OK so today we had a HUGE EMERGENCY, involving water moistening the ceiling over my Spouse's office and said Spouse running frantically all over the place freaking out, and the attic was briefly investigated (from a safe distance through the hole leading up to it) and the leak was pronounced to be near the chimney where there was no flashing but since the chimney cap had been removed it now leaked more with the wind coming from the Northeast and a heavy rain all morning, and OMG we need to rent a boom lift so off we go, and now we arrive back with a rental Condor in the driveway, and OH Dear it doesn't reach to the chimney and now we have to bring it back, and the hardware store didn't have patching compound and it's still raining cats and dogs and no I am not controlling my emotions I am getting something DONE ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT'S OUR HOUSE.




( Click here for a more calm and sedate continuation.... )

I know, I know, a water cooled rower sounds redundant, but I'm referring to our brand spanking new rowing machine that I had described in a previous post. Granted, we did not spend a lot of money on this unit (like, none at all) but it was still disappointing when it broke right away. Shortly after my Spouse began using it, the hydraulic cylinder started leaking somewhere inside and no longer supplied resistance. He also said it never had supplied resistance for the first 5-10" of travel and once he said that I realized that he was right. When we ordered a replacement and installed it, I discovered I no longer needed my feet rests to use the rower -- having the pedals push back on my feet properly worked much better! And they were nice enough to send us a free replacement cylinder, so out of pocket cost was still nothing.

Unfortunately though, the new one also misbehaved as soon as it got hot. My Spouse found by strapping ice bags to it during use, that cooling the cylinder prevented it from losing resistance after 10 minutes of usage. This led to the amazing sight shown here. Not my project but I just had to show you guys!



My spouse made a water jacket for the cylinder out of PVC pipe and ends from the hardware store, a couple pipe clamps and the leftover food-grade plastic hose from my 5-gallon water bottle project. Water will constantly circulate through the jacket, cooling the cylinder passing through it.



The other end of the hoses lead to this small pump in a water bucket. The bucket has a lid which can cover it long-term. The system has already been tested but it's waiting for the pipe glue to cure fully before it is put through the wringer to see if it keeps the cylinder cool enough to work properly. I hope so; the rower is really nice to use when it is working 100% as designed.

As mentioned in a previous post, my 2007 Prius (AKA "New Friend") hit a deer while being driven home from Duluth by my Spouse. Luckily no human beings were hurt. We have no idea about the deer since it vanished after impact but it must have gotten a heck of a bruise at the very least.



Apparently the collision happened at about 30 mph. It's a 55 mph road but the car was in the process of screeching to a halt. Note the tiny lump in the hood where the thin metal wrapped around a protuberance underneath. I guess it wasn't the positive battery terminal, since the car still starts.



An almost-successful attempt to steer behind the running deer led to the impact being between the left front corner of the car and the left rear quarter of the deer. All the damage is consistent with a heavy, meaty part. This picture shows how the headlight assembly no longer lines up with the hood and front bumper.



Another angle showing the dented hood. Also shows the front bumper no longer aligning with the left front quarter panel. The plywood in the background is the roof of the unfinished doghouse. I am thinking that the days the Prius is absent for repair, leaving an empty stall in the garage, will be a perfect time to finish work on that dog house indoors.



The bumper may be salvageable, I am no expert. It has some scuffs and white marks from the impact -- scrambling hooves I guess. There are also misc. drips perhaps from the deer being wet. Luckily all splashes, etc. are clear in color. I like to fantasize that the deer survived with a huge bruise and a powerful desire to stay far away from roads if any cars are in sight.



This picture shows the inner wheel well separated from the outer panels. I think it is just popped out though. All of these parts have fancy factory coatings. I think Von Holzen is good for replacing it all exactly though.



Parts of the front grille no longer line up right. There's more mud splash, feet scramble etc. here. My mind is boggling with the amount a body shop could dream to charge for all this. Luckily we're properly insured. And most importantly, the driver wasn't hurt. I envision the outboard motor that was in the back flying foward and wreaking havoc. Brrr!



Small light also not lined up with the grille anymore. I'm bringing the car in to the body shop today so hopefully my New Friend will be good again soon. Hugs to both my crash victims, vehicular and human, and my thoughts go out to the deer. If it is all over, I hope it went quick.

Today I discovered to my considerable pleasure excitement relief that the Bathroom Sink Glop Hook ™ that I made works equally well on bathroom tub drains.



As a note the Glop Hook ™ is available through me for $2.99 each and comes with a handy neck strap. White or bronze tone.



I am not sure why I, as the least plumbing-proficient person in the house, always end up being the one to clear glopped drains. It's just one of those things I guess. Here's a photo of the disassembled drain after being de-glopped. Notice the scum that formed because the accumulating, non draining water was preventing it from being washed off by the shower. Yum!

