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| I may or may not have sampled the local wares. Purely for scientific research. Several times. Each night. |
So I may have traveled to Ireland for a bit which prevented me from doing any home improvement. You know. Work stuff. Now I'm back though and we have started anew, this time with the heating system. I'm not too proud to admit when I need help and in this case there is no amount of DIY I am able to do to get this heating system done correctly. I'd just as soon light a fire and hope for the best.
We have a team from a great HVAC company, Cooling Unlimited, in this week redoing our entire heating system. Not just updating, but a complete rip out and install. It is very important for this to happen for two reasons:
1) The furnace won't turn on.
2) There is no safe heat on the second floor.
With another Wee One on the way within the next few weeks we wanted to make sure that we had quality heat in our house. Since it is all forced hot air, we wanted quality air as well. No point in breathing 50 years worth of dust and dog hair being cycled through a furnace that is held together by rust and duct tape.
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| I'm sure I could have just fixed it myself |
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| Duct tape. Duct work. Makes sense to me. |
As they are going to be here the entire week working on everything, I figured I would give a few small updates instead of one massive post, because that would not accurately capture the scope of what is happening here. We are taking a poorly installed heating system and ripping the entire thing out for a new, properly sized one that is efficiently designed. This goes back to my promise to this house.
I will not cover up mistakes. I will never patch something improperly done. I will never route new work around unneeded pipes. I will rip anything out that is bad and build it from scratch the right way.
Which is what we are doing with this heating system. Bye bye duct work that is more duct tape than plenum. So long 100 meters of unnecessary gas pipe. Sayonara closet in the nursery.. Wait what?
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| Baby clothes are tiny anyway |
Yes, because there is no heat on the second floor we had two choices. Run pipes up from the basement or add a second furnace into the attic to handle the second floor.
Pro Tip: Two furnaces will cost twice as much as one furnace.
So we had to compromise and run the duct work. That cost us half of a closet downstairs and all of the closet in the nursery. Luckily I am use to one project spawning various little demon projects that continue to plague my life. Like those stupid slimes in every RPG ever. You kill it and then two more slimes appear. At best you hope that the two slimes are smaller than the original. Even then they usually group back up into a big slime if you aren't quick.
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| Slay the project with my +5 hammer drill |
I'd better put a new frame on that closet before it gets out of hand.
With day 1 completed we have a host of new vents in the second floor. Those vents will eventually deliver electronically cleaned, perfectly humidified cool or hot air. Right now all they are delivering is a draft from the attic and copious amounts of blown-in insulation. Also bugs. Lots more bugs.
The wife is concerned about rodents getting into the bedroom now. I accidentally said that if rodents are in the attic already they would have had no issue getting into the bedroom before and most likely would head right for the kitchen through the walls. Now I need to buy traps for 'various sized rodents'....
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| I'm thinking bear traps in the attic should do |
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| This guy got paid by the foot of installed pipe |
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| This guy got paid to do it right |
Hopefully the rest of the week goes ok. Only one worker fell through the ceiling in the poor nursery so far, I would like to keep it that way. There are too many holes in this house already for the rodents to come through.
- The Porter -
