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bad diagrams and incompatible wiring harnesses
Saturday, November 6 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
It was in the low 50s when we woke up on the futon on the floor of the dining room area of the cabin. But the sun was shining, and when one sat on a couch in the sun, it didn't seem that bad. We quickly built up a hot cardboard fire and added some sticks I managed to harvest down the slope west of the cabin. (I also pooped down there to conserve flushes in the toilet; we only get one flush after the generator is switched off, and I both wanted to keep the generator off and save that one flush for Gretchen.) We managed to grind coffee using a 120v inverter attached to an 18v Ryobi battery, so that launched our normally Saturday routine. We wrote the letters of the New York Times Spelling Bee on a piece of cardboard and solved what we could, getting well beyond genius before Gretchen wondered if "landry" is a word. It isn't, but the panagram ("laundry"), which immediately popped into my head, is. It was about 9:00pm at that point. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
My big project today was getting "two wire start" to work with our Generac generator. I'd printed out a bunch of documents, which I kept carrying out to the generator to consult as I went through the procedure they outlined. Unlocking two wire start using the generator's on-device menu system wasn't difficult. So then, with considerable confidence, I hooked up two wires of an ethernet cable to the specified places on the generator's two wiring harnesses and fished that cable through the short conduit running from the generator to the basement using a piece of ten gauge copper wire as makeshift fish tape. Then I brought the cable up the stairs to the great room, where Gretchen was on the couch reading. "Moment of truth!" I declared, and then touched the two stripped ends of the ethernet cable's green and striped-green wires together. Nothing happened.
I did more research, and eventually discovered that the two wire start on the Evolution 2 controller uses completely different pins than the two wire start on the Evolution 1 controller. And I'd been following the instructions for the Evolution 1 controller. (If this were the world of computers, it would be as if every change to a motherboard resulted in a complete rearrangement of wires in the ATX power cable. Nobody — except perhaps Dell — would ever do that; it would invite possibly equipment-destroying connection.)
After finding the wiring for the Evolution 2's two wire start (I now had to work off my phone, because I didn't have a printout for that), I hooked up the two wires for that (this time using short wires in case the resistance of the long ethernet cable was a problem). But again, connecting them together did nothing. I went into the house to pore over the documents to see if there was some clue about what might be wrong. One possible issue was that in none of the diagrams was it that it never stated whether one was looking at the end of the connector (that is, with wires from it running away from the viewer) or at the back of the connector (with the wires from it running towards the viewer). The documents did label the diagrams "harness ends of the connectors" which suggested we were actually seeing the business end of the connector, not the backside of it. But then some photos of connectors for other kinds of generator controllers seemed to be showcasing the backsides of connectors. So I thought as an experiment I'd try acting as though the diagrams were depicting the backside of the connectors. When I hooked things up this way and bridged the two wires, there was a little hesistation and then the damn generator sputtered to life! I'd figured it out, despite the botched diagrams and nonsensical versioning issues. When I disconnected the two wires, the generator continued running for about two minutes before conking off again.
So then I hooked up the short wires to the long ethernet cable and went into the great room, where Gretchen was still reading her book (an advanced reader copy, which her bookseller job gives her access to). "Moment of truth!" I declared a second time. I clipped the two stripped ends of the wires together and then, after that pregnant pause, we heard off in the distance the sound of the generator waking from a terrible dream. Gretchen was so delighted that she said she'd let me stick it in her asshole, though of course she was kidding. "You're seeing what happens when one is relentless," I said. She heartily agreed to that and also to my contention that my relentlessness is one of my more lucrative traits.
Meanwhile John Jr., the "stoner plumber" was supposed to be coming out to advise us about our heating system. But he was delayed for much of the afternoon by a "boiler test." The sun was getting low in the sky when he finally arrived with a big burly sidekick. At the time I was out in front a cheap fixed-blade boxcutter cutting up pieces of a cardboard box that had contained an errantly-delivered surplus bed.
At the time, the generator was off, but as we were headed to the basement, I demonstrated my new trick of being able to turn on the generator from within the house, which John Jr. wasn't expecting. Down at the boiler, my first question was about the stainless steel manifold that was mixing the cold boiler water with hot boiler water before recirculating it. John Jr. said that this was how super-efficient boilers were supposed to be set up. (Be that as it may, it seemed to me that a nice improvement would be for there to be a valve allowing me to control how much of that mixing is ocurring.) I also pointed out how handy it would be if someone had installed a cut-off valve between the house's water supply and the boiler plumbing, which would allow me to introduce antifreeze into the system without having to first drain the household plumbing. John's response was that if it's possible to avoid then it's best not to introduce antifreeze into a heating system, since, according to him, it attacks things like rubber gaskets and even (he said) solder joint. I've never seen this myself, though he made me wonder if perhaps I should avoid adding antifreeze. Unlike in a traditional copper-based plumbing system, in modern PEX-based plumbing systems, there are a lots of rubber gaskets in places like fittings buried behind walls where they can't be accessed and repaired. Such gaskets are even used in modern copper fittings designed to be crimped shut instead of soldered. I explained that I don't know anything about any of these newfangled plumbing fittings and that all I ever do is old-school soldering. John said he likes the crimping tool, since it makes possible some fixes that are impossible with soldering (which requires first draining the pipes involved). But the crimping tool is expensive, he said, costing about five thousand dollars. John said that the problem he detected here was that the basement seemed too cold. His advice was to install a little basement-only zone, which, he said, which would be enough to keep the whole house at about 50 degrees for not all that much money. He said he could stub it out for me to finish or he could do the whole thing; he'd get back to us with a price.
After that, the four of us stood around in our sock feet on that bone-chilling concrete basement slab talking about stupid little things much longer than we needed to. It was John who finally said he'd had enough of standing on that slab. As he and his friends were driving away, I saw something glinting in the west at about where Lake Edward should be. I had Gretchen join me to look out the west-facing window of the first floor's northwest bedroom, and she agreed, that looked like a lake out there. Could it be that when the leaves fall off the trees, we actually get a view of a lake, and a completely unexpected one at that, from our lake cabin?
My next chore was to install all the remaining sage-green six-by-six wall tiles in the first floor bathroom. Due to a calculation error, I didn't have enough to complete the job, but I could put what I had on the south wall above the bathtub drain, the wall with all the tricky cuts for the plumbing bits, which would leave me only one more super-simple tiling chore (to be done when the extra tiles are ready) before I'd be able grout. As we had last week, Gretchen acted as my assistant and we listened to WFNY, which (for some reason) was playing a lot of familiar patriotic music in among their quirky, eclectic mix of nostalgia from the the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. To do all the tricky cuts, I'd brought various diamond-studded cutting wheels and a small diamond-studded hole saw, all of which worked better than expected (though my measurements weren't always the best).
I interrupted my tile installation to eat a tofu burger Gretchen had prepared on the kitchen stove, along with all the fixin's, including red onions, sauteed mushrooms (from the Price Chopper) and little grape-sized potatoes. I cracked open a Guinness Extra Stout, the first of what were to be two. By this point the house was nice and cozy, with temperatures in the 70s.
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