OK now, don't click on this unless you really wanna see a picture of the actual glop I fished out of the drain. I'm warning you... some of you guys had to be tough guys and click on the link of me eating the chicken heart on live video and you did it anyway. If that made you blanch, don't click here now! ;-)

( Read more... )

OK so it wasn't that bad even if it was about 15" long. Honestly if you think it looks awful you should have felt it! LOL

For my birthday, which was earlier this month, my Dear Spouse gave me my very first video camera! It is a Canon FS100, which is just like a Canon FS10 or 20 except without any internal memory. The distinction is moot because everybody just uses removable SD cards anyway. Also I had received Corel VideoStudio 12 to handle any editing. I immediately produced a very bad test video which I won't punish you by linking to here, but if you really want to know, you can look backward in my LJ ;-)



Here's my new purple friend overlooking the scene of my new opus. No, I did not PhotoShop in the LCD display, that's really what it showed! No, don't ask me to pull that lucky shot off again, I'd never manage in 1000 years ;-)

The video I am working on has a working title of "Reparing a Christmas Light" and it shows me soldering electrical wires and then glueing broken plastic parts. It even shows the light working in the end! Right now I am just doing silent shots, since I figured trying to coordinate the scenes to be the exact length with good dialogue at the same time would probably make my head explode.



I shot it in our exercise-cum-junk-room because it has a high ceiling. Also it had a closable door to keep our "fur children" out.  Here's the "stage" surrounded by camera, 2 lights, etc.



My very high tech soundstage is made of cardboard. Note the soldering iron, sponge, electrical tape, etc. ready to hand. There's also a Maglite I used to illuminate a clear part from the inside so the camera could see through it well.



In the interests of not making myself crazy my first time learning the camera I skipped some stuff you're supposed to do, for example white balancing. However, I did make a shot list and crossed off each one as I accomplished it.  Aren't I organimizated?

The next step will be to take all the stuff I shot today and put it together in VideoStudio 12 to make a silent movie. I'll keep you guys appraised as to how that is going. 



And yes, there is a happy ending ;-)

--Kaas

Since the Great Prius Battery Discharge Disaster With Much Horn-Honking described in a previous post, I have discovered the accessory battery will not stay charged overnight. After recharging it 3 more times I have pretty much given up thinking it will hold it, and I don't dare drive the car anywhere I can't leave it running. I have an appointment on Thursday to get the battery replaced. It's only 2 years old, yeesh!

OK, this was definitely not one of my finer moments... hours... weeks. However, I have found that our moments of greatest uncleverness often make for the best reading for everybody else, so here we go. Grin.

( It all began when I thought that right before it snowed 15 inches would be a good time to pull both cars out of the garage and do a huge mucking-out of the garage and getting rid of all the remaining junk in there.... )

Also in the spirit of upstairs-stairwell-remodeling, I had bought pieces of light fixtures so that I could assemble my dream light for the stairs. The existing light is actually quite period-appropriate for our 1930's house but it's just really tiny, ugly and utilitarian. Not exactly high art for back then.



Here's the 2 shades I bought on eBay. These are made of slag glass and are called "tulip" shades. There are many possible manufacturers (these two are from different manufacturers I think) and they were made over several decades but by the 1970's they were making plastic ones.



Here's another angle. These guys actually have the same color glass for most of the panels but the larger one has alternating panels of clear amber between the swirled ones. Both shades look differently from the top and bottom, and a third way when lit from within.

I chose these because 1) they will echo similar fixtures I am putting into the kitchen elsewhere in the house; 2) they will reflect a similar flower shape on the tiles I am ultimately going to put on the risers of the stairs in this stairwell, and 3) this amber color will go well with the woodwork when it is done.



One of these came wired as a light and the other was just sold as a shade. My first task was to remove the old wiring. This socket is actually still in usable condition as long as I am willing to solder the wires instead of landing them on screws, so I set it aside in case of future need.



Lighting is one of those odd jobs where you always start out by thinking "I need only a screwdriver to do this!" Above is shown the pile of crap and tools I had already accumulated by this stage of the process. Cat Daisy was a great help.



Here's the new socket all wired up. It's been screwed onto the end of a small threaded pipe that will be the backbone of the new light fixture I am making. I took this in my hand and kind of put the light together around it so that I could see exactly where to place the spacer nut shown on the pipe. That nut will keep the socket nicely spaced away from the inner shade while still leaving enough pipe to be able to fit everything else on above it. A small dab of threadlock should hopefully keep it from moving about in the future.



Here is the fixture with the small shade added. Basically I passed the bare end of the electrical wire (it's nice gold zip cord meant especially for lighting work) up through the shade hole and then passed the pipe up through also until it stopped. Once I put a second nut on top of the shade and tightened it, that left the socket snugged up inside just under that pointy part of the shade.



Now here it is with the large shade added. It is physically resting against the small shade, metal cone to metal cone, so all that is needed now is to tighten a nut on top to squeeze them together firmly to avoid any rotating or slipping.



