Silly me...

...drywall screws don't work w/ brick!!

Had I been thinking, I would have connected the dots that go from "The outside facing walls in my room are lath and plaster directly (almost) on top of the brick.", to "Odds are, that also is true downstairs!!"

Had I been thinking.  Ha!

So, no heaters on walls today.  The good news is that I returned about $25.00 of stuff today, which means that I should be able to afford the fasteners and starter bit that I'll need.

"What do we want?"

"Heat!"

"When will we have it?"

"Real soon!"

Sigh.

(Copy of an email to my fan club...)

Speaking of Radiators... (Updated!)

Update: 1,380 ponds of scrap cast iron.

...they are outside.  In pieces.

It turns out that they are put together using individual sections.  Two pieces of pipe are used to connect one section to the next.  Four threaded rods run the length of a radiator, and by tightening nuts on the ends of rods, the sections are pressed together. Years of hot water causes them to rust in to one, massive, impossible to move assembly.

Turns out that, once you have removed the rods, the sections are relatively easy to bust apart.  If you own a splitting maul.  Which I do.  You don't try to cut the sections apart, rather you use the wedge to pop the sections apart.

Here's what I started with:

You can see the hex heads of two of the four rods right under the break.

Multiply by four, and you get:

Bedroom radiator and the Chosen Destructor

Pile the first...

...and pile the second.

My neighbor is going to load them up and take them to salvage.  I asked him to let me know how much all of it weighs.  I'm guessing close to a half ton.

Da House...

As Jack Benny used to say, "Well..."

I got the two downstairs radiators detached and their feed and return pipes capped.  This, I thought, would at least let me run the furnace and heat my bedroom.

Both God and the house said "Ha!"

I turned on the heat, and went upstairs to check things out.  There was a nice thin stream of water squirting out of the interior of the radiator.  And, whilst the system was pressurized,  rain began falling from the decorative(?) beam between the living and dining areas.

Let there be rain!

My suspicion is that it is the result of a pipe that burst between the ceiling and the floor upstairs.  I hope that it is one of the pipes to the closet heater, because those are relatively short sections, and I *think* I should be able to detach them at a joint near the living room ceiling.  If it is one of the pipes to/from the bedroom, oy!  They are straight, single piece pipes from the basement to the radiator, as far as I can see.

So.  Command decision is that *all* radiators are in some way dead.  Four new radiator panels and four valve sets are on order from Runtal in over in Massachusetts.  I've ordered two twelve foot UH2 panels, one for the bedroom and one for the closet.  Five foot and eleven foot UH4 panels are on order for the living and dining rooms.

Oh, and of course, there is wall repair needed where the old radiators stood as well, which really means that he downstairs needs painting.  Since heat is the priority, I plan on patching and painting the walls where the old radiators were first, then moving on to painting the entire living/dining area.  Deb had a color scheme in mind,  If I recall correctly, it was green for the living room, blue for the dining room, and red for the kitchen.  (My recollection is based on the colors of the kitchen and dining room chairs.)

The wall under the front window. NOT the worst of the two!

Someone put a 'cap' on the baseboard, because it is bowed away from the wall.

Close up of the cap.

The dining room wall, the worst of the two. This is after the first coat of fill.  Once it is completely dry, it gets sanded, a second, thin coat, final sanding, and paint.

This is the part of the floor over the dry rotted joist.  There is about an inch of gap between the bottom of the baseboard and the floor.  That is brick you see in the gap.  There was a majorly kludged patch covering it.  I think I have more shoring to do...

 In other news, I finished up weatherproofing the kitchen door.  This, of course, required some patching and painting, too, but the job is done.  Yes, the door and frame need painting, but I need to focus my attention on the walls before the radiators get here.

The improved product.

New threshold plate and coat of paint.

New weather stripping!

Next pay day, I plan on getting someone out to put in a new pane of glass in the hole covered by the cardboard.

In the mean time, the bedroom is comfy, thanks to an early Christmas present from Deb - an electric, infra-red heater!

The new heater.  It is a faux fire place, with the infra-red heater in the box underneath.  That's Suzu warming her tail.

Suzu enjoying the new 'place' by the 'fire'.

I created the place by using my old bedspread under two fleece throws I picked up for $3.00 each at WalMart.  The dogs seem to like it, and I've even noticed Baxter making use of it.

For my next trick, more outlets in the bedroom!

Oh,  an update on the last electrical post... the short in the wiring over the back bedroom migrated.  I came home to find my wireless out, because I had plugged it into the old circuit, which failed when the short migrated.  So all of those lights and outlets are dead again.

I love this place!!

Bah Effing Humbug!!!

OK. So, I got a load of oil Friday.  No rush, figured I get the furnace going Saturday.

Here's the resulting e-mail convo:

Well, I'm shopping for heating.  I've looked at replacing the old radiators w/ similar new ones, but I don't think they'd be anywhere near 'hot' enough.  Depending on the calculator I use (and the underlying assumptions made by the coder), the downstairs (12' x 25' x 9') needs anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 BTUs/hour to stay warm!  The replacement 'old fashioned' radiators put out about 900 BTU/H.

From what I can tell so far, the Runtal vertical rads can do the job,  The ten pipe puts out 1400 BTU/H/ft, so two 8 foot panels should do the trick. Here's a link to the product page, and I've attached the PDF brochure. Their site has a boatload of information, everything except pricing. These would be special ordered, altho it seems that they do it on a regular basis.  The 'replacement' radiator is on the order of $500.00.  I can't guess what these might cost.

Did you get the pix I sent of the dead ones? For now, I'm toying with the idea of moving the one in the kitchen out to the living room.  Some heat would be better than none.  I just hope it doesn't fail like the other two.

