|
|
|
leaf dam in the valley
Friday, November 12 2021
An unseasonably warm airmass arrived in the Hudson Valley at some point this morning, and with that warm air came a lot of rain. At some point I heard a dripping sound and then saw that the roof leaking beneath the northwest valley of our four-valley roof (our house has roughly the shape of a cross). Normally such leaking only happens in the winter when there are ice dams, but obviously that wouldn't be happening when temperatures are in the 60s. I got an umbrella and went to look at the roof. I saw a mass of leaves stuck in the valley around where the leak was happening, which explained everything. Later after the rain subsided, I was able to poke that mass of leaves with the fiberglass pole I use to clean out the chimney. While I was up there, I also cleaned out the gutters, which I hadn't done in years. The gutters were filled to the top with rich dark soil, the result of multiple years of leaffalls and decomposition. This hadn't been good for the adjacent carpentry, some of which had become funky with rot. I'd been kicking the can of cleaning out the gutters down the road for years, not wanting to look at the situtation for fear it would depress me. But now I was there seeing the consequences. It only took a few minutes to clean out the gutter, something I obviously need to do more regularly. While I had the step ladder out, I also cleaned out the gutter below the southwest valley.
I've been enjoying the reliability of my Woodchuck setup since I replaced the motherboard some weeks ago. But in the last few days the monitor in the upper left (a device branded with the suspicious name of Hanns-G) has been powering up with an all-white screen, one that won't even show the on-screen display. The screen would appear if I powered it down and then up some gradually-increasing number of times, but today that number became so large that I removed the damn thing from its arm and pried it apart. This was not the first time I'd done this. As happened last time, I discovered bulging HEC-branded capacitors on the power supply board (this time they were two 1000 microfarad 16 volt units connected in parallel). I removed both and replaced them with a single 2200 microfarad 16 volt capacitor (to which I had to add extra wire to its leads, since it had been salvaged). After the replacement, the Hanns-G monitor powered up perfectly every time.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?211112 feedback
previous | next |
