Feelin' Hot Hot Hot

 Heating season has begun here in sunny California, which means I am once more faced with my loud, obnoxiously unreliable furnace being loud and obnoxiously unreliable.

The loud part has a number of causes, one of which is the direct-return installation where the furnace uses a single central return vent plumbed directly into the blower plenum, which means that there's exactly zero ductwork on that side of things to absorb the noise. But it's also partly caused by the flue gas blower fan being bent and rubbing against its enclosure. Keep this in mind, we'll come back to it later.

The unreliable part came in the form of the furnace lodging itself in an error mode, blinking a code indicating a high limit error. What this means in theory is that the yellow loop that goes through the high-temp limit switches and the thermal fuses was going open-circuit, which you can see in the diagrams below. What this means in practice is that the furnace would randomly refuse to put out heat.

Now a noisy furnace will still keep me warm, but a furnace that won't put out heat is failing in a fairly fundamental task. So, time to diagnose!

I whipped out the multimeter and traced around the yellow high-limit sense loop. 24v goes in, 24v goes out, 24v goes in, 0v goes out. Well there's your problem. The issue was the burner-area high temp limit switch. It was supposed to be normally-closed, but was, in fact, only normally-mostly-closed, which doesn't really cut it.

So a replacement is ordered, personally delivered overnight by Jeff Bezos himself, and out comes the old switch.

And in goes the new switch.

The switch didn't come with the fiber gasket, so I reused that from the old one. Easy-squeezy.

So after everything is popped back into place, I set the thermostat to char-broil and...

I have created fire! Stolen from the gods themselves, tamed and domesticated by mankind.

As a bonus the furnace is a fair bit quieter now, since I also took the opportunity to pull out the flue gas fan and bend the squirrelcage back into shape, as well as giving the bearings a little squirt of oil. It still makes a lot of blower noise through the cold air return but at least the metallic schff-schff-schff-schff of the flue gas fan is gone.

A job well done, if I may be so bold as to pat myself on the back.

Update: those back-pats may have been premature, the problems continue...

A Shitty Situation

 So I got home after a long morning riding my bike up and down the hills of Santa Cruz, pull off my salt-stained gear, hop in the shower, and wouldn't you know it but the drain is plugged.

Thankfully my Trump-disapproved low-flow shower head wasn't filling the shower pan too quickly so I had plenty of time to soap up and rinse clean, but that wasn't exactly going to be a viable long term solution.

Now the drain had been somewhat slow flowing for a while now. Usually when I'd start a shower, the drain would back up for a moment, threaten to overflow the drain grate, but then catch up with itself and not cause any fuss for the remainder of my bathing. I had previously attempted to snake the drain, but the snake had always come out perfectly clean, leaving me rather puzzled to say the least.

But, as the situation had clearly deteriorated, I brought out the snake again to give it a second shot.

At first the results seemed to mirror previous attempts. I never seemed to hit a blockage, never got anything wrapped up in the snake, never got the water to flow. My plumbing line does have a cleanout outside, so I tried running the snake down there and as I expected, given that no other drain on that line had any issues, I didn't find a blockage there either.

I felt a little defeated and took a break to eat lunch, pondering just calling a plumber to go shimmy into the crawlspace and rip out and redo the pipe for the shower, but I went back and gave it another shot once I'd gotten some food in my belly.

I poured a few kettles full of boiling water down the drain and ran the snake again, and finally this time it latched onto something. It took quite a bit of force to yank it out, but when it came loose it pulled up a rather disgusting looking wad of matted hair, fabric fibers, and bits of carpet? Lord only knows what the previous owners were washing in that shower.

Still, the water wasn't draining, so I went at it again. It seemed to be pretty hit or miss whether I'd latch onto something or not, but after a few more lucky hooks I seemed to get the bulk of the clog cleared out.

When I poked my head into the crawlspace to have a look at the pipes the problem became quite apparent. The shower pan itself was plumbed with nice, smooth ABS pipe, but just past the trap it transitioned to galvanized steel pipe, which threaded into a cast iron tee fitting at the far end that served as the vent going up and the drain going down. Judging by the length of snake I had to feed in, and the fact that I was clearly hitting the far wall of the tee fitting before latching onto the clog, it was apparent that the threaded end of the pipe had been rusting internally and this flaky rust had been what was catching all the fibers as the water flowed over the corner of the tee, forming a clog just below it in the vertical pipe.

At some point I might have to go down there and replace the galvanized pipe with a length of ABS, but for now the drain is working so I'm just going to leave well enough alone, and be glad that I'm back up to 2 working showers again.

The Downs and Ups

 With the time change comes the off season for my cycling, and the switch back over to doing my weights as my primary form of exercise. I decided to take advantage of my peak cycling physique this weekend and hit up Demo forest for a second time on The Crimson Ghost.