Bah effing Humbug.

On 11/22/2015 3:19 PM, Deb wrote:
OOPS! missed the info that the radiators needed replacing. If we can make the budget work, I think these vertical ones would be best. Find out how much and how soon. I'll see what I can do about money.

Meanwhile, wear layers. I'm told it helps. :)

Had trouble sending from my phone.

Here are the pix.  This explains all of the water pouring into the basement around the feeder pipes when I turned the heater & water on.

Dining room

Living room

Can't get one of the fittings to budge, so I'm just going to get an 1-1/2" cap tomorrow.

Did I mention it will be below freezing tonite?

Yeah.  Good times.

11/13/2015

Random House Stuff

As often happens, one of my e-mails seems to be a blog post.  This one is no exception.  I had some house stuff to discuss with my friend, the owner:

I've been busy shopping and repairing.
I got the 4x4x12s into the basement and located. I think I mentioned before, I need one more of those jacks, which I plan on ordering when the $$ hits the house account.  Then, the fun begins.

I've replaced the light fixture in the laundry room. It was driving me nuts because a) it insisted on not hanging level. I suspect a small, localized gravity abnormality, but I can't be sure. B) is the fact that I kept smacking it whenever I pulled things like sheets or bed spreads out of the washer - just not enough vertical clearance.

So, bronze and white, LED:

Do you want the old one back?  The glass is awaiting a run thru the dishwasher, and the fixture is safely hidden under the little bench you left here.  It's not Hobnail,  so I thought I'd ask.

And, I have the old lamps re-shaded in my room:

Woof!

And finally, I like this for the bathroom:

I picked up another day per pay period at work. I'll see what 40 hours nets me next Friday.  I'm beginning to accumulate serious Winter Gear, since I'll be out in it for about 8 hrs at a pop!  Got galoshes for when we get serious rain, and Merino wool socks.  Looking at some snow boots that have 200 g of Thinsulate in them, and some nice thermal undergarments.  Will probably spend some of the house $$ on heating oil.  There's a Turkey Hill on the way to work that sells it ($1.99/gal.), so I got a 5 gal 'Kerosene' can (blue, not red), and have put about 20 - 25 gallons in so far. *But*, it's not lighting. (Put in a new fuel filter, too.)  Thinking I'll ask the fuel folks if they n take a look and get it going.  Bah.

I've decided that when Suzu turns 16 in about a month, we're all having Ribeye.  We all deserve that kind of treat, her especially!  (One for me, split one three ways for the pups - I'm doting, not crazy!)

And that's it from PA!

(leelu)

Almost, But Not Quite...

I wandered into the back bedroom yesterday afternoon, idly looking for where the feed from the junction box outside the kitchen door came into the room, and wondering if I wanted to move the light fixture into the closet (No). I noticed that neither the light switch on the wall nor the light in the closed seemed to have been looked at when Ron and I surveyed the place last month. So, being curious, I  did some disassembly:

The switch looked just fine.

I removed the light in the closet, and found this:

Mostly bare wire. Not. Good.

A bit of ripping and tearing revealed this:

Someone had nailed a bit of scrap siding(?) between the two joists, and ran the wires thru it. This gave him something to screw the lamp base into.  The post in the background was not in use for this.

Further ripping revealed some interesting water damage, Also Not. Good.

 And you can see the wires meandering off into the bay above the ceiling:

So, bare wire from the fixture, over the (lath & plaster) ceiling, thru the joist, to places currently unknown:

My guess is that the debris was originally the insulation.

Those 'grommets' are over the bedroom ceiling, so that was it for me.

About two minutes into the job, I wished I'd worn a turtleneck.
(That's a dark Navy blue shirt.)

I called Ron in the middle of this, to tell him what I had discovered - the bare wire. That was before I pulled out the patch of ceiling and discovered nothing but bare wire.

E-mails to the owner ensued, which pretty much tell the whole story.

This is what I wrote before calling Ron:

As we suspected, the skwirlz did it. (Or that's the way to bet!)

Bored, wanted to look at the (light) fixture in your room to see if I wanted it for the closet.  Got to wondering if Ron and I had looked at the light switch in your room, and at the light in the closet. I noticed water stains in there, too, so.

I unscrewed the switch from the wall - looked fine.  But! when I undid the closet light, well whaddya know? Miles of bare wire. Don't know if it was chewed thru or *just* rotted off, but there is a boatload of bare wire on both leads to the light.

 We had this exchange after I called Ron:

WOW!!! I paid those electricians a boatload of money to find the problem back when. I just knew it had to be the squirrels. Maybe. Maybe not. But I was at least right about the location -- my bedroom.

Thanks for letting me know and thanks for tracking it down. I'll let folks here know...

Ron suggested that I short the two wires in the closet ceiling, turn on the breaker, hook up one pair of wires together, and touch the other two.  I did.

Blammo!

Being a curious fellow, I wondered what would happen if I un-shorted the closet wires, and then put everything back together.  So I did.

There be power! All of the lights and sockets on the second floor work.  I haven't poked around on the third floor, but I don't doubt that it works, too.

The only thing *not* working are the lights on the (first to second) floor stairs. That, I suspect, was a result of the re-wire of the living room.  I believe that it is a *relatively* easy fix, along with recommissioning the XOR light switches at the front door and the bottom of the stairs.

Money and effort just undid themselves a turn or two or four!!

---

Yet, after all of that, I still don't know where the short is, or how all of working circuits are  tied in to the main breaker box in the basement.  And I'm thinking that the whole bedroom ceiling needs to come down for crud remediation.

Bah!