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it's Ulster County
Friday, December 30 2005
As you may have forgotten, I'm building a new heat exchanger that will be attached between the supply and reuptake manifolds of the household boiler, allowing me to isolate the boiler water from the slab water and allow them to operate at different temperatures (or even with different pressures and chemical compositions). As with all the experimental stuff I've been building, I want the new system to be able to fall back to the old way of operation should I so decide. In the old system, hot water from the boiler simply circulated through the slab at whatever frightful temperature it had attained.
Today I cut through the one inch pipe rising from the boiler zone valve and installed an assembly consisting of three ball valves arranged in a rotated U-formation. A ball valve between the two side-lines can be opened, allowing the system to operate as it was originally designed. Or it can be closed and the valves on the side-lines can be opened, allowing primary boiler water to flow through the bottom one to the heat exchanger while allowing secondarily-heated water to return from the exchanger and continue on to the slab.
Since all the fittings were big one inchers and since the valves were huge pieces of brass, I was a little concerned about bad solder joints, but evidently I did a good job because all the joints held.
I was at the DMV today - twice - to do what was necessary to render our "new" 1997 Honda Civic street legal. I actually drove it into town for the first mission expecting to be able to knock it off in one trip. (The Ulster County DMV is much faster than the ones familiar to urban dwellers.) But bureaucracy is still bureaucracy and I absolutely needed a copy of Gretchen's driver's license to complete the registration. I could have done what the woman at the neighboring teller window did, and gotten, you know, huffy. But, for Christ's sake, it's Ulster County, not Manhattan! (Interestingly, the tellers responded to the huffy woman as though huffiness was a fairly uncommon thing.)
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