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Saturday, February 11, 2012

Mr. Chair... I PAID FOR THIS HEATING SYSTEM!!!

my annual salute to officious "moderators" who think they know it all, copied from an old sportcaster on the radio.

which arises because we woke up to no heat today, zero outside, and the thermostat sliding down to 56.  poked and fiddled, the reset button did nothing.  found we had power with the last dying chirp of the "growler" line detector's batteries.  cycled the breaker anyway at the panel.

shutting the maintenance switch off and turning it back shortly after got a click out of the burner controls, so downed it for a minute and then power on.  after a decent delay, the furnace kicked in and heated up nicely.  about three minutes into it, the flue got hot enough to equal one of the earlier cold-day "ouchies," so all is well for now.  particularly since the furnace walls were NOT hot, which is sorta significant ;)

didn't inspect this year on advice of our burner mechanic, so we're probably marginal on something (burner "eye", nozzle, ignitor tips) that hopefully we can catch next fall.  found and downloaded the burner manual, and it's all full of danger-fire and hotpuff warnings.  apparently nobody is supposed to know anything in the manuals except certified servicemen.

since ISO records indicate this house came by this furnace because of a claim, sounds like a good plan.  I suspect either the motor overheated and tripped the safety, or a preset on runtime against clocktime was reached and tripped the safety.  windows had been left open a crack in DeBasement because of varnished stair treads.

// edit 4/5/12 // replacing the vaporizing nozzle was the fix.  if it wasn't the issue would probably have been the transformer, which apparently now is not a VHV transformer, but something more like a voltage multiplier module, like old CRT TV set "triplers."  have not had to call the furnace guy back. it's expertise you pay for when you call.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

too tired to get DeBased

we did sand everything down.  didn't put any new varnish on in DeBasement, but should tonight.  looking ahead, I don't like the idea of pulling every blinkin' wire separately for a 6x1 speaker system, two coaxes, Ethernet, video feed up from the theater amp, and a partridge in a pear tree... so I picked up another 500' spool of wire on my way into work.  now it's going to be purple and white behind the walls, in the conduits.

12 gauge stranded.  take your Monster (tm) cable and twist it in knots, guys, copper is copper.  if I built a micro-ohmmeter again (whipped one up in the 70s because I had plans) each connection would have ten times the resistance as the cable.  minimum.

did vacuum up the loose dust left after we swept Monday night.