I bought them at my local Habitat for Humanity Restore location near 55th and Kansas Ave in KCK.  It’s a great place to go for cheap parts.

While it’s nice to have water on-hand, for free, to water my plants I really just bought this to try to help with stormwater runoff.  It’s not good for all our lawn chemicals to get pulled into the waterways as it creates algae plumes and other nastiness.  When I rent this house to someone, I’ll remove the barrel and take it with me.

Here is the downspout I chose.  I chose this one because I found some slight erosion at this one and it was near my plants.

Here I’ve used a saw to cut the downspout off.  I did a rough cut just to have space to get the barrel close.  Don’t use a recip, use a hacksaw.  I used a reciprocating saw and cut into my siding with it.

Here is my leveled cinder blocks that are on top of some pea gravel.

Here is the finished install.  Sorry there are no pics of the middle of the install, but I was racing a storm.

Finally, I scoured the yard again and realized that the poison ivy I’d been fighting was peanuts compared to the whopper vines I had in the yard.  These suckers were so big that I had to use a branch trimmer and a bow saw to kill them!

Anyhow, here are a few pics.  Because everything is better with pics.

Here are the after pics:

A wall with no conduit running outside of it!

And the panel door is re-installed and no wires are running through the front of it.

Here’s the tunnel for that conduit

And here’s how a properly terminated run of conduit meets a hot water heater

Here’s how an outlet should be mounted.

Here are the two new outlets that are more appropriately places, so the washer/dryer will be spaced away from other utilities and the freezer cord won’t be stretched so much or block the rear door.

He also realized that I didn’t have water run to the area where I’m moving the washer/dryer to, so he left that run open for the plumber.

It’s great news to have the money saved up and it’s even better news that there is a $1500 tax credit to install one this year.  The bad news is that I hurriedly installed two circuits into the house after the hot water heater broke last year.  They were generally safe and installed correctly, but code requires that the connections be terminated better to the outlet box, water heater and to the fuse box.

I didn’t want to call an AC guy and have him turn up his nose at my fuse box so I called one of the best elecrical companies in the KC area and they sent someone out.  They think they can fix my bad install with 4 or so hours of labor.  I consider that a fair price on something that I don’t have the time to learn right now.  Not to mention, I want a furnace this year, not a bunch of space heaters running on extension cords and me nervously sleeping and wondering if an overloaded circuit would burn me up.

So any how, I spent 4 hours today moving things around to give the electrician the space he’ll need tomorrow.  Now I’m pooped.  But I sure can’t wait until I get rid of all these window Air Condtioners and have no space heaters in the winter.

UPDATE: I’m going to add some before pictures into this post.

conduit running from front of panel and going through the drywall into utility room

Panel with incorrectly terminated connections.  They should be tunneled in the wall and come up from the bottom of the box.

Incorrectly terminated conduit to the hot water heater

Electrical Box is not mounted to the wall, just hanging from conduit

Conduit should be running inside a tunnel that allows the wire to turn 90 degrees inside the wall.  Tunnel sort of prevents chafing.

The charger did not act this way when I charged the old battery I removed from the van.  So clearly the old battery was dead.

I re-attached the clamps and thought I’d be back in business.  The battery gauge on the dash jumped to life and the radio turned on when I inserted the key.  Yes!

Alas, it still would not start.  And after the first time the radio wouldn’t come on and the battery gauge just laid there like a dead fish.  So it couldn’t be the starter.  And it was unlikely that a parasitic drain had pulled 9 hours of charging out in mere seconds.  Nope, it had to be a bad ground or bad cable somewhere.  It’s really the only thing that made any sense.  I’d noticed that the battery clamps that hook onto the battery terminals had a few loose bolts.  I don’t think they were loose originally but from all my taking them on and off to troubleshoot I think I worked them loose.  As I went to tighten them down a few flecks of white powdery corrosion sort of flaked out of the connector in an area that I had not scrubbed free of corrosion.  Aha!

