With new crimp rings in his bag, Mike arrived Friday night for the weekend. Upon arrival, he checked out the last leak on the water filter system and, though there was still one drop hanging on the edge of the unit, the towel under it was dry. So he wiped off the water that was on the pre-filter and later that evening checked again for a leak. There was no water coming from the connection. He continued to check this connection throughout the weekend and it was not until Monday that he felt some water. We are still up in the air on fixing this leak since it is so minimal, so we will continue to monitor it for awhile to see if it gets worse. At least we have the parts we need to fix it if we need to go that route. Since the install was essentially done, he decided to do the final step which was to remove the blue protective film and apply a wax (small bottle of car wax included) to the silver tanks. Once the tanks were all shiny, there were two Pelican logo stickers to be applied. Now we will wait to see what happens with the continuing leak saga.
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| Shiny tanks with the Pelican logo stickers - but are we really done??? |
Since he did not need to work on the water filter system this weekend, Mike decided to work on the water heater timer. We put a mechanical timer on the unit not long after moving in. We feel it controls our electric costs and have had them in most of our houses. The trouble we have with the mechanical timer in this house is, when Laurie leaves for the weekend or longer, she has to turn off the water heater breaker to keep the timer from running while the house water is off. Then, upon her return, she must turn the breaker back on and reset the time on the timer. It does not seem like a lot to do, but it takes time and is not fun when it is really cold outside. Recently when Mike was helping our nephew and niece at their new house, they found an unused digital timer in their water heater closet. Their water heater was new and had built-in settings for controlling the unit, so it looks like the previous owner disconnected the timer and left it behind. For his help, they gave Mike the timer and we decided to give it a try.
We did not know if this timer was functional or not and the only way to tell was to install it. So Mike took off the mechanical timer and put the new unit in place. It has the same footprint as the current timer so the install was not difficult. The hardest part was reaching over the water heater in the small closet to do all the work and trying to avoid dropping anything behind the water heater (already lost one screwdriver this way). Once the new timer was in place, Mike configured the settings and tested it out. It was keeping time and allowing a schedule to be set, but it was not opening the circuit to the water heater. Mike tried a few things and, while pressing some of the bypass buttons (a little harder to be sure they worked), the timer started working. But this was temporary and it shut off again. After much work, he found that if he pressed on the front of the timer unit (did not need to be a button), it would open the circuit but once he let go, it would turn off. He removed the unit and took it apart to see if there were some connections that needed repair and could not find anything that stood out. So much for that freebie. Still the digital timer was a good solution, so we took a look to see what we could find at Home Depot. They had two units that were only available online and were $100 or more (Amazon was even more expensive). Laurie decided it was not worth the extra cost since we hopefully won't be gone many weekends in the future, so Mike put the old mechanical timer back on.
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| Our original and current mechanical water heater timer |
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| The digital water heater timer we hoped would work, but was not 100% functional |
After the timer was back in place, Mike looked at possible ways of disabling the timer without using the breaker. This type of timer has a dial that keeps the time with metal set points for the on/off functions. To set the time, the dial is pulled forward to release it from the gears and then rotated to set the correct time. Mike decided that if the dial could be left in the pulled position, it would not rotate and therefore, not trip the on/off tabs. So he cut a small piece of PVC pipe thick enough to go behind the dial and leave it in a pulled state. Then the time just needs to be reset after the piece of pipe is removed. No breaker needs to be touched. This worked perfectly and Laurie will try it the next time she goes to the Valley for the weekend.
Sunday night a storm came to town and we started to get some rain that evening. By Monday morning, we had a small layer of snow on the ground and it continued to snow. The weather report predicted snow all day and Mike became concerned about getting back to the Valley for work. He decided it was better to leave earlier in the afternoon than wait for the evening. Most of the trip back is not at a high elevation, but there is one pass about a half hour south of Payson that has been known to require chains in really bad weather. Thankfully the roads were all clear on his way back.
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| The ground just barely covered when Mike woke up around 7am |
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| This was just about an hour later and the snow was still falling |
Stats: 1 Home Depot trip; 1 Walmart trip
Remodeling expense 1/25/16-2/1/16: $0
Remodeling expense to date: $52,629
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