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anti-Grundfos jihad
Tuesday, August 31 2021
I had the Chevy Bolt today, and this meant I had it charging from when I got to Red Hook to lunchtime at the free charging stations at the Red Hook Town Hall. I had a couple fellow colleagues with me in the office today, and they noticed my scooter where I'd left it in the middle of the office, and that inevitably led to a conversation about electric cars and range anxiety. When people hear I have an electric car, they always want to know if the cherry-red Tesla out in the parking lot is mine. But no, that belongs to some guy up in Chicken Hawk Racing, perhaps Reuben, who used to drive a rusty old Subaru.
One of the Reuben's favorite places to get lunch is Bubbie's. I went there for lunch, which I ate at one of the picnic tables across the street. One of the other picnic tables was occupied by a group of attractive young women and another was soon occupied by a homeless man.
After I got home, I immediately started working on the unpleasant job of removing the old Grundfos zone valves from the solar hydronic loop and replacing them with mainstream ones made by Honeywell. (Grundfos's design was later copied by or acquired by Honeywell, who made a similarly-styled zone valve for a time.) First I removed the insulation from the pipes, then drained all the fluid I could from the pipes I would be desoldering. But when I then went to desolder the pipes, there was still so much hydronic fluid in them that the solder refused to transition to liquid. The problem was a long line of pipes that dipped down near the floor without any drains anywhere near the low part. I ended up having to find a syringe and attach it to a thin hose to reach down into dark unseen places to slurp away the fluid. Then I dumped a huge amount of blowtorch energy into a valve until I was finally able to pull it loose from the plumbing it was attached to.
Because of the geometry of the pipes, I ended up replacing two of the Grundfos valves, though originally I'd only planned to replace one. It turns out I have a bunch of Honeywell plumbing bits in stock for creating a leak-proof valve, even if I don't have the actual electromeechanical parts to completely implement the functioning valves. Some of those parts, it turns out, must not be heated too hot during installation or the solder used to make them turns liquid, something I didn't discover until too late. But those parts are easy to fix and I have lots of them.
My work on all of this was interrupted by the eating of home-cooked Impossible Burgers and the watching of the two final episodes of The White Lotus. By the time I finished for the evening, all the plumbing was back to being leak-proof (even if the electromechanicals weren't in place) and it was well after midnight.
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