Small Shovels. Big Results.

In Hot Water

Zero hot water. That is what I have. Zero. For a handful of reasons not caused by a failing water heater, I decided to replace it anyway. Because I'm an idiot. 

Here is my train of thought:

-gap under the door is letting air in

-air is blowing my pilot light out

-find new unit without pilot light

-put it outside because its too big anyway

I don't judge.

Ok, ok. I assume you think I've lost my mind, and I may well have. But I'm not totally crazy. They actually make these. Luckily, the sketchy Craigslist guy had a brand new one that could do my whole house for a few hundred dollars. 

The neighbors were confused

Great! So I get this thing home and I realize, like every time, I have no idea what I'm doing. So I go to Menards(Lowes sucks) and start wandering around with the three other, equally confused, shoppers. After an hour or so I settle on these amazing combo valves that allow me to shut off the water, send it out another "service port", and still leaves me a place to put the safety valve. They were advertised for a hot tub, but it's cool. 

Its on the wall! That's literally 2% of the work. Now we can run the lines through the wall and into the crawl space. PROBLEM. I don't have a crawl space, yet. This is where things get bad. Genuinely bad.  I should have just put a new seal on the door. 

Goodbye Furnace

I wasn't joking about something being dead

With my old hot water heater slated to be replaced, I thought I should do the same for my furnace. Again, I'm not entirely stupid. 

I'll explain:

-old duct work is all leaking into the 6" gap that we can refer to as my crawl space

-the furnace is way to large for the size of my home

-something died in it

-it actually blocks the side door from opening

The solution? Put it in my attic. Takes up zero space, doesn't make noise, no vents covered by furniture, and I can use that new hole in my floor as another access to my crawl space. So I tore it out, and began the process of putting a new one in the attic. Basically halting the hot water heater project.

Step one: get the thing up there. Here's a problem. If you put an appliance in your attic, you must have a certain sized opening for installation and maintenance. I don't. So I made one! Sorry kitchen ceiling. 

Step two: shovel insulation. This sucks. It actually inflates when you move it. And it makes dust. And its hot up there. 

Step three: duct work. Uh oh. George doesn't know how that works. So I learned. 

ohhhhh shiny

I went to menards with a whole day to spend. And I spent it. I layed out my entire house worth of duct work on the floor. I received many weird looks, but I got the job done. Spending $800 and a truck load of ducting was my reward. Now the exciting part, putting it all together.

Step four: installation. It's a simple concept. Start at the furnace, run your trunk. Branch off to cover the sections. Luckily, my house is tiny and square. My brain needed a break at that point anyway.

Should have used flex duct

The main trunk is in. Things are looking promising.

I only fell through the ceiling once

 

This finishes the duct work for the living room. Luckily most things were straight shots and 90* angles. Most. 

 Problem. Still don't have a crawl space. Still need to get down there. Uh, what did you say? Child Labor? I PAID THEM!

So, the neighbor kids dug out the crawl space. One 5 gallon bucket at a time. It took a while. Like 2 years actually. But I only needed 1/4 of it done for the time, so that only took a couple weeks.

Look at all this new room!

 Commitment issues

The furnace is 90% done. All I have to do now is run the gas line. But I'll leave it and finish the hot water heater. No, I don't know why either.  It's November. There is snow on the ground. I don't have heat.

 

So! Lets run a new gas line...for the entire house. Come on, you should know how this works by now.

I tightened every one until I ran out of threads

TA-DA! The last part of the line is run. I put a T there for future desires of adding a generator a few feet from there.

Still not sure what priority water is

Tankless units have this cool little panel that controls things. Also, I have endless hot water! Yay me! Ok, we can get back to the furnace now. It's still cold outside, and I still dont have heat.

The end of productive days

The furnace was a simple job to finish. Insulate all the duct work, plumb the gas line, and wire the thermostat. What a beautiful warm night that was.

Future note, fix all those splices

Throw that shit back where it came from and no one will ever know you did a bad job. Kidding, it turned out really well. 














FIRE! THERE IS FIRE IN MY ATTIC. Like warm, controlled fire. Which is good, because it was 50* in my house.

Hoping for a natural disaster

You'd think that freeing up my mudroom and ridding it of that clunky old furnace and bitch ass water heater would have been the real accomplishment here. Nope. It is all just part of a really dumb plan I have. But for now, look how much space I freed up!

All of the crawl space dirt came out of the hole under that cover

Lead paint tastes better

Look how cool that wall is! Oh. That's the old siding from 1890. That's a load bearing wall. I bet you can guess how this works out.