The nut in question is actually the ring on the end of the chain, which is able to screw on tightly. Once that was on I passed the gold zip cord up through the chain neatly, and then passed it through the ceiling part. The light is now theoretically ready to go up on the stairwell ceiling.



I like to put a pointy bulb in because it looks more like the center of a flower. 



I wired the end of the zip cord to an edison plug so I could give the fixture a quickie test. Nothing is worse than finding out something is broken when standing on a ladder trying to install it. Here's what it looks like with light passing through the petals! So beautiful.



Here's another shot of it lit up, with a different light setting on the camera. This angle also shows the bulb a little. This will go up after the yellow is done being painted in the upstairs stairwell -- it'll just be in the way of the ladder if it goes up before that. All done for now!!!

 

Today I fixed a broken wind chime that had been lying around since earlier in the fall. Over the summer it had been attached to the same branch of the tree as I tie the dog to when she needs to do her business out back. When she'd see a rabbit she'd go insane and stand on her hind legs lunging, causing the wind chime to ring wildly. One day I came out and it was lying on the ground under the tree, the string connecting it to its hanger having apparently parted.



I drilled out the rivet that had been holding the now-missing piece of connective string to the bottom of the flat bird piece, and substituted in my own piece of white string as shown above. There is a washer tied to the bottom knot to keep it from getting pulled through the hole. I don't know if this string will be tough enough to do the trick, but there's lots more where that came from if it isn't.

As a note, after I found the wind chime lying on the ground the dog refused to go anywhere near that half of her space. I wonder if there is any connection? (evil grin)

Cats (who else?) in a hyper spazz knocked this small wooden box off my desk , sending it crashing to the floor and breaking the hinges loose for the lid. The majority of the tiny screws were lost (I suspect the cats had something to do with that too!) although one can be seen lying inside the box itself.



I waited for several days but the hinges did not heal themselves... damn....



Today I rummaged in our parts room where we have a large number of inherited and randomly found hardware, and dug up these "brass plated steel linoleum nails" which, heaven only knows why we had these. They were the right size and color though. The holes were too damaged to accept the original screws anymore so the greater length of the nails would help hold the hinges firmly to the box.



Success! The box edge looked like it was thinking about splitting after I got the nails in, so I hit the tiny splits with some gorilla glue, which is clear and adheres very firmly to porous surfaces. That should prevent it from actually splitting now.

5 points to anybody besides my Spouse who knows what came in that box ;-)

This morning around 7:30AM I was awakened by a slow, rhythmic 60Hz pulsing noise accompanied by repeated recharge bloops of my cell phone beside the bed. It turns out our power was coming on and off over and over again. After a few of those we lost power completely. Not the cleanest power outage I've ever experienced! I called Xcel Energy and a computer (who told me its name was Mary! I never had a telephone computer introduce itself before) told me power would be restored within 4 hours. It actually took under an hour.

Punch list for items to fix:

1. The UPS in my office lost it completely during this outage and now needs refurbishment/replacement or at the very least, replacement batteries. It doesn't even pass its start up test now.

2. The UPS in the server room doesn't shift into warning beep mode before shutting down due to run down batteries. It went straight from "I've got lots of battery left" beeps to off. Needless to say the servers had a few sharp words with me after that. On the good side, WTF duly informed me via email that it needed one of its apps manually restarted, which was my first test implementation of a homebrewed notification system. Win!

3. Still on list of things to do is put in a panel to be able to hook up the generator to house electrical. I probably would have done it manually using an extension cord if the power had stayed off longer, but that is definitely less cool.

Now, in our family I am famously the person who supposedly starts stuff and doesn't finish it. I don't personally agree with this assessment; I think that what I do is retain a long memory of what needs to be done, and attack whichever project I feel I'll work hardest at on a given day. But whichever the explanation, my supposed monopoly on this behavior is totally fictitious. LOL. I seem to remember that I was the one who did the bulk of (and finished) the most heinous jobs of moving us from Minneapolis to Glencoe, from Glencoe to Colorado, and from Colorado to Wisconsin, while my dear Spouse was conveniently on the other side of the country or if possible, the planet.

Recently this phenomenon has taken on a hair raisingly local turn as well. Imagine my surprise when, shortly after my Spouse took the initiative and placed 4 of our lighted ceiling fans on eBay for auction, the call came from the Union for an assignment on a ship at sea. Hmm.. someone will have to take down, disassemble and ship all these devices, who would that be? :-p

And so, along those same lines, we come to today's project: replacing the gaskets on the wood boiler. This is something it never would have occurred to me to do on my own, probably due to a lack of boilers in my early life. But when presented with the information that they were worn out, and the previously-purchased supplies sitting on top of the kindling stack in full view, OK.



Here's the old gasket on top. You can't really see it because it is dirty, but it basically sits in a channel corresponding to the lip of the boiler opening. When the door closes, that lip pushes into the channel and sits in a nest made by the gasket. The gasket itself is some kind of white ropy material that I hope wasn't asbestos. This is the top half of the boiler into which the wood is shoved and all poking and arranging activities occur. The little arched opening in the lower middle is where you can open a little door to see how the fire is doing. This works way better than I had expected.