And this time the bloody van leaped to life.  Restarted it 3 times and everything was grand.  Drove down to have dinner with a friend and his family in Raymore, stopped for ice on the way and the stinking van wouldn’t start the first time I tried.  But it started on the second try and it started back up 3 times when I tested it at his house.  It also started up after dinner and got me home.  Tomorrow I’ll pull that connector apart and chemically clean the connector, then scrub the bejeesus out of it.  Finally I’ll add some of that corrosion preventative stuff.  I generally don’t like it as it’s goopy and I’m not sure how well it works but after all this work I’m ready to try anything.  Especially since the car is running on a donut until my new tires come into Sams Club 5-10 business days from now.

The only other thing that I could possibly do is remove this terminal connector and replace them with the types that you just stick the copper wires into and smash with a hammer.  I’ll try the vigorous cleaning first.

I hope the story wasn’t too boring.  I know I didn’t provide pictures or anything.  I’m normally better about that stuff but I’m just getting back into the swing of writing again.  I hope y’all had a nice weekend!

Dan Doughty

It’s okay, it was a free bare root stock tree that’s only been there a week so I’ll just transplant it to another location.  But just thought it was a good time to remind others that you really should consider the grand plan of your property before you make tree decisions as trees can have a huge impact.  And certainly NEVER plant a cottonwood under power lines.  Those suckers shoot straight up and get huge and then fall over.

On a much lighter note, I also planted 4 cherry tomato plants from my neighbor Klaude.  His thumb’s so green I’d swear he’s related to the Jolly Green Giant and you can’t beat free.  I planted them in some containers I had as I don’t really have a good garden plot set aside yet.

I’ve also been troubleshooting the battery in the van recently.  Bugger won’t start and the headlights were very dim.  I tried charging but the charger came back so fast saying that it had successfully charged that I didn’t believe it.  Also the headlights were very dim.  So I tried jumping it from my Corolla but that didn’t work either.  I picked up a new battery, an Everstart Maxx 65N, which was well rated by Consumer Reports but it also didn’t really act particularly right.  I’ve set it on the charger and the charger is at least acting normally and taking a while before reporting back to me.  Hopefully by the time this post is sent to the web, I will have a running van again.

Some of the minor projects I knocked out are:

• Installed Security Eye in front door
• Removed generator from laundry room and got it in to be serviced then returned to friend
• Picked up 6 pallets to keep 3 more cords of wood raised from the ground(moisture seeps in)
• Moved the blog from Joomla to Wordpress
• Repaired broken mandrel on mower and installed new mower blades
• Bucked most of the maple tree that fell last fall
• Fixed a CFL that was flickering in my guest bedroom
• Bought, but have not yet assembled, a nice 10×14 shed.  Got it on sale, $500 instead of $560
• Fixed wood stove door latch that broke last winter

Clearly, there’s still a ton of work to do on the house, but at least my savings is built back up and am working on the place again.  Not to mention, the change to wordpress will help me update more regularly instead of the Joomla I was trying out.

Finally, I’ve listed out some of the things I need to repair and their importance.  It’s not a complete list, but it’s a great starting point.  If you’re curious you can view it, but not edit it, at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pUf7ZxY4SMzLC98y9tqH_TA

This prioritization helped me figure out that I don’t want to spend another spring without a tornado shelter.  I have a bunch of cinder blocks available so I think I’ll just go dig a hole in the back yard, line it with cinder blocks and I should be good to go.  I talked it over with my grandfather and he thought it was a pretty good idea.

So that’s what I’ll be doing for exercise and safety over the next few weeks!  I’ll probably post up some pictures as I dig.

And I’ve purchased a temporary hearth for the stove.  I was going to look into laying a nice tile hearth for the stove, but it doesn’t make sense to do that until I refinish the hardwoods and replace the linoleum in the kitchen.  So instead I picked up something that’s called a stoveboard for $250.  Leisure Pool and Hearth were again able to help me find just what I needed and even helped me with a bandaid when I sliced a finger open loading the stoveboard.

So now it’s just a matter of tapping a hole in the chimney, hooking the stovepipe up and attaching the chimney cap.  So pretty damn close to finishing the stove stuff.

Houdini four paws continues to probe some holes in the fence line so I may use the 3.5′ chain link to install another run of fencing.