Geri Sullivan, Girl Homeowner
Aug. 4th, 2006 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gerisullivanI guess get to keep my house after all.
Most of 23 years ago, a few months after buying Toad Hall, I had to call my dad to find out how to start a furnace. A boiler, actually, but the basic issue was the same: I needed to turn on the heat, and I didn't know how.
Dad soon had me on the right track, and just one flood from the overflow tank through the bedroom closet floor and the living room ceiling later, the boiler started and the house began to warm.
I didn't feel like a competent homeowner that day. Not only didn't I own a portable drill, I didn't even know how to turn on the heat.
Yes, I know. Lots of homeowners don't own portable drills. Others who do own them probably don't know how to use them. But I grew up in a house where one of the homeowners, Daddy, fixed pretty much everything himself. I grew up thinking that homeowners were supposed to be able to fix pretty much everything themselves.
It took until my 30s to learn that calling the repair guy was a legitimate way of fixing things. Actually, I have![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fredcritter to thank for that. Someone had broken a window trying to break into my house. The double-keyed deadbolts foiled the burglary, but there I was with a broken window to fix. I called Fred and asked how to replace a broken window. He told me to look under "glass" in the yellow pages. Huh! I would have never thought of that.
As it turned out, a fan I was dating at the time knew how to replace window's my dad's way. He explained the process and offered to come over with putty and glazier's points. So I learned two ways to replace a broken window in the process of replacing one. Win-win.
Fast-forward those 23 years. Fast-muddle, actually. Many repairs languished untilgalacticvoyeur moved in and soon turned his efforts to shoring up various corners of the house. "If you can take it apart with a putty knife, it's not wood anymore," he proclaimed as we were scraping paint from what proved to be rotted window sills. He taught me how to paint a house, a skill I've put to good use this past week painting the new boards for the fascia and soffit bits that are being replaced as part of the gutter repair. Heck, I'm even wearing one of the same T-shirts I wore when painting Toad Hall. I can even see a smear or two of Gingerbread. The story never ends....
Yesterday, I was confounded for a few hours by a lack of electricity to my garage door openers. The overhead lights worked, the circuit breaker was fine, but the doors wouldn't budge. Thank goodness for manual overrides.
It was too hot to go poking around in the garage, so I calledkip_w and malibrarian and suggested dinner. I rather desperately needed to pick up water softener salt, which entailed driving 30 miles in some direction unless I wanted to risk whether or not WalMart would have the iron-reducing kind I use. I usually shop elsewhere, and driving 30 miles in Kip and Cathy's direction held the added benefit of seeing them and Sarah. Win-win.
The garage had cooled off to a tolerable temp by the time I returned, so I went poking around. It took only a few minutes to discover a previously-unnoticed GFI outlet. Tripped. Hey, that was easy! One push of the reset button later and the doors were once again going up, down, up...all at the push of a button.
Flush with satisfaction at having figured it out before hunting down and calling the electrician, as I'd been envisioning, I came inside and proceeded to replace the fluorescent bulb above the kitchen sink. I'd guessed the right size to buy when shopping (lists are not my friend), but what should have been an easy maintenance item seems to have morphed into yet another home repair. The new bulb didn't do the trick.
Hmmm. The house and I ended the day tied.
The contest resumed today in a rather alarming way. I filled the water softener tank and reset the three timers on the entire filtration system. We've had a lot of power outages lately, and they were several hours behind. This only matters in terms of when the system backwashes, but I do like to pay at least some attention to this routine maintenance issue.
I was on the back deck just finishing up the replacement top coat of paint that was washed away in Wednesday's sudden storm when one of the tanks started backwashing. WTF? That wasn't right. It's supposed to be a middle-of-the-night process. While 5am might be credible, 5pm was certainly not!
I headed back to the basement, figuring I'd probably set a timer wrong. Nope. All were fine, but the neutralizer was backwashing. Hmmm.
There's a manual control that I've never used. The instructions said to push it in, and the little lever already looked pushed up against the edge of the casing, so I thought I might have accidentally pushed it in when replacing the cover. So I turned it a bit, and pulled it toward me.
Big mistake.
The innards went *spung*. There's a heavy but plastic camshaft kind of thing that came completely loose, no longer in contact with any of the eight metal tabs that control whatever it is they control. Nor was it on contact with the front piece, the one with the clock and all the little tabs telling it when to backwash and such.
I tried putting it back together. No such luck. I got a light, a chair to stand on, some screwdrivers to push the little tabs to the side in the hope of noodging the camshaft into the correct position. I held the little plastic lever between my teeth so I wouldn't lose it.
(It's a fix-it-yourself homeowner kind of thing to do.)