The boiler is the only bright blue object in the basement that is not my fault!



There was a gasket on the bottom half as well. This half is where the wood ash gets cleaned out every couple of days. There is also an air flap that is automatically opened and closed to allow more or less air in depending on how much heat (fire) is needed to keep the water temperature right.

This is a really cool boiler but it is no longer sold in the United States. My Spouse contacted the manufacturer in Europe and they were very nice and even sent literature.



The first step was to remove the old gaskets. I did this with a flat head screw driver and some very stout needlenose pliers. Much of it peeled out easily but the part over on the left hand side of the bottom (corresponding to the hinge side of the door, plus where there was clearly some rust action) was tough. There were two different sizes of rope, wide on the top door and narrower on the lower.



Some of the channel was left in much better shape. This part has nice shiny iron showing and little to no "gasket hair" left behind.



Hairy gasket channel, yuck. As you can see it is rusty too.



Holy gasket hair, Batman!

The next step was definitely the most labor intensive part of the project, and took the bulk of the time. This was cleaning all those channels with a wire brush.



I used the brush shown plus another that was smaller and had brass bristles. With its smaller head that one was better for getting the last bits out and getting the sides of the channels. But the long one was excellent for doing long stroke initial cleaning and it took care of the bottoms of the channels really well too.



Here's what the hairiest part of the channel looked like once cleaned. Hurray! Needless to say I was blackened head to toe like a coal miner by the time this project was finished. Once the channels were clean on the first two doors I realized oh yeah, there is a 3rd gasket as well, on the air flap. It can be seen pretty well in the photo above.



The gasket in this 3rd channel was way different than the others, being woven of some kind of silvery metal and a tiny bit smaller in diameter than the narrower sized rope. In retrospect I don't think I needed to change this one because even though it was as worn and compressed as the other two, this door flap never actually closes. It has a locking mechanism in case it is ever needed, but practically speaking it is open all the time. I suspect the reason why this had a different gasket material is because the last person to do this didn't bother to change it. Well, it's changed now.

Once the channels were thoroughly wirebrushed I wiped them out with water as instructed on the back of the gasket glue packaging, and squeezed some of the black glue down each channel. The rope got pressed in manually, wide on top and narrow on the other two. I think maybe the heat flap could have used yet a smaller size but none of that was on hand. It pretty much worked out however.



Here's the finished project: 3 new gaskets. They look nice and clean because the stove has not yet been operational. According to the glue instructions the stove will have to be run at least once for the glue to be fully cured but other than that, it's done. I was not entirely sure what to do about the ends of the new fiberglass gasket as it was extremely prone to fraying and the frayed ends bushed out like Afros, not staying in the channels whatsoever. I ended up opting to paint the ends down with the black gasket glue... we will see if that works out. So far so good; when I closed the doors to make sure everything was seated right, the glued ends conformed to seat the lip just like the rest of the gasket.

We are having a beautiful warm spell right now so it will be a few days yet before the boiler gets fired for the first time this year. When I got done with this project I walked around the corner and found the whole other end of the basement lit up with sunlight, which I had never seen before. With leaves off the trees, sun was able to sneak in from the kitchen through the open basement door. Crazy and cool!

The wires running overhead in the photo are our extensive low-voltage wiring system including video, ethernet and 2 phone lines running throughout the house. This is one of the first things I do when moving into any house. Mwahaha, nerd heaven.



Today I also replaced the old Anti-Creo-Soot spray bottle with a new generic one from the grocery store. The old bottle's spray head had started leaking, and it was a drag to have vinegar-smelling gack running down your hand every time you went to spray a log. We had inherited that bottle from the previous owner so it was probably very old. The wood boiler had not been in use for 8 years at the time we bought the house.



The old bottle is in the foreground, getting ready to take a flying header into the trash can. (They actually say the bottles are recyclable on the website, but since I can't find a # symbol on this bottle it's probably an old one that isn't). We have lots of gallon refills we use to reload the sprayers.

If I haven't mentioned it already, the purpose of Anti-Creo-Soot is to weaken creosote deposits so that they fall off easily. This both makes the chimney easier to clean, and prevents the creosote (hopefully) from ever succeeding in building up a glazed impermeable coat. Apparently it works because we got an A+ and keep-up-the-good-work from our chimney cleaning fellow this year, something that never happened at our old house!

The anti-creo-soot is supposedly non toxic. As I mentioned before it smells a lot like vinegar. According to their website the active ingredient is manganese. I spray each log with 10 squirts once the fire is good and hot. The instructions actually say to spray the interior of the boiler before starting it up, and to spray every log not just the big ones. But what I discovered is using it while starting the fire interferes with the firestarting process as the steam from the Anti-Creo-Soot actually fights a small fire. So what I do is hold off on the Anti-Creo-Soot until the fire is basically lit and I've passed through the small-and-medium stick insertion stages. Then all the regular sized logs get their 10 squirts.



