Tree take-down

I have to confess something. The whole time I've been blogging about our heating system, we've actually been shelling out some serious moolah for another big project. This year we decided to call in some professional help with our yard. We've spent 4 autumns in this house trying to get the yard and garden into shape with minor results. And we really haven't enjoyed it. We were on the fence about whether to hire someone when we noticed that we had one tall dead tree and one half split dead tree. This wasn't a job for a friend - we needed real arborists.

We figured if we were going to hire people anyway, we might as well go for the whole deal. Today I'll show you the tree work, but I have a few more stories saved up on the other projects we had done. Unfortunately for this blog (but fortunately for our sanity), the landscapers did all their work during the day while we were at work. So the pictures aren't particularly dramatic - I would have loved to have gotten some while they were taking off the branches.

Instead, after one day of work, they had this waiting for us in the evening:

After the second day of work, those giant logs were gone and only this remained - a neatly stacked pile of tiny logs for our fireplace.

Oh, and the two large stumps, since stump removal would have cost a lot. Since the trees were in the back corner of the yard in our rather unmaintained area, we decided leaving the stumps in place was preferable to paying over $1000 to remove them.

Heating Conundrums (the end?)

The heating saga is now resolved. Not 100% to our satisfaction, but pretty close. 86%?

To quickly recap, the pipe loops that lead into and out of our bedroom were re-routed to run directly into (and out of) the boiler. The logic for the move was that since the pump on this loop appeared to be pulling so much water through the loop, the loop was to be moved to largely separate it from the rest of the system.

The problem was that after many hours of work, the bedroom still wasn't heating up. Even with its pump running. Also, the pump on this moved loop was very loud - it sounded like air was constantly flowing through. More on that later.

After the plumber left I spent about an hour bleeding all of the accessible bleeder valves. After pulling out a lot of air, the house was getting plenty warm, except for the bedroom.

What was strange was that the return pipe on the moved loop was getting warm while the feed was still ice cold. Which has two possible explanations: either this really isn't a loop or that the water is flowing the opposite direction we are expecting. I still don't know the answer.

What I did do was take advantage of a new lever.

This lever allows me to control whether the hot water flows vertically into the main loop (which feeds the entire house excluding the basement and master bedroom) or flows to the left, eventually into our bedroom. I ran the system for over an hour, the entire home was warm except the master bedroom. I left open the bedroom bleeder valves for several minutes to try and encourage the hot water, but was rewarded only with cold water.

I then went back to the basement boiler, turned the new lever, forcing water into the bedroom. I immediately heard water rushing into the feed, turning the feed pipes from cold to scalding hot. I turned the lever back to the original position. I went upstairs and our bedroom now had scalding hot water.

Thinking that this was just a temporary pulse I left the heat to run for another hour and periodically bled from the master bedroom valves. An hour later, still hot! So, I guess I fixed it?

I was hoping that the pump would stop being so loud after I got the water flowing into the feed. But it was still loud. I spoke with our plumber, who thought that the pump may be bad. He came over and replaced it with a new one - which made just as much noise. I tried disconnecting the pump to see whether it needed to be running to get hot water in the bedroom - it does.

So we are claiming victory now. It's a bit annoying to hear the raspy pump running, but it's only audible from the dining room/kitchen. It's worth the noise pollution to get heat EVERYWHERE. Winter, we are ready.

Old Bleeder Valves

All dressed up and nowhere to go

Let's take a break from our depressing heating problems to describe another quick fix we did the day that our family and friends came down to help us with our honey-do list. We bought some fiberglass insulation for our hot water heater over a year ago and had yet to install it. We missed putting it on before last winter, but I wasn't going to let another cold season go by without wrapping it up to keep it running more efficiently.

The process was pretty straightforward: wrap and tape (while leaving the front parts exposed). Here it all is, step-by-step in pictures.

Now if only everything were that easy!

Heating Conundrums (part the third)

This is becoming quite the serialized mystery tale. Today we had a team of two repairmen out here for 6 hours (they estimated the job would take 4 hours) and we still have not solved the problem.

To recap, our heating system is not heating all the rooms of our house evenly. Some get no heat at all, others are just fine. We've tried bleeding the system completely, bleeding a little out of each baseboard, fixing the piping, turning on/off the pump to different loops--and nothing seems to help. After coming out twice for no charge just to take a look and make some suggestions, this plumber/heating guy proposed a solution that would involve moving the master bedroom loop so that it wasn't fed from a pipe that led to the whole house (thus taking water away from the rest of the system). He would connect that loop directly to the boiler. So that would result in two circuits both coming directly out of the boiler - both with pumps to keep the water moving. While he was at it, he also would install auto-bleeders on both, to reduce the number of air bubbles in the system.

