Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   ozone throat
Tuesday, February 8 2011
I spent much of the day procrastinating the solution to a web development problem similar to the one solved by Googe Maps. You go to a geographic area, some map tiles load, you drag to a different area, new map tiles load. My problem was a one dimensional schedule. You go to a place in time, one set of appointments load, you go to another place in time, other appointments load. I managed to figure out how to pull it off, but it took real brain power. And the procrastination was important too. When I'm procrastinating, some part of me is working on the problem. It's the part that's not interested in the latest posts of my Facebook friends or what Chistopher Hitchens has to say about Ronald Reagan.
Meanwhile Gretchen had her first day back at work since her weekned of being bedridden from leg muscle pain. It seems that her leg had recovered and she was perfectly able to execute those functions that were expected of her down at Eastern State Correctional Facility.
On a whim this evening I hooked up the old oil burner ignitor to 120 volts of power to see what kind of sparks it could generate. This is the ignitor that I recently replaced with a unit that has greatly improved the reliability of our oil burner. Still, the old ignitor definitely had some power left in it. Using some scrap copper wire, I fashioned a spark gap of about a quarter inch for it and was able to produce a nice little 19th Century mad scientist switchable lightning bolt or crude Jacob's Ladder. Knowing this bolt consisted of nothing but charged particles, I then suspended a rare earth magnet nearby to see what would happen (the lightning bolts were either attracted or repelled). The plasma arc could also be manipulated in fun ways simply by blowing on it. It was all fun and games until I noticed a scratchiness in my throat from all the ozone I was inhaling. This led to repeated coughing and throat clearing and for awhile there I wondered if I perhaps I'd overdosed on ozone.
The old boiler ignitor reminded me of the one vexing boiler problem I'd yet to fix: its tendency to eject hydronic fluid regularly through its pressure relief valve.
I started out doing the research necessary to reduce the pressure supplied by the feeder valve, which introduces hydronic fluid to the system. In most household hydronic systems, this feeder valve is connected to the household water supply. But if I were to do that, the antifreeze would soon be diluted by all the water being fed back in (and I'd have to find something to do with all the antifreeze being ejected). So for years now I've had a system for pumping antifreeze back into the system and it sits just upstream from the feeder valves (there are actually two of those that branch out to three destinations, all of which are functionally isolated from each other most of the time: the slab loop, the solar loop, and the boiler-heated zones). It's a great system, but I really shouldn't have to be collecting antifreeze puked out from the boiler and then repressurizing it to inject back into the system when it needs it.
In the past I'd thought maybe the feeder valves were set to produce too high of a pressure, but finding out how to throttle them down wasn't easy (the information doesn't appear in the documentation that comes with them). After digging through various online fora (the best information for these blue collar topics always seems to show up in side discussions had between right wing gun nuts), I learned that a lever cap had to be removed from the top stem and then this stem could be rotated with a screwdriver.
But this adjustment didn't fix my problem. I stood there and watched the boiler fire and then heard the tell-tale trickle of water coming from the pressure relief valve, ready for me to dump once more into the antifreeze pressurizer. I began suspecting that the problem was actually the system's expansion tank, which is the space which water expands into when it gets hot. I put my hand on the top of it as the water circulated past it and it wasn't even warm. Was there something obstructing its connection to the hydronic loop? So I began letting air out of the bottom of the expansion tank (there's a bicycle-style Schrader valve down there). Surprisingly, there wasn't actually much air in the tank; evidently I'd tried this experiment before and failed to repressurize it. So I hooked up a small electric air pump and repressurized the tank to 12 lb/i2, which is the pressure the system is supposed to have. I then hung the five gallon overpressure collection bucket to a crude homemade spring scale to monitor any further outflows from the system.
After a couple hours, the collection bucket had gathered no further outflows. Perhaps I had finally fixed the problem, which has been vexing me for at least six years.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110208

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