This is a project I started today but didn't have time to finish. It will be an insulative plug for the coal door in the wood room. This is where wood is tossed in from the outside and it is just a stamped metal door on hinges, set into a window-like cutout in the foundation. When we first moved in some insulation was just stuffed in there, but this was impractical when the coal hatch is in actual regular use.

My intention is to staple insulation into this frame, then stick regular door weatherstripping foam around the outside edge.



Here it is with a thin plywood cover on one side. My idea was to add a couple handles (such as those found on homemade screen doors) on this side to be able to place and retrieve the plug in the opening.

Unfortunately once I had reached this stage I took time to test it in the opening and there was too much interference with other stuff in the area (pipes, the wall, etc.) for it to get all the way to where it needed to sit. Therefore I need to do some modifications before I go any farther. This will probably involve making the Z-dimension of the bottom less than at the top (so the plug can be inserted top-first then angled in) and also reducing the overall width by about 1/2" to make it easier to maneuver to the coal hole initially.



Looking at the coal hole it is really non-intuitive that this plug absolutely will not fit as-is. The problem is those pipes on top overlap the opening by a lot more than they look like... about 2 inches.

When we re-do the ceiling I fully intend to move that silly electrical conduit that is entwined through everything so that it is properly parallel to everything else. I have never understood people who don't value neat wiring, especially on permanent install.

This morning there was water leakage in the basement so I got to see my leakwater channelling strip in action. Unfortunately some water had done an end-run around the head end of it, which kind of defeated the purpose. It appeared to come out of the very base of the wall where there is a gap. I think when I go through and patch all the wall cracks that problem will take care of itself. I hope so anyway. Hehe.



The basement has so much dehumidification equipment down there that the puddle was already partially dried but based on the evidence left it looks like the part that seeped around the end only made it a short way, so that's good. The rest of the strip worked exactly as it was supposed to. The cat, Zinger, agrees that wet floors are teh suck.



Also while I was over there I noticed that it is time to scrub the parts room door again. When we moved in the door was covered in mold, oh yuk! It has been scrubbed all over with bleach twice now. It appears the 3rd time will be the charm, as it is returning with very little force now.



Yes, we have a parts room. What do you expect in a house owned by 2 nerds? :-D

This other "leak" at the stairs end of the basement turned out to be a hairball. Thanks guys.



Today I spent much of the day on the 2 Compaq Proliant servers. Ultimately it turned out I will need some software I had to order out for, so realistically they will not be ready by October 12th when I had wanted to go to Minneapolis and switch the system over. So I have a modified plan now where I will use the two P1's with 2.4.x kernel Linux and no SSHD capability as temporary servers. Once everything is all switched over I will be able to finish and swap in the two Compaq Proliants at my leisure.

While I was moving stuff around I made an important discovery regarding a used KVM switch I got on eBay a while back. I had never had enough machines running on it at once to really pinpoint what it's issues were, but I figured it had some since it was included for free with something else I bought. Lo and behold, it has exactly 4 bad keyboard channels. (The 3 marked with X below, plus the one labeled "ORLY")



Electronics technicians love to see stuff go bad in multiples of 4 and 8 because it makes it insanely easy to figure out which part has gone south. Somewhere in the keyboard input circuitry there is an IC chip with 4 sets of inputs/outputs that needs to be replaced. It should be relatively easy to tell which one it is by taking an oscilloscope and comparing the signals on the working one and the non-working one. Before I take the switch apart though I need to test the mouse functionality, so I have a concise list of everything that is wrong. All of the monitor circuits work.

Of course, I could also just wait. Once the old primary system comes home from Minneapolis, I'll have a very nice 16 circuit switch of the same brand that works perfectly. Hehe.

I went to the farm and picked up 3 fresh chickens. I brought the big cooler with a bag of ice in it, because these are large girls. Not like the grocery store whole chickens, which increasingly resemble game hens. When I got back I cut up 2 of them so now I have lots of individual leg/thighs and breasts in bags, 2 carcasses in tupperwares, the hearts and livers in their own small tupperware, a bag of wings, and another whole chicken. This should keep me well supplied with good stuff for the next 6 weeks. We have a big final order of the year to pick up in November, which will include a couple of turkeys!

Since we have this big chest freezer now I realized we'd need more freezer tupperware and bags and such so I got these handy items. They are supposedly disposable but my Spouse (who became a fan of them long before I did) got some years ago in Colorado and they're still in regular weekly use. They're insanely cheap too. I got a huge pile of ones like this for about $10 total.



The firewood people called and said they would not be able to bring the rest of the wood by until tomorrow. I am sure the backyard grass is breathing a sigh of relief at the temporary reprieve....



