath while watching TV. Have I mentioned there’s no insulation in this house? Despite paying for rush shipping, the part takes almost a week to arrive.

I install the new transformer and sure enough, the weather suddenly gets warm and then hot. With it eighty degrees in the house, I can’t easily test the system, so I move on to other things. Then this past week, it starts to get cold again. I flipped the switch on the thermostat, went downstairs… and nothing was happening. Incidentally, somewhere in this process I learned that the system is steam, not hot water, so while there is a cold water feeder, it isn’t powered. Everything just runs low voltage.

I break out the multimeter again and test voltage at each connection. Nothing. No juice at all, even out of the new transformer. I test the power coming into the transformer, and the line tester beeps affirmative. It doesn’t make sense. I test resistance between the terminals of the transformer and confirm it isn’t shorted. Finally, I disconnect the new transformer to inspect it and make sure I’m not missing something. Everything looks fine.

Unsure what else to try, I hook the transformer back up. I’m not sure what I did differently, but this time the transformer was live. I connected the wires, testing at each point with the multimeter. Signal is getting through the pressure cutoff, but when it gets to the low water cutoff switch, it stops. It’s in alarm state. The strange thing is that I know the low water cutoff works. If I drain water from the system, it fills it back up. There seems to be a problem with the mechanism that connects the switch to the actual water feeder. According to the documentation, it could be several things, with different parts to replace. Since I know the low water feed is working, I take the chance and simply bypass the switch.

The last stop for the wire is the gas control valve. I turn off the thermostat and reconnect the valve. I relight the pilot. I run back upstairs and switch on the thermostat. As I come back down the stairs I can hear it: the boiler is firing. Finally.

Sarah and I went back upstairs and watched tv. In about half an hour we started hearing noises from the radiators. They started getting warm. They hissed a little. The pipes banged. Most importantly, the house got warm. I checked pressure, made sure it shut off when it reached the right temperature, and it’s continued to work beautifully –if noisily– the last few days. It just needs to make it through this winter. Next year we’ll start work on our massive HVAC undertaking. For now, we have heat. All it cost me was time and about twelve dollars for the transformer.

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.

Moved In

August 23, 2011 / / 4 Comments

Well we finally made it. Sorry there aren’t any pictures. The last few days were a scramble to get the last items done at the house, get the condo packed, and then Saturday it happened. The rain didn’t help, but with the help of Sarah’s family we got the condo emptied, the storage unit emptied, the downstairs storage emptied, the garage emptied… and the house filled.

When I say filled, I mean we’re wading through boxes and randomly placed furniture and trying to find every little thing that we need. Sunday, rather than make serious progress unpacking we went shopping, because clearly, the house needed more stuff. We bought some storage for the bathroom, as well as some racks to hang our pots and pans on, since there’s significantly less cupboard and counter space. We ordered a new trash can and cheap window shades from Amazon and got the computers set up in the office.

Yesterday and tonight we’re working on the condo, getting it cleaned up so we can rent it. I’ll be putting up the listing today. Hopefully we can find some good people quickly. Sarah did all the touch up painting yesterday and I got the replacement drop ceiling tiles into the laundry room. Tonight we’ll clean the kitchen and bathroom and sweep the floors.

Hopefully tomorrow we can start getting the house in order. I need to put a phone jack into the office for the DSL and replace the drain in the tub. I’d also like to get the living room furniture arranged, and Sarah wants to get the kitchen and bathroom sorted. When we’ve got it all put together I’ll do a new video walk-through of the upstairs so we’ll have a nice before and after.

Attic Electric

August 16, 2011 / / 2 Comments

The last few days at the house I’ve spent a lot of time in the attic. The wiring is a bit… custom. Despite a bunch of breakers in the electrical box for the upstairs, only four circuits are actually used for everything. We haven’t figured out what the rest are for yet. Fortunately, in one of those rare positives of the house, all of the electric for the upstairs is really easy to get to because it’s all run in the attic in the flexible conduit. Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t ancient fabric-wrapped wiring inside the conduit, because there is, but I’ll take easy-to-get-to wiring any day. First I mapped out where everything went.

Wiring diagram

If you can’t tell from my crappy sketch, the exciting part is where the one wire goes to the kitchen ceiling to the bathroom outlet and the bathroom light, then to the office ceiling, then to the office outlet and the living room outlet. Oh, and when we put those outlets in the kitchen, they were off of the bathroom outlet. That’s all one circuit, and we both have power-hungry desktop computers and a laser printer. Clearly I needed to do something about it or we’d be tripping the circuit constantly, if not burning the house down. That meant spending more time in the attic.

Original electrical

This isn’t being used, but I wanted to share it anyway. This is the bare wire on porcelain insulators from when the house was originally wired. Because the house has remnants of gas lighting, we think it was electrified after it was built, but this wiring means all the flexible conduit stuff was a retrofit done years later. Before I get to my wiring escapades, I have one more attic discovery to share.

Zombie rat

Sarah was in the attic when I found this guy above the bathroom. He’s well on his way to decomposed, but was so stiff that I could stand him up and pose him for a quick photo. Sorry if you’re squeamish, but I was laughing like a little kid when I took this picture.

Anyway, back to the wiring. I disconnected the office from the bathroom. There was a line running from a box at the back of the attic all the way to the front of the house where it went to a blanked outlet. The box in the attic also went to an outlet in the kitchen. We turned off that circuit and I cut the line. Imagine my surprise when sparks came out as I cut the conduit! Whoops! An investigation of the box revealed three wire cable run from the basement. Basically there were two separate circuits coming into the box and splitting up, one to each outlet, and sharing a neutral. I swapped the two, which put the kitchen outlet on the same circuit as another outlet in the kitchen. That left me with a dedicated circuit for the office. I got that hooked up and ran the living room outlet off the living room fan.

High quality wiring

I thought everything was done, or at least, once I’d resolved a short in the kitchen ceiling fan receptacle and a mis-wiring of the bathroom light switch, until I came to the bedroom. You may remember this picture from when we took down the drop ceiling in the bedroom and disconnected the track lighting.

Ceiling receptacle

Well when I went to put the ceiling fan into the bedroom I realized that the receptacle was only a half-inch deep, and the way the fan mounted I needed a receptacle with a bit more depth. So we picked one up on one of our frequent trips to the hardware store. The problem was that the original receptacle was directly over a ceiling joist and nailed into it, while the deeper-set receptacle mounted to the side of it. No problem, just cut the hole a couple of inches bigger on one side and it’s all set. Well, I got into a bit of a hurry and grabbed the reciprocating saw, which would have been fine except that it’s plaster and lath, not drywall.

Ceiling problem

Crap. So I managed to get the new receptacle installed and the wiring connected, but now we need to patch up the ceiling before I can install the fan. Oh well, we’ll get there. Did I mention that cutting the hole caused a rain of dust, rat turds, and random ceiling debris? Onto the new carpet that Sarah just installed? Fun stuff. At least we’re almost ready to move in.