You can see the difference between the left and right pictures how much pipe-work he did. It's easy to recognize what's new, because it's done in shiny copper.

Here's a close-up of the two pumps. He connected them in a way that we could shut the valves above and below them if they should ever need to be replaced.

Each one has a little black box on it to control how much oomph goes into moving the water. Hypothetically, this means we can alter the percentage of hot water to each section, if one side gets warmer than the other.

Here are the fancy new bleeders (you can't quite see them in the first picture, but they're there, hiding behind our service form):

Creating the new loop meant a lot of restructuring down in the basement. They closed off two connections - one each to the main outgoing and incoming/return pipes (circled in red). The new copper pipes represent the new outgoing and return pipes for the new bedroom loop. They aren't attached to the thick, black steel pipes - they go all the way back to the boiler.

They also fixed the little section of pipe that got leaky from our last heating experiment.

This all sounds impressive, right? Well it seemed like it to us. And we were pretty sure this would fix the problem, based on which pipes were hot and which were cold when the system was running. The problem is that after 6 hours of work, our workmen ran the system and........no improvement. SERIOUSLY! We couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe it. The master bedroom still gets no heat.

It was right about then that they realized they'd spent way longer at our house than they were expecting and one of the guy's brother-in-law called to ask for help because the water boiler in his restaurant stopped working. So they asked us to keep experimenting with bleeding the system, didn't charge us, and promised to be back in touch early next week to continue to figure out what to do.

We are starting to wonder if the loop they created never went to the bedroom at all. We all figured that it did, since it was the only cold pipe and the bedroom was the only cold room. The problem is that we are operating by process of elimination. We don't have a schematic for what pipes lead where behind the walls. It isn't really this company's fault, since we thought the same thing. Though we certainly won't be paying up until we get some resolution. I guess this problem remains "to be continued..."

Heating Conundrums (part two)

Part two (really it's part 4 or 5, if we count all the things we've done to try to fix our heating system since we moved here - but it's part 2 for this round) was a little bit of an upgrade and a little bit of an experiment. First though, back to where we left off - with a new foot or two of pipe. Unfortunately, when we filled the system with water again, it dripped a little. A slow leak, like a droplet or two every minute. But still enough to make us nervous. So we yet again bled some water out of the system and prepared to do battle.

Reducing the pressure in the system gave us the flexibility to make some tweaks to it. D replaced all the old, rusty valves after realizing that it was fairly easy to do and made for a much easier time bleeding the system. So, for example, the valve in our upstairs bathroom went from this:

To this:

(None of this is very visible when the covers are in place.)

Then we called in a plumber/heating repair guy to come and have a look. After checking over the whole system, he noticed this pump--which he said looked like it was added to the system after it was built. He figured out it was the loop to our master bedroom. He suggested that we try turning it off (there's a simple on/off lever at the top) and seeing what that would do. It would be something easy to try and yet another diagnostic to try to get to the bottom of our heating woes. He said that he would come back and fix our leak, as well as try to fix the whole system, once we gave this a try on our own. And then, after spending about a half hour at our house offering helpful suggestions, left without charging us.

We tentatively pressurized and ran the system (with a bucket in place below the leaky pipe). Lo and behold, we had heat to the whole house! Well, almost the whole house. We had heat everywhere but the master bedroom.

After reveling in the fact that the baseboards in the guest bedroom, office, and main bathroom were actually hot to the touch for the first time EVER, we headed up to the bedroom to try to sort out what was going on. D rigged a hose to the valve and bled the system out the window, hoping to unclog a few air bubbles.  To no avail. After a while, it got too hot in the rest of the house to keep experimenting, so we turned the heat back off.

We think what is happening is that previous owners probably got no heat to that one bedroom and had someone come in to fix the problem. That repair guy installed a pump to divert extra hot water from the main circuit up to the master bedroom. The problem is that it may be pulling too much hot water and not leaving enough for the rest of the house.

Needless to say, we aren't willing to compromise on either having heat in our bedroom or in bathroom/office/guest room - so we still aren't quite at a solution. But we might be getting warmer...(I couldn't resist!)