36 hours had passed so I got to test the aluminum strip. The caulking had dried all nice and clear:



I poured a bucket of water down one end and aside from a splash caused by my own clumsiness, the initial results were excellent:



The cat in the picture is Daisy, another of our three. She was eager to help out as long as it didn't involve touching any actual water.



The end of the strip is not glued down as there is a hill leading down to the drain at the low end. Once I am done testing I will probably cut the end off and re-fasten it in short articulated sections to keep the water channeled as it goes downhill too. This next photo illustrates the hill a little better:



The next step after the strip is completely done is to attack the cracks in the walls with waterproof cement repair goop. Oh I am so looking forward to that. 

I got Adobe Creative Suite installed on "Big Friend" (my replacement desktop machine) so I can put pictures in my LJ entries again. Be sure to go back and re-read the last few posts if you hadn't already because I did go and put in all the pictures that were supposed to go in them. Big Friend has all the slots for different memory cards right in the front of the computer which is very luxurious!

For dinner I actually had salmon with my veggies rather than chicken. I bought a small piece of fish at the store to get myself stoked to try fishing sometime in the next few days. Scary!

This morning the L strip I caulked in the basement looks really good, but the instructions on the caulk say wait 36 hours before subjecting it to water so I have to wait longer to test. I am eager to see!




The church near our house has either installed a new bell or turned on a long disused one for the first time in at least a couple years. It is a chorusing chime song sounding uncannily like a ringtone my Spouse used to have on a cell phone. As a result I keep going on high alert when it rings (once an hour). At least I know what it is now though. When it first started up about 3 days ago I would listen intently and move around the house trying to figure out where the heck that cell phone ringing was coming from. LOL

I forgot to mention that on my wild (hehe) shopping spree yesterday I also forced myself to do the scary deed of investing in fishing equipment. Scary because there is a huge learning curve and there was no way to start out without making at least some mistakes. Following book and internet advice the best I could I got a 8' spincasting pole called an "ugly stik" (hope that intimidates the fish) and 10 lb line. I got an assortment of 5-6 each spinners and spoons, some sinkers for fishing near the bottom, and a box of snaps and such for putting stuff together. I placed all these things in a small olive-green canvas tool bag I already had lying around. Total cost: $24. So at least if I make a fool of myself it is low cost humiliation :) 



According to my info this time of year certain salmon and trout will be returning to the streams to either spawn or overwinter, so my best bet for shore fishing is to fish near stream mouths and harbor breakwalls near the streams where those types of fish are found. Sound right? Uh... we'll find out eh. I keep telling myself I only need to catch about 10 edible fish to pay for this gear. LOL

Speaking of edible, today I need to go pick up the second round of fresh free-range organic chickens from the co-op farm. This time I need to be smart and cut them into pieces first before freezing, so some can be pulled out in per-use increments. I still have two whole ones frozen if I need a whole one.

Also the other load of wood is due to arrive today, probably while I am out fetching the chickens. I have the first load entirely stacked now. I'd say the wood room is about half full at this time. I nearly have 2 full rows going the long way, with one long row and 2 short rows still left to go. We're going to have a lot of wood outside to start the winter.

Hello, this post does have pictures that go with it, but I won't be adding them in until later. No reason I can't type the text part now though! Good news! The pictures are now added into this post, if a bit belatedlly.

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I didn't load in quite all of the remaining wood on Friday night and left it uncovered overnight thinking I'd finish it off this morning. Naturally it rained buckets all night last night as a result. It has also been drizzling all day today. I guess I will go ahead and throw it down later even though it is wet. It is still seasoned and the surface moisture will have had weeks or months to dry out before it's burned.

It rained enough to make the south basement wall leak and I noticed late last night that the aluminum L strips I glued down to channel the water did leak also all along their length. I kind of figured this would happen and that was the confirmation. It was interesting to note that even though it leaked, the water remained close in to the area and progressed down to the drain never getting more than 2-3 feet from the wall. So apparently the strip provided some direction even to the water that had passed outside of it... perhaps through surface tension? Unfortunately I do not have a photo of this phenomenon because our trusty dehumidifiers had dried it out thoroughly by this morning but I do have one that shows the line left on the floor by the edge of the erstwhile puddle. I think it'll illustrate what I meant about staying 2-3 feet from the wall:



I went and got some clear tub and tile caulk and caulked both the inside and outside of the strip so it should not leak next time, cross fingers. The caulk will supposedly try clear but when it was fresh it was pure white. Don't laugh at my un-smooth caulk application! At least I didn't get it all over everything!



In places the transparent glue attaching the aluminum to the floor was clearly providing a good seal so I didn't caulk those spots. It worked out pretty well I think:



Another project I did today was I took apart the laundry dryer vent to find out what was clogging it. Everything looked good in the long vertical portion of the pipe, as well as the elbow bend at the top. But when I removed the elbow I could see... gasp!!!




