Tuesday, December 26, 2017

An Update From Missouri

Today's high is forecast to be 17. Missouri - HOT in the summer and cold in the winter. Maybe not cold for you folks in Coldwater, but think about it, Centertown is as far south from Coldwater as Coldwater is from Grayling. Friday is the only day in the 10 day forecast where the high gets above freezing. PTL for our Hardy wood fired boiler.

November 18th - McDonalds - Lydia's turn to pick the restaurant for our Saturday morning breakfast.

We ran our Hardy wood fired boiler in early November, to burn some trash wood. After several days I noticed some steam coming out around the flue and thought we must have a leak. Fixing the leak meant removing the insulation jacket that surrounds the boiler. After several hours work it became clear that the jacket must be lifted off the top, in one piece.

So, I added a column and removed part of the roof and the end wall.
The wiring that powers the pump and forced draft fan was just a bare wire comiing up out of the ground. While I was doing the work it seemed reasonable to correct that issue. As I dug up the wire I found that it was in conduit below the surface. Why the conduit was terminated below ground I have no idea. I wanted to run the wiring up the new column. In order to not have to splice the wire I had to dig up 4-5 feet of the existing conduit and bend it to point towards the new column. The conduit is under a driveway area, full of rocks. It was a lot of work with a pick and shovel.
After a lot of work it turns out that I couldn't find any leak and it quit "steaming". The only think I can think of is that the seals on the ash and firebox doors are bad. The weather was warm enough that the Hardy was getting enough draft, even with the doors closed, to "overfire" and boil the water. It has a large vent pipe in case that happens. I have no idea why the steam came out where it did, instead of the vent. I bought new door seals but never installed them. It is cold enough now that even if the door seals leak a little the water in the boiler won't get to hot.

During the summer a storm toppled one of the trees in our yard and took the top out of another one. I cleaned up everything that was down and had a tree service company come out to give me an estimate to clean up the broken areas in the tree and to take down a severaltrees along our driveway. One of the trees by the driveway was dead and the other ones had large branches that would take down our power lines if they fell. The tree he is working on was maybe 20' taller before the storm took the top out of it.

Looking at guy in front yard, over the top of our house.
 Trimming along our driveway.


That gets us through November. I will try and get some photos and videos from Lydia's school Christmas program posted soon.

God is good. May He bless you and yours.



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