Category: Life with Pratts

As I Used to Say at Work…

… “let’s swap all the tires until we find the flat one.” With “tires” being an expression for whatever the not obvious cause was of a technical problem.

That’s the situation I’m in right now. The power company sent a notice yesterday, warning of possible outages, due to high wind. So, I wasn’t surprised this morning to see there had been two of them. But then I saw that the router was offline.

Power was off, not only in the office, but throughout the finished half of the basement. Checking the power panels in the unfinished half, it was easy to see that one of the circuit breakers had popped. Resetting it once, twice, three times, didn’t work. So, something must have shorted out due to a power surge.

The first thing to do was see if Internet service could be restored. With a very long extension cord, I connected the office gear to a test outlet next to the panel. Success! That put me back online. Would the circuit breaker still refuse to reset?

Yes, it did. So, where’s the problem? I disconnected everything else, and tested the breaker again. It held! Yay!

Now the question is, what shorted out? I’ll test each outlet and, assuming they’re all good, reconnect everything one by one, to see what pops the breaker. But not right now, because I have a dentist appointment to fix this damn broken tooth.

Side Door Man

A couple of years ago there was this little project on the side door of the garage.

A Fool and His Tools

Today, I was hoping to get by with painting the casing on the other side of that door. But in the process of scraping, I saw the wood on the lower half was getting spongy. Having a section of pre-primed casing on hand from the previous job, I decided to replace, rather than paint.

The Care and Feeding of Pop-Up Drainage Emitters

Winter preparations are underway. Water from the gutters on my house goes underground and exits through pop-up drainage emitters. When I checked on them today, two of the three emitters had disappeared into the ground. When I uncovered them, they were completely clogged.

I pulled them off the pipes then cleared everything out. Then I raised the emitters using a couple of pieces left over from when the drainage systems were installed.

The third emitter was also clogged, but it hadn’t gone into hiding. The tube on the right is visible from the street. I’m thinking of making it shorter with a hacksaw.

The Heat Is On

My oil burning furnace in 2006, when it was less than ten years old

Here it is again, the heating season. Keeping the house warm from October-April costs up to $5000/year, when including year-round hot water and the service contract. Now that the furnace is almost thirty years old, I am worrying not only about the replacement cost, but whether or not to get another oil burner.

There is no gas service on the street. The all-season porch has eight feet of electric baseboard heat along one wall. That thing by itself can kick up the wintertime electric bill by almost $200/month. I can imagine how much it would cost heating the entire house electrically.

I’m not convinced that heat pumps will do the job in winter, without supplemental electric heating elements. The house has forced hot water heat, so there is no ductwork. Which means each room would need an unsightly, wall-mounted fixture.

Ye Olde Commonwealth of Massachusetts is determined to see old oil-fired furnaces replaced with heat pumps. But when the air temperature is freezing or below, where will the heat come from for the transfer? Going underground is an option.

My utility is Eversource. Not very far from here, in Framingham, Eversource has a geothermal pilot program.