Jan 6, 2014 - Feeding the beast

What beast?  The oil furnace, of course!

No chance to blog yesterday.  It was warmer yesterday, still nice and brisk, though.  Katrina and the kids stayed home from church because of the stomach thing she and Christian had.  I went in to teach Sunday School, and we discussed what the kids needs to do, be, and become to be ready to serve as missionaries.  It was a good discussion, deeper than some we've had recently.

As one of the kids was saying the closing prayer, my phone vibrated in my pocket.  I left right afterward, and as I left the building, I checked who it was.  It was Katrina.  So I called back, and she told me that the furnace had stopped working and that we had leaking pipes in the basement.  2 thoughts came into my head: 1) How bad could this possibly be?  In the worst case, how bad could it have gotten in the last 10 hours, and how long would it take to fix it? 2) Is there really anything broken?

So I went straight home, and assessed the situation.  The furnace was the biggest thing.  If we don't have water, we can survive.  Without heat on a 25 degree day, we're not in good shape.  So I checked the power to the furnace, it was off.  Katrina had flipped the breaker to be safe.  So I turned it back on and walked down to see if I could see any lights going.  There wasn't anything visibly wrong, so I reached down to the red button and pumped it a couple times.  10 seconds later, I heard it kick on.  I went up stairs, and in 2-3 minutes, we had warm air coming out.  I'm guessing an air bubble got in the line or maybe a little snow got in the tank when we had it filled on Friday.

So that was a good thing.  Easy fix.

The leaky pipe took some more investigation.  The pipe is the dead end for the line that used to feed the hot water boiler.  Many houses in the East have radiant heat, with a furnace that heats water, and the water is piped throughout the house in water radiators.  They look like baseboard electric heaters in the West, but circulate hot water instead.  There must be a logic to it that I don't understand.  At any rate, the house used to have that kind of setup, and the pipe that fed the system is still there.  There is a stem pipe that comes off the main cold water line, then a valve, then a nipple.  The nipple was leaking.  So either the valve had gone bad, or the nipple had gone bad.  It was just dripping, not squirting, so no worries.  There was a bucket under it already, and it was fine.

Once the house had heated up a bit, it stopped dripping.  So there's a seal in there that is leaking by a bit when it gets cold.  I 'll replace it on Wednesday.

The takeaway from this?  Something I've thought repeatedly about this house:  I love that everything is visible in this house.  The full basement gives me complete visibility to wiring and piping without getting dirty or staring at desiccated opossum remains and other unpleasantness in a crawlspace.

The work week this week is crazily busy, but short.  I worked a half day on Sunday, 12 hrs today and tomorrow, and then a couple hours on Thursday, and I'm done.  I'm preparing for our monthly meeting with customer management, and it's an intense effort.  The team members all put their best foot forward, and we always have a good product.  But it takes effort to gather the information, shape it, and package it in a way that is useful for us and our customer.  So that's what I'm working on.  Made good progress today.  Tomorrow I should be ready for the premeeting.

Pics: the leaking nipple and Hopewell Junction.  I was out picking up something at the local hardware store.  Not Home Depot!  We have one relatively close, but we've got a local odds-and-ends hardware store as well as a building supply store closer.  I love both of them.  As I left the store, I was struck by the Hallmark Village I was walking through.  So I snapped a photo.