False Impressions

We have a new electric hot water tank plumbed in.  The work went along very nicely: removing the old oil boiler (damned heavy thing), cleaning the closet, plumbing the lines, and running some electricity over.  We had hot water by four in the afternoon of day two.

But there is no rest for the wicked.  I'm not sure what wickedness we're guilty of, but there must have been something.  On Tuesday night it became apparent that our refrigerator was no longer working, and after removing the rear access panel I [Michael] discovered that the compressor had given up.  What's worse is that it melted an electrical connector, which we then realized was the actual cause of the smoke in our house two days before.

So the heater was not the real culprit.

In hindsight it all makes sense, of course.  At the moment we started smelling smoke our initial impulse was to blame the heater, which has a history of giving us trouble.  It did strike both of us as odd that the smoke was concentrated in the kitchen rather than in the hall beside the heater closet.  It was also peculiar that the smoke didn't register on our carbon monoxide detector.  Lastly, it seemed odd that the floor in front of the fridge was not warm.

 At the moment of crisis, none of that mattered.  The heater had lately taken to shutting down and waiting for a human to reset it (it had done so earlier that morning).  The smoke filled the house at the same time the heater fired off.  I had repositioned the pickup tube in the oil tank four days prior, and so the possibility of picking up something off the bottom of the tank that could affect the heater was also a prospect.  There was also the simple logic that when I turned off the heater the smoke cleared and the house didn't burn down, and the false impression set in that the heater must have been the cause.

 So we bought a new refrigerator yesterday.  Nobody in this town works on refrigerator compressor systems, so replacing the compressor was not an option (which really irks both Sheryl and I to have this huge monolith that now needs to go to the landfill).  The unit we bought has a Crosley name plate on it, but apart from the name and a little bit of trim, the fridge is exactly the same as the one we took out (a Kenmore).   We even used a couple of shelves from the old unit to augment the ones in the new one.  The really funny thing is that the Crosley was less money that the new Kenmore of the same type (by a couple hundred dollars), and the Crosley carries a ten year warranty on the compressor compared to a one-year warranty for the Kenmore (the Kenmore did have an optional five-year extended warranty for an additional four hundred dollars).

All in all, everything worked out okay.  There were some fish sticks that did not survive the freeze-thaw-freeze cycle, but the rest of the food seems to have made it intact.  The only thing we really lost was the ability to burn the remaining eighty gallons of oil in our underground tank, but a friend who looked at the old heater after it was out proclaimed it unsafe on a couple of counts (and he's had some experience with oil burners), so decommisioning it when we did was not a bad thing to do, even if it was just a little premature.

Starting the Heater Project

It isn't a pretty picture, is it?  This is the closet that once housed our oil heater.  Yesterday morning we started smelling nasty, sooty smells, and seeing wisps of smoke, and Sheryl started bundling up the children to herd them out the door.  By the time they were ready to go I [Michael] had decided that the culprit was our old oil heater, and our great heater project had begun.

By the time Sheryl returned home the heater was ready to come out of the closet.  It is sitting on our front porch right now, in fact.  By late afternoon we had cold running water again (the two pipes in the picture are cold water in and hot water out, the valves were salvaged from the previous plumbing in the closet).  By midnight I had the hallway floor cleaned (oil heat is very dirty) and the intial cleaning of the closet floor complete (but as you can see, it is still quite black).

Today we'll get a new electric hot water tank and get it temporarily wired in (our final heater design calls for a tank anyway) so we can take showers and baths again.  It's a little cool in the house this morning (60 in our bedroom), but could do without central heat until September if we have to, and we may very well have to, since it's going to take some time to get everything else cobbled together.  Not exactly how I envisioned beginning this project, but these are really pretty good circumstances considering that the old heater could have done this back in the depths of winter.

Well, lots of work to do. 

Becky's Birthday Week

	Monday was Becky's birthday, turning four years old. While the "official" party (with her friends from school) isn't until this weekend, we couldn't let the occasion pass without doing something, so Sheryl baked a cake and we had a little celebration.
	Becky was very pleased with her cake.
	The following morning, Michael decided that he wanted birthday cake for breakfast. After all, it was there on the table where he could reach it, and he was sure he could eat quietly and not attract any attention to himself. Of course, there was the little matter of the evidence trail, but it seems that when mischief is "cute" punishment is non-existant, and Michael had no fear. He also had no fork, but that didn't slow him down in the slightest.
	A few days later, Becky got a lovely dress in the mail from Grandpa Bob and Grandma Kathy. She wore it all day long yesterday, and it's likely to be her new favorite.

On another subject, I [Michael] have been doing some inspecting of the neighborhoods to the north of us to determine the watershed for the creeks that flow through our property.  This effort has been aided in no small part by an aerial photo taken in the 1960's, which shows the lay of the land when only the main roads (Back Loop and Montana Creek) were in place.  Google Earth provided the more recent picture.  Photoshop allowed me to overlay the photos and add more overlays for streets and water flow.  The result of this is the photo on the right.  This explains why the east creek is intermittent while the west creek is not.  I'm considering putting the photo in a flier that I could distribute to the folks upstream, just as a way to make them conscious of the fact that their actions can affect our water quality.  I don't know if it will make any difference, but it couldn't hurt.

The Real Reason We Moved

Another string of sunny days, another opportunity to remind ourselves why we moved last winter. There is the lovely front yard, for instance...     ...where Michael likes to roll his cart up and down the trail, over the bridge, and through the woods. There is also the hilly nature of the place, suitable for rope swings where both Becky... ...and Michael like to spend a lot of time. And then there's the water, with one year-round pond and a seasonal one, and the two creeks (the east creek is apparently intermittent, having gone dry during the last break in the rains). Indeed, there is so much to do now that winter has passed we hardly have time for blogging.  So be it.

 

The Lay of the Land

Some of my [Michael's] meanderings around the yard are done with a clipboard rather than a rake.  I've been observing the shape of the ground and the flow of the creeks, looking at dips and marshes, and I sketched out a rough contour map to refer to when contemplating what to do with the property.  I also decided to make an electronic version of the map, the first draft of which is represented here.

The map is drawn on a one-foot contour.

At this stage, the map is more representational than accurate.  As time goes on and I gain familiarity with some of the more intricate details of our property I'll probably move some contours around and add a few more, but for folks who want to know the general lay of the land, this should serve as a pretty good reference.