Can't Heat

Having worked so much the last few weeks, my "honey-do" list was piling up.

Hell, I did so much, I can only remember half of it at best.

Of course it's the bad stuff that comes to mind first.

Let's see, while cleaning the pellet stove in preparation for this seasons heating, I found this little crack.
It's tiny, but it's there and it goes all the way through.

My favorite was what we found trying to close the pool (again). Remember that new skimmer we put in last spring? It's broken.

There were all kinds of things I never liked about the way the guy did the job, but for the most part it worked and I was happy.

Until it wouldn't work.

No matter what we tried, we couldn't get the pump to suck the last bit of water out of the skimmer. Reluctantly I decided to start digging and maybe do a little cutting. I cut out the corner closest to the pool and tried our "water in water out" procedure again -- use the hose to pump water in and use the cover pump to pump it out.

For reasons I can't remember, I decided to dig some more, but a funny thing happened. The closer I got to the pool deck, the more wet the dirt got. The dirt shouldn't be wet. I thought maybe my hose had sprayed in places I didn't see, but the water was coming from under the ground. If you look real close in the above picture the dirt under the pipe is wet. As I would pull dirt out, I could sit there and watch the wetness percolate back into place.

This is bad.

This means the integrity of the pipe under the deck is seriously compromised.

It's fn leaking.

This means the whole job's gone to shit.

It has to be done again.

Yeah, so after that discovery, a whole bunch of beers, La Vie en Rose, and a comatose sleep, I got up this morning and crawled into the attic.

I started an outdoor speaker project four months ago in June that required some wiring in the attic. Being that June is summer, it quickly got too hot to do too much in the attic and the project went unfinished. 8am, I was up there this morning laying across the insulation and pulling wires.

It was beautiful and itchy all at once.

See I'm a bit of a freak.

With the weather turning cooler, the disrupted insulation (due to the project) in the attic was bothering me. I can't say it's completely what's keeping me up at nights, but it probably didn't help.

So I got the wire pulled through, the insulation back in place and even laid out another bag of hot itchy fiberglass.

I swear the crap makes me warm just looking at it.

The project isn't done and I'm by no means done with the insulation in the attic, but I'm better off then I was. Probably not good enough to not have heat, but maybe good enough to sleep a little better. At least till April, when I start thinking about the pool again.

- b