Interior Warmth Restored
Mar. 13th, 2007 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gerisullivanHuzzah! Boiler Guy Larry started Zone 1 heat this morning. The first good sign was water flowing full force when he checked the drain. That sure beat Thursday's tiny trickle. Oil Delivery Gal Cele came with Larry. She and I watched the edges of the basement ceilings for water leaks as Larry fired the boiler with Zone 1 open. Then I checked upstairs, making sure the floors were dry and feeling the beginning wisps of heat rising from the baseboard radiators.
Color me lucky. All appears to be fine. Fine as in no split pipes.
Temperatures are forecast to drop later this week through the beginning of next week. Before then, I'll put the pipe insulation back in place, but I'll probably leave the dropped ceiling titles open just to put a bit more warm air up near the pipes. There's no reason to think that's actually necessary, but I'm understandably a bit twitchy on the frozen pipe front and am playing it extra safe for the rest of this heating season.
I also talked with Boiler Guy about replacing the oil tank, which I've never been happy with. Larry strongly recommends a new location for it. As it turns out, the former owners put the current tank in themselves. Look Ma, no permits. That explains just how funky the entire set-up is. (The house originally had electric heat and was converted to oil; I knew the conversion job was a weak point in the house when I bought it.) Larry says the front corner of the toy room is the best location. That would involve carving a corner out of the room, then putting walls around the tank. Walls, and an access door. As in, more work (and expense) than simply swapping out the current tank, but it would also give me a lot more unfinished basement space, something the house is uncomfortably short on. And there's the fact that we probably can't get a permit to put a replacement tank in where the current one is; a tank should have never been put there in the first place.
Replacing the tank this summer may be overly optimistic from a budget standpoint, especially considering the additional expense associated with relocating it. But it's exciting to think of the increased functionality in the unfinished portion of the basement...and not all that daunting to contemplate changing the toy room. That's probably because the room is sheer chaos from the weekend's flooding problems. It's already a good time for me to rearrange the furniture and some of the shelves. Hmmmm....
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fredcritter, please tell Susan that the flooding didn't damage any of the circus! And the proposed new location for the oil tank wouldn't affect the circus -- we're talking about the corner where the drafting table is now.
Color me lucky. All appears to be fine. Fine as in no split pipes.
Temperatures are forecast to drop later this week through the beginning of next week. Before then, I'll put the pipe insulation back in place, but I'll probably leave the dropped ceiling titles open just to put a bit more warm air up near the pipes. There's no reason to think that's actually necessary, but I'm understandably a bit twitchy on the frozen pipe front and am playing it extra safe for the rest of this heating season.
I also talked with Boiler Guy about replacing the oil tank, which I've never been happy with. Larry strongly recommends a new location for it. As it turns out, the former owners put the current tank in themselves. Look Ma, no permits. That explains just how funky the entire set-up is. (The house originally had electric heat and was converted to oil; I knew the conversion job was a weak point in the house when I bought it.) Larry says the front corner of the toy room is the best location. That would involve carving a corner out of the room, then putting walls around the tank. Walls, and an access door. As in, more work (and expense) than simply swapping out the current tank, but it would also give me a lot more unfinished basement space, something the house is uncomfortably short on. And there's the fact that we probably can't get a permit to put a replacement tank in where the current one is; a tank should have never been put there in the first place.
Replacing the tank this summer may be overly optimistic from a budget standpoint, especially considering the additional expense associated with relocating it. But it's exciting to think of the increased functionality in the unfinished portion of the basement...and not all that daunting to contemplate changing the toy room. That's probably because the room is sheer chaos from the weekend's flooding problems. It's already a good time for me to rearrange the furniture and some of the shelves. Hmmmm....
fredcritter, please tell Susan that the flooding didn't damage any of the circus! And the proposed new location for the oil tank wouldn't affect the circus -- we're talking about the corner where the drafting table is now.
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no subject
Date: 2007-03-14 12:12 am (UTC)I don't know if this matters to you, but I think that 2007 is the last year for tax breaks on replacing stuff like furnaces and water heaters with more energy-efficient models. It might be worth looking up, at least.