The pipe passing to the outside and that had an enormous wad of very dense fuzz in it. The beige fibers weren't like anything we own so it must date back to before we bought the house. It resembles nothing so much as tiny wiry fragments of a doormat or something.



I reached in with my hand and very bravely removed the stuff, which looked like this. The ruler is to illustrate I am not exaggerating when I say there was ten inches of it!



Upon removing this monstrosity I made a perplexing discovery. The vent appared to be a dead end, rather than leading outside. Huh???



Banging on this metal surface, it appeared to be fixed solidly in place. So I went outside to see WTF was going on. I knew the rear deck of the house was in the way but I had always assumed the dryer vent came out underneath the deck.



There's the basement window the vent passes through. As you can see it's entirely blocked by the deck, which is actually at the same level as the vent. Here's a closeup of the vent, if you can call it that at this point:



I wasn't able to get a photo from an angle that showed it, but the vent is the fixed kind that is closed at the top and sloped outward to allow a slim opening at the bottom. So armed with this knowledge I went back in and fished around with my handy dandy Bathroom Sink Glop Hook ™ ™.



With this I was able to probe all blocked areas and ultimately excavated a tiny opening that is shaped like a human eye and perhaps 1" tall by 2" wide.



Clearly this is the bottleneck of the system and we will need to be vigilant about keeping that cleaned out until we remodel the deck area. The good news is though, that the entire area outside of that small opening is very large and clear. I had originally been afraid that that portion under the deck would be stuffed with a rabbit-nest, as there is a rabbit who lives under there.

The laundry area all put back together... very civilized!



I am in the middle of a big computer-related switcheroo. The plan involves:

1. Removing my server presence at my parents' house in Minneapolis, and shutting down the DSL line and ISP service there. All functionality would be moved to the DSL line here as well as any equipment I intended to keep.

2. Combining our Wireless and LAN here at the house into 1 network to end the routing headaches, which does mean basically redesigning the entire network logic-wise.

3. Adding a powerful Windows-based machine to the local LAN to handle things like the weather station, voice over IP, WINS resolution, and backup storage wrangling.

4. Finishing the A/V and Home Automation installations in the server room.

Item 1 is in the early stages. My mother is getting her own DSL line up and running at her place, so as not to depend on mine anymore, and I am in the process of getting new servers running here to take up the user load in as seamless a fashion as possible. My hope is to travel to the Twin Cities to drop off computer recycling and pick up all the servers around Oct. 12th. Item 2 is fully planned out and is basically awaiting 3 and 4 to be done first so that I don't make myself crazy. Item 3 is why I can't post the pictures for this LJ entry quite yet. I decided to use my own desktop "Big Pig" for the powerful new Windows utility machine and am kind of midway through transferring my junk to a different machine. I am not entirely certain Big Pig is reliable enough for the job anymore, but it does have the power I was looking for. If it turns out to be worn out, I will substitute in the old previous incarnation of Big Pig when it comes back from my mother's house. And, as for item 4 it was held up by my missing a few key components but I did go buy those today so I should be able to finish it up with just a day or two's work.

While I was out buying A/V parts I did buy a Skype adapter for Big Pig which I set up and tested today. It works great! Once I have finished moving Big Pig downstairs to the server room we will have 2 black wireless phones (one in my office, and one downstairs) that answer to both Skype and the regular PSTN. Which Skype address they answer to depends purely on whose account is running on Big Pig at the time. Will probably always be mine when I am alone here of course.

When I was out and about my first choice for buying the clear caulk was to go to Forslund, a contractor-oriented Do it Best store that I have been about 99% loyal to since moving here. Unfortunately they were closed and dark during their normal business hours, with no explanation other than the closed sign. I really hope they have not gone out of business.

I vanquished the evil plastic drain valve, though it battled mightily. First I pulled out the temporary plug causing water to continue to glug out. There is no output-side valve to shut off water so I had no way of stopping everything from running out of the house hot water pipes back down on me. This seems like an oversight but what do I know? At least the water was only 80 degrees (the ambient temperature today) instead of actual hot water. So I used 2 buckets and just kept swapping them out as they filled and dumping the contents down the basement sink. The water was nasty, yellow and had lots of sediment. I learned while researching the valves that actually those are there so you can flush all the sediment out periodically to enhance water heater performance. I guess I just did a maintenance sediment flush on our heater. Go me!

The tools I used are as shown:



The item in the upper right hand corner is one of my favorite tools. I highly recommend everyone have one of these mini, open-ended hack saws in their toolbox. It has saved my butt so many times. I originally bought it when I was on the road for Electronic Theatre Controls and found myself at a theatre installation at 6AM on a Sunday in a strange town. I had to catch a flight home at 8AM at the airport and the ONLY thing left to finish on the system was that one of the dimmers had a foot installed in such a way that a door hinge was blocked from being installed. This little saw, bought at a 24/7 hardware store, allowed me to saw off the end of the hinge to make it fit in the smaller interior space. Whew!

