Doughty Rental

So I’ve saved up enough money to have my furnace and central air re-installed.  I say re-installed because thieves stole the old unit from the house while it was in foreclosure before I purchased it.

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.

So the new battery accepted the charge but it took 9 hours at 2amps trickling in.  You have to unplug the type of charger I use in order to stop the charging.  It’s a $30 cheapy from Wal-Mart and it doesn’t really have an off switch.  It has the intelligence to stop charging once it’s detected the battery is full and then you pull the power cable on it.  This time it did something that I forgot about.  After you unplug the charger from the electrical socket it was still running with LED lights showing me that it was at full charge.  I’d seen this before when I charged a mower battery, but forgot that this was how you could tell that the battery charge had taken.

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

So, I do some work with Heartland Tree Alliance and as a part of that we’ve all been taught to not plant trees in silly places.  What did I do?  I goofed up and planted a Redbud tree in my front yard.  It’s a short ornamental tree that’s well suited to Kansas City.  Unfortunately I didn’t consider the fact that there is only one side of the house that I can drive around to haul things in and out.  The other side has the leach field from my septic tanks and you can’t drive over those or else they will cave in.

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.

So, I’ve been busting my butt lately.  I had been sitting around waiting for my foundation guy to call me back, but got tired of that and went out and bought a shed and started my Spring work.  True to form, my foundation guy called me back and he’ll be working on the house this week.

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.