Several dozen attempts later, I became concerned that I'd break something and make the problem much worse than it already was. I figured I'd call Well Guy on Monday. He installed the filtration system, he'd be able to pop the camshaft back into place no problem. It didn't matter that the neutralizer wouldn't backwash before then. It's a once-a-week process, and it had just just backwashed a half-hour earlier. I came upstairs. I worked, doing a quick proof of a 126-page document and generating a new PDF after making a few corrections. I went to the kitchen for something to drink and noticed the paintbrush that I'd been going to clean a few hours earlier, only to be distracted when I heard the system backwash. Oops! I adore that paint brush!
(Owning favorite paintbrushes is typical of fix-it-yourself homeowners.)
The paint is latex, so I quickly ran the brush under the faucet. The faucet that yielded a cup or two of water before trickling to nothing. Fuck. That camshaft doesn''t just control the backwash cycle, it controls the entire operation of the neutralizer. And without the neutralizer working, water doesn't flow through the system and out of my faucets.
In retrospect, I'm pretty sure there's a bypass...if not for each individual tank, then for the whole water treatment system. But I wasn't thinking of that when I headed downstairs. Leaving home for the weekend was a distinct possibility. I didn't consider an emergency plumbing call; it didn't seem like that much of an emergency.
The pressure on the water pump was just over 50 pounds, which is a tad higher than I remember seeing it before -- hmmm. I unplugged all three of the plugs for the water treatment system (one for each tank), and discovered that one of the metal tabs on the neutralizer relieved pressure and enabled me to be able to move three of the other tabs that had been impossible to move earlier. Okay. That's progress.
I closed the valve between the water pump and the treatment system in the hope of attaining a pressure-free work state. It took a bit more fiddling, but eventually the camshaft settled into place and the little lever that lead to so much trouble slipped smoothly through the freshly-aligned holes. Goshwow.
Then I came upstairs and turned on the faucet. Flowing water! Yay!
I cleaned the paintbrush, which looks only a little worse for the delay. I hope to find out for sure tomorrow morning, when I plan to add top coat to the other side of the boards and be finished with the project.
For tonight, I'm keeping a closer eye on the pressure valve, and have just been reading a fair bit online about well systems, water pumps, and typical water pressure ranges. If my system is set to operate between 40 and 60 psi, all is well. If it's set to operate between 30 and 50 psi, another common set-up, I might still have problems.
All of which is a long way of saying I don't yet know today's house vs. girl homeowner game score. But I do have running water again, and I didn't for awhile there. And I didn't even have to call my dad or anyone else to get it going again.
I'm looking forward to telling him the tale when we talk Tuesday night. He'll get a kick out of it, and quite likely have some useful things to tell me about water pumps.
Most of 23 years ago, a few months after buying Toad Hall, I had to call my dad to find out how to start a furnace. A boiler, actually, but the basic issue was the same: I needed to turn on the heat, and I didn't know how.
Dad soon had me on the right track, and just one flood from the overflow tank through the bedroom closet floor and the living room ceiling later, the boiler started and the house began to warm.
I didn't feel like a competent homeowner that day. Not only didn't I own a portable drill, I didn't even know how to turn on the heat.
Yes, I know. Lots of homeowners don't own portable drills. Others who do own them probably don't know how to use them. But I grew up in a house where one of the homeowners, Daddy, fixed pretty much everything himself. I grew up thinking that homeowners were supposed to be able to fix pretty much everything themselves.
It took until my 30s to learn that calling the repair guy was a legitimate way of fixing things. Actually, I have
fredcritter to thank for that. Someone had broken a window trying to break into my house. The double-keyed deadbolts foiled the burglary, but there I was with a broken window to fix. I called Fred and asked how to replace a broken window. He told me to look under "glass" in the yellow pages. Huh! I would have never thought of that.As it turned out, a fan I was dating at the time knew how to replace window's my dad's way. He explained the process and offered to come over with putty and glazier's points. So I learned two ways to replace a broken window in the process of replacing one. Win-win.
Fast-forward those 23 years. Fast-muddle, actually. Many repairs languished until
galacticvoyeur moved in and soon turned his efforts to shoring up various corners of the house. "If you can take it apart with a putty knife, it's not wood anymore," he proclaimed as we were scraping paint from what proved to be rotted window sills. He taught me how to paint a house, a skill I've put to good use this past week painting the new boards for the fascia and soffit bits that are being replaced as part of the gutter repair. Heck, I'm even wearing one of the same T-shirts I wore when painting Toad Hall. I can even see a smear or two of Gingerbread. The story never ends....Yesterday, I was confounded for a few hours by a lack of electricity to my garage door openers. The overhead lights worked, the circuit breaker was fine, but the doors wouldn't budge. Thank goodness for manual overrides.