In this case I was able to stick its little end in the hole and saw cuts through the plastic ring of the old drain's snapped-off part. The saw blade I used is dull enough that I didn't have much chance of hurting the metal of the tank. So I just kept sawing until I heard it hit metal. Then I use the small flat blade screw driver to pry off the first of the sections. The rest came out easily with a tug from the pliers. Once that was done (and by that time all the water had finally drained out) the huge monumental problem suddenly seemed like a quick fix. I wrapped thread tape on the new valve, screwed it in, tightened it manually then two additional full turns with a wrench, and viola. I turned the incoming water back on, then turned off the drain valve once water started to come out, and it did not leak. So I turned on all the hot water faucets in the house and when it'd managed to fill the system to the point where they were all spewing, I turned them all off and turned on the electrical part of the hot water heater. It immediately lit off and started getting to work heating all the new water.

That means I win... right?



The same fellow quoted in a previous post (regarding the inadvisability of plastic drain valves) said that the ball valve was the best so I went for that. It was only $4 more than the other kinds.

I think in 20/20 hindsight I should have stolen that rubber white ring off the old valve and used it to cover the base of the new one too just for looks. Maybe I'll cut it off and wrap it around post-installation. Cause that new valve is NOT coming off again just for that ;-)

Just got back from my dentist appointment, just a regular 6-month cleaning. It's momentous because it marks the first time in about 20 years I've been able to say I am going to the dentist regularly. I find the dentist's office really intimidating and not having gone in years doesn't help. Every time I screwed up the nerve and got an appointment at a new dentist, got one cleaning and got all the cavities fixed I had at the time, we'd then move again before I could have a 2nd cleaning there. Finally we live somewhere permanently so I can have the same dentist forever! This guy is really competent too. He learned it at his dad's knee (who was also a Dentist) and has 20 years of experience himself now. All the staff people and helpers I've met have been super nice and super competent also. I love that.

So, one heinous task down, one to go. On the way back I picked up a 3/4" brass ball valve with a spout to attach a hose to, to install in the water heater tonight. It'll be easy. Right? The parts I am dreading are 1) cutting out the broken off stump still in there without damaging the tank's threads, and 2) turning the water back on with all the air that is surely in the system now. Ugh.

I got a call from the firewood company saying they'd be dropping off the 2nd load on Sunday night instead of tonight, so I have a reprieve there. I'll post more later after I know what happened with the... dun dun dunnnnnn... water heater.  

This morning I ordered a new drain valve and was told the company no longer sold the plastic ones, only brass ones. Since the brass ones work with this water heater OK I went ahead and got one. It will take 5 days to arrive though so I may go and see if the local hardware stores have the same ones. It seems like the entire Rheem line uses about the same thing so it may be a generic part standard across many brands as well.

I had a look online for how-to instructions for replacing the valve which turned out to be mostly useless, since they assume 1) the water hasn't already exited the water heater, so you'll have some hope of avoiding letting air into the pipes, and 2) they assume the existing one is not snapped off at the threads and still mostly works.



However, I was somewhat amused by what the various sites had to say about plastic drain valves. For example:

"Plastic cone valves and plastic faucet valves drip, freeze inside, and clog with sediment the easiest. Plastic threads are very easy to cross when you wish to attach a garden hose to the drain valve. Even after opening a plastic valve one time, using it and closing it back up, the valve may drip." -- from "Avoid Leaks At The Bottom Of Your Water Heater - Upgrade Your Drain Valve" by John Haynes

I am wretchedly fervently looking forward to the process of removing the ring of leftover, snapped off plastic thread from the water heater without damaging the hole so the new one will seat well. Le sigh.

Crap! I made myself go throw a load of wood down before it got dark, and in a freak event a round stick bounced over the side of the ramp, bounced up from the ground underneath and knocked the drain valve off the water heater. It's too late to order the replacement part so I shut off the water and the water heater and bookmarked the manufacturer's web page to phone them tomorrow. Note to self: sound of rushing water coming from wood room = BAD.



Above is a picture of the opening where the valve was. It was a plastic one and the cowling snapped off at the threads. The innards were still good (the cone shaped kind) so I shoved those back in to keep more water from coming out for now.

I can't believe this happened so soon after I posted that the water heater works great. And talked about dealing with leaks in the basement and keeping wood dry. Oh come on! Give me a break!!!! 

Here's the damp floor a couple hours later. The cat in the picture is Zinger, one of our three. He has no idea that not long before, massive amounts of water were shooting out of the hole pointed in his direction right at his height.



Here's the view behind the boilers, where gravity caused all the water to run. Most of it went down the drain and the dehumidifier is busy helping the rest dry out. Great view of the new shelf from this angle too.



As a note this is about where the hot water heater would have been sitting if we'd had a chance to move it before the next sea assignment. LOL

The accomplishment seems somewhat diminished by the great water disaster just described, but I did manage to complete the first stacked row in the wood room:



OK that is it for tonight. I'm going to bed.