Return of the Chronotherm III

So, we apologize for not posting in almost two weeks. But it's cold, and we've had problems.

Picture of the cold. Apparently the white stuff on the ground is called "snow".

Melting snow on our stove, to have enough water to flush the toilet with. Just like the pioneers.

Being somewhat obsessive about energy use, we tend to keep our house pretty cold in the winter, and constantly scheme about ways to cut down in other ways.  Shortly after moving in, we signed up for pretty much every free and almost free energy-savings program offered by our local utility- including a home energy audit and a new programmable thermostat that was installed last week.

In Canada we never had a problem with keeping our house around 55F at night, because Canadians tend to take things like insulation pretty seriously.   Yet in our new house, in the humid sub-tropics of the Chesapeake Bay, we've had frozen pipes on an almost weekly basis, thanks in part to some creative plumbing by the previous owner.

Finally, after much freezing and thawing, a hydronic heating pipe out on our uninsulated porch burst.   Hydronic heating is basically a boiler heating water and circulating it around the house in copper pipes.  Why the previous owner decided to run some of these pipes outside is beyond us, and we'd already been looking into getting them removed. Unfortunately, everyone we consulted about it hemmed and hawed and gave us ridiculously high prices (one was almost $700) to remove the pipes.  Seriously? we said.  We could probably do it ourselves with a single SharkBite fitting.  And so the pipes burst, and we had our chance.  In the end it took a pile of SharkBite fittings, because when you're panicking because the rest of your pipes might freeze, you just buy one of everything at the store and don't worry too much about how it looks (we redid it later, and it did ultimately only take one elbow piece to cut all of the pipes out of our porch, for a total cost of $8).

We turned off the heat and got the pipes back together. Excellent. Now to turn the boiler back on...we flipped the switches for the gas and the circuit breaker and there were some clicking noises and the lights on the circuit board began to flash.  We raced through the list of warning light codes handily printed on the inside cover of our boiler, but too slow.  There was a pop, and then smoke, and we were done.

At this point it was about 8 pm on a Friday night.  We called a few large companies from the yellow pages and were basically told (without sympathy) to hunker down until Tuesday.  At a loss, we canceled our evening plans, drained our pipes, and pulled out our winter camping gear.  Next thing we know, our friend's uncle is calling us determined to find a plumber or else have us stay with them.  He rattles off the names of a few people we hadn't found online and says he'll call some while we call the others.  Pretty soon we got a call from Riverside Mechanical LLC saying they were on their way.  A very knowledgeable repairman arrived, who quickly diagnosed the problem while tactfully ignoring the 4-person dome tent in the bedroom.   The problem: a blown transformer due to our new thermostat, which the power utility had installed incorrectly.  So it wasn't our fault? we asked the repairman.  Nope, you did everything right. he replied.  We almost danced.  Goodbye, slick new web-programmable thermostat.  We meet again, Chronotherm III.

For the best.  The new one clashed with the "Remember the 80's" theme we have going on

Saturday morning, we're still over the moon that it wasn't our fault and that there are good people in the world who will stay up until midnight worrying if perfect stranger's heating systems are working (and then leave their porch light on so the strangers can let themselves in, just in case).  We go and do greenhouse yoga at Priapi Gardens and generally go about our business. That evening, we hear gurgling and rush into the bedroom to find another pipe has burst, this time inside the house (which was not below freezing). Why? How? Springing into action and using our rapidly diminishing stock of Sharkbite fittings, plus a fourteen-foot length of copper pipe that had been removed from the porch, we managed to fix it up. And this time, the boiler started up again.

All this is to say, sorry for the delay in posting, but it is cold and we've had problems.  But the heat is on...for now.