It was too hot to go poking around in the garage, so I called
kip_w and malibrarian and suggested dinner. I rather desperately needed to pick up water softener salt, which entailed driving 30 miles in some direction unless I wanted to risk whether or not WalMart would have the iron-reducing kind I use. I usually shop elsewhere, and driving 30 miles in Kip and Cathy's direction held the added benefit of seeing them and Sarah. Win-win.The garage had cooled off to a tolerable temp by the time I returned, so I went poking around. It took only a few minutes to discover a previously-unnoticed GFI outlet. Tripped. Hey, that was easy! One push of the reset button later and the doors were once again going up, down, up...all at the push of a button.
Flush with satisfaction at having figured it out before hunting down and calling the electrician, as I'd been envisioning, I came inside and proceeded to replace the fluorescent bulb above the kitchen sink. I'd guessed the right size to buy when shopping (lists are not my friend), but what should have been an easy maintenance item seems to have morphed into yet another home repair. The new bulb didn't do the trick.
Hmmm. The house and I ended the day tied.
The contest resumed today in a rather alarming way. I filled the water softener tank and reset the three timers on the entire filtration system. We've had a lot of power outages lately, and they were several hours behind. This only matters in terms of when the system backwashes, but I do like to pay at least some attention to this routine maintenance issue.
I was on the back deck just finishing up the replacement top coat of paint that was washed away in Wednesday's sudden storm when one of the tanks started backwashing. WTF? That wasn't right. It's supposed to be a middle-of-the-night process. While 5am might be credible, 5pm was certainly not!
I headed back to the basement, figuring I'd probably set a timer wrong. Nope. All were fine, but the neutralizer was backwashing. Hmmm.
There's a manual control that I've never used. The instructions said to push it in, and the little lever already looked pushed up against the edge of the casing, so I thought I might have accidentally pushed it in when replacing the cover. So I turned it a bit, and pulled it toward me.
Big mistake.
The innards went *spung*. There's a heavy but plastic camshaft kind of thing that came completely loose, no longer in contact with any of the eight metal tabs that control whatever it is they control. Nor was it on contact with the front piece, the one with the clock and all the little tabs telling it when to backwash and such.
I tried putting it back together. No such luck. I got a light, a chair to stand on, some screwdrivers to push the little tabs to the side in the hope of noodging the camshaft into the correct position. I held the little plastic lever between my teeth so I wouldn't lose it.
(It's a fix-it-yourself homeowner kind of thing to do.)
Several dozen attempts later, I became concerned that I'd break something and make the problem much worse than it already was. I figured I'd call Well Guy on Monday. He installed the filtration system, he'd be able to pop the camshaft back into place no problem. It didn't matter that the neutralizer wouldn't backwash before then. It's a once-a-week process, and it had just just backwashed a half-hour earlier. I came upstairs. I worked, doing a quick proof of a 126-page document and generating a new PDF after making a few corrections. I went to the kitchen for something to drink and noticed the paintbrush that I'd been going to clean a few hours earlier, only to be distracted when I heard the system backwash. Oops! I adore that paint brush!
(Owning favorite paintbrushes is typical of fix-it-yourself homeowners.)
The paint is latex, so I quickly ran the brush under the faucet. The faucet that yielded a cup or two of water before trickling to nothing. Fuck. That camshaft doesn''t just control the backwash cycle, it controls the entire operation of the neutralizer. And without the neutralizer working, water doesn't flow through the system and out of my faucets.
In retrospect, I'm pretty sure there's a bypass...if not for each individual tank, then for the whole water treatment system. But I wasn't thinking of that when I headed downstairs. Leaving home for the weekend was a distinct possibility. I didn't consider an emergency plumbing call; it didn't seem like that much of an emergency.
The pressure on the water pump was just over 50 pounds, which is a tad higher than I remember seeing it before -- hmmm. I unplugged all three of the plugs for the water treatment system (one for each tank), and discovered that one of the metal tabs on the neutralizer relieved pressure and enabled me to be able to move three of the other tabs that had been impossible to move earlier. Okay. That's progress.
I closed the valve between the water pump and the treatment system in the hope of attaining a pressure-free work state. It took a bit more fiddling, but eventually the camshaft settled into place and the little lever that lead to so much trouble slipped smoothly through the freshly-aligned holes. Goshwow.
Then I came upstairs and turned on the faucet. Flowing water! Yay!
I cleaned the paintbrush, which looks only a little worse for the delay. I hope to find out for sure tomorrow morning, when I plan to add top coat to the other side of the boards and be finished with the project.
For tonight, I'm keeping a closer eye on the pressure valve, and have just been reading a fair bit online about well systems, water pumps, and typical water pressure ranges. If my system is set to operate between 40 and 60 psi, all is well. If it's set to operate between 30 and 50 psi, another common set-up, I might still have problems.
All of which is a long way of saying I don't yet know today's house vs. girl homeowner game score. But I do have running water again, and I didn't for awhile there. And I didn't even have to call my dad or anyone else to get it going again.
I'm looking forward to telling him the tale when we talk Tuesday night. He'll get a kick out of it, and quite likely have some useful things to tell me about water pumps.
