Wanderings

Anything you dream is fiction,
and anything you accomplish is science,
the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
- Ray Bradbury
August 27th, 2013

Heating the house

As you may have read in these pages that we had a very unreliable furnace heating our house. It was a Peerless Pinnacle high efficiency boiler. I chose it because they installed a similar one on “This Old House” and I liked the idea of 96% efficiency. The boiler leaked and failed, and I had to replace sensors and parts all the time. For a while I had to pull mice out of the air intake valve once a week. On the coldest nights it would die at 3AM and I’d have to go down and reset the buggy little computer that ran it. Erica was always cold and I got sick of it.

This summer, after 5 years of chilly winters, I sold the Peerless on Craigslist. The copper pipe was installed by Sears about 30 years ago when I first installed heat in the house, and it was shoddy work that leaked. I ripped out all the copper and put in new copper pipe wherever I could. Last weekend I finally finished all the soldering of new pipe. I put temporary valves in the places where I will hook it up to the furnace, and turned on the water. Not one drip!

I now have to order a new boiler before the weather turns cold. I have about two months to get the furnace installed. Conventional boilers are made of cast iron and weigh about 450 pounds. I am not looking forward to getting this into position in the cellar. I may need a little help from my friends.