What home improvement work did you do today?

Work table is done. Vises are mount and I drilled some holes for dog clamps.

 

What a day!

The single wide is unhooked and staged for removal tomorrow and the nerd room has an expanded storage wall with additional uses bring printed now:









Tomorrow will be a clean up day, hopefully

 

Printer was running all day non stop... finally on the fun part of the wall... The single wide is gone and the tree guys called to confirm they will be here next weekend. Tractor is coming back tomorrow and we saw some new neighbors... damn, what a day:









Maybe tomorrow we will get a break from these nado warnings and I can get some outdoor stuff done.

 

That's the same one I'm running. I did notice that it comes with a fairly thick aluminum backplate, so I put it on and basically downloaded like 200Gb of PS5 games, and had my son use the crap out of his computer.

It does get fairly warm...but nowhere near enough to cause any issues, and in any event it'll be screwed into the box where the current coax line to my living room (which is being removed) is, and that box is metal itself = further heatsink. It'll be fine.

 

Dec 23, hanging out with family - everyone agrees its cold in the house. Look at smart thermostat and it says "waiting on unit" but nothings happening out at the heat pump or indoor air handler and indoor temp was 2F lower than set point.

Fast forward to 3 hours of troubleshooting later, with weird inconsistent voltage measurements across different wires while testing for calls for heat/AC/fan/compressor. Confirmed the 24V transformer was good, swapped to old dumb thermostat, no change, gave up and swapped back to smart thermostat and ran it in emergency heat mode all night.

Next morning, woke up early fearing the electric bill of running emergency heat only and bill of paying an expert to troubleshoot it, I kicked it back over to normal heat mode in the app. 5 minutes later I hear the outdoor unit fan and compressor kick on! Monitoring it's performance since then and it hasn't skipped a beat. Properly defrosting and keeping up with temp demand.

The only other possibly weird thing was a thick build up of ice on whatever the big cylinder is plumbed into the compressor? Accumulator? Not the smaller dryer cylinder. Possibly a stuck switching valve and all of our dicking around with switching to AC and back to heat and tapping on the solenoid freed it up unknowingly? Or a fluke that caused the accumulator to ice over and letting it sit overnight defrosted it? Temps were just above freezing. Or this is an early sign of a leak in this 13 year old system and I'm on borrowed time.

 

Printer ran some more organization and I started prepping the ground for the new addition. Tomorrow is some medical follow up BS... and then more on Wednesday... So I will take today as a victory:





Allegedly, some trees are being removed from the neighbors property to ensure nothing falls on the new building:

 

I prepared to give $4600 to the well guy to replace

- well pump
- wiring
- 200' of galvanized pipe

 

I replaced mine myself last year. Used pex to tie it all in. Unless that pipe is underground you can do it. If I recall I was under $1000 all parts included. I did need to buy a few new tools for the pex though.

edit: had my trusted hvac guy quote me $13k for a new pressure tank, switch, new tankless water heater, and all the trimmings. Started looking at parts online so pulled the trigger on a diy once I figured what he was charging me in labor.

 

Any of you guys ever install a smart water monitor/shut off valve? Any issues?

Picked up one of these and plan on installing this weekend on existing pex-a.

 

It's all underground - we're talking about the galvanized pipe in the well itself.

With that said, the $4600 is to replace the well pipe, the pump, the wiring, as well as the labor itself, and a few other odds and ends...so they're not exactly getting away with highway robbery.

If it were inside the house, yeah, a bunch of buddies and I would be having a Pex party. LOL All of our piping inside the house (not counting our kitchen) is copper, though, so we are good there.

 

Swapped out our 2 couches and chairs for a large sectional for all 7 of us.
Should work out well for movie nights since they always wanna crowd around us in a single chair or couch.
Before:

After:

 

Are you able to buy more sections, for, when uh, you know, the uh “family grows”? Again?

 

We ordered originally with 1 extra piece. When it got home, we saw the layout and called to order 1 more.

So yea....I can add onto it



This one is about 17.5' wide with it 11' against the wall.....it fits quite a bit now haha

 

I like that color a lot! We did the same earlier this year. Then waited for the company to correct the mistakes, hard to believe this was paid for roughly 7 months ago but we took delivery mid Nov.

 

Dang!
Crazy to take that long. Yalls looks good too! Very nice
We don't spend too much time on the couch(apparently more in the bed). Typically just the weekends and/or when family and friends come over. But opted out of leather since it didn't feel as "cozy" to us.
Just finished a movie with the littles and of course a few, including the wife, passed out on it haha

 

We had a pupper when we made the purchase and an inbound infant. So we opted for leather for cleanability. But I can tell you I prefer the fabrics 9 times out of 10.

Love that yall are loving it!

 

Goddam, that's a lot of couch.

 

Well.

$6600 later and we have water.

We figured out right away the issue was likely not the pressure switch or the bladder tank. (Amazing considering both are 52 years old, but hey...if it works....)

They pulled the pump, which was 270' deep, encased in galvanized pipe which had *obviously* seen better days. Tested the wire out, and the 273' of wire measured 20 ohms. Given that 1000' should measure maybe 1 ohm...obviously it was the cause of the pump locking up.

Replaced with a 1HP Grundfos brushless pump, 280' of schedule 120 PVC, and wire, and we now have water. Hooray!

 

Was the pump also that old? I’m coming up on 20 years on mine and not looking forward to the replacement… it’s 390’ down.

 

Nope. The original casing was the age of the house (52 years) but the pump itself was replaced in 2002, so it lasted 22 (23?) years. Not too terribly bad.

That said, even if we DO have to replace the pump in the future, it'll just be the pump and wire, so maybe $4500 tops in the future. Not great but better than $6600.

I should also point out that while I had to replace the wiring and pump, I didn't *have* to replace the casing. I chose to replace it because the wiring itself was bad, and the question was *how* it became bad. Prevailing wisdom says the constant torquing of the pump can cause the rough surface of the galvanized pipe to wear through the wiring casing, whereas that's not the case with PVC. So I chose to 'buy once cry once.'

 

This.

Helped my dad do it at their place in S. AL a couple years back, pump had died. Local quoted a little over $2,500. House was built in the 1980s. The original used PVC so we reinstalled PVC. Was definitely a 2-person job pulling up the PVC and line to the pump, it gets unweildy. But we knocked it out for around $600 including a really nice long-life pump. I'd need to ping him to get part numbers on the pump, can do so if it helps?

 

ouch.

 

I thought about doing it myself, but

- the parts alone were about $5K
- the 3 guys I would have asked for help were either out of town or recovering from shoulder replacement
- wife was fussy (lol)

If it were shallow? All day long, sure; but almost 280'? Yeah, I let professionals do it.

 

Never even knew this was a thing. But my interest is piqued because of my 2 teen daughters. I have however flipped the breaker to the well switch before when they've been in there too long.

 

Sorry man.

I'm in a house with 3 girls. I went with 2 hot water tanks and a circ pump.
The circ pump took a shit though so that's on the to-do list.