I had previously only done a single lap down Flow trail, and I wanted to try Braille which is the other top rated trail in the park. There's also Sawpit and Corral but they're a bit less popular for a variety of reasons (Corral is rather short, and Sawpit is way down at the bottom of the forest which makes for a longer climb out).

So I saddled up and rode to the top and took my first run down Braille. It was, as the name might suggest, rather bumpy. Manageable though, I made it down in one piece, though I did mistake a roll for a drop and confirmed that my bike's suspension does have exactly as much travel as advertised. It's a decent mix of technical trail features, but at the end of the day it mostly just reinforced that technical trail features are not really my jam.

Since I still had my legs under me, I rode up Sulphur Spring and made my way across to Flow to see if my riding had improved any since my first attempt (which was, not coincidentally, the first time ever riding The Crimson Ghost).

Flow did not disappoint. I was able to take the bermed corners with more confidence than my previous attempt, but I was still going pretty slow through them and in general riding pretty heavy on the brakes. Cornering on a mountain bike at speed is not something that tends to come naturally, and I'll need to work on my skills a bit more before I feel like I've mastered it. As a bonus, I didn't eat shit this time, so I've got that going for me.

Once that was wrapped up it was high time to climb back up to the parking lot, pile in my van, and go home. 40 minutes of grinding up the hill later and that's exactly what I did, to close out a lovely morning of riding my bike.

The View Ahead

 I've designed a few revisions of camera mounts for my road bikes, and the previous champion of that process was this design that I cooked up slightly more hastily than maybe I should have.

The mounting plate for the camera was much chunkier than it needed to be, and I designed it around the standard 1/4-20 screw mounting, for which my camera needs an adapter to mount to (the long bit with the metal backbone) rather than just printing out the adapter as an integrated part of the mount. It also didn't have any accommodation for an external battery pack, which meant I was limited to 45-90 minutes between battery swaps.

I finally got tired of dealing with those downsides, so I printed up a new camera mount that solved all those problems.

There's no more chunky baseplate, it has a battery holder integrated right into it, and best of all I printed the adapter for the camera directly into the mount itself.

Will it hold up to the trials and tribulations of road cycling? No idea, I haven't ridden with it yet. But I will, tomorrow morning.

I'm pretty sure it'll do just fine.

Rocky Redemption

 A while back I dragged my butt out to Santa Teresa County Park with an eye on riding a figure-eight loop that would take me down some of the more challenging trails in the park. I saddled up on The Crimson Ghost and took a wrong turn and ended pedaling up one of the trails I was supposed to pedal down, which caused me to burn a lot more energy than I'd planned, so I only managed to ride down one of the two trails on that ride.

This morning I headed out again to seek my redemption. Having learned from my previous mistake, I avoided taking any wrong turns and ended up at the top of the first trail (Rocky Ridge) much fresher and ready to take on the world. I did much better going down it, though there was still a short stretch (maybe 20 feet long) that I got off and walked.

I was quite happy that I managed to ride through a bunch of challenging sections that I had to walk through on my previous ride, and given I was still feeling much fresher than on my previous outing it was a no-brainer to pedal to the top of the second trail and give it a shot.

The second trail (Stile Ranch) was a bit more technical than Rocky Ridge, though I managed to at least somewhat roll though the whole thing. There was one section that I got a bit out of shape on and almost yeeted myself off my bike, but I managed to keep it together and avoided any major incident. There were a lot of rocky sections that lead into tight hairpins, and I generally had to stop at the hairpin and waddle my way around them because my smooth brain can only handle so much technical riding at one time.

That said, I did successfully ride both trails, so I earned my redemption from the previous ride.

All in all, a very successful morning.

Getting A Handle On Things

 I have a fence, which has a gate. The gate has a latch, but it has no handles.

It's not an exceptionally tall gate so reaching up to the top edge to pull it open or closed, or grabbing onto the cross-piece on the back side, isn't impossible. But it is annoying, especially when I'm carrying something.

So the obvious solution is to add some handles. On the front of the gate this is no problem, but on the back I'd like to put the handle next to the latch, but the braces make the area very uneven so we need to deal with that first. Luckily I have some scraps of redwood laying around.

Some construction adhesive and screws will ensure that it stays put forever, no matter how clumsily I might yank on the soon-to-be-mounted handles.

Speaking of those handles, a few dollars slipped into the pockets of Jeff Bezos saw a pair of cast iron handles soaring across the ocean from the orient to my doorstep, and it wasn't any trouble to get them installed.

On the inside I mounted the handle as close as possible to the edge, both to center it on the blocking I added (which will turn grey in a few years of weather exposure, fear not) and to make sure I can reach the latch from the handle with one hand, which I can.

On the outside I mounted the handle a bit further in. I originally had it lined up with the handle on the inside, but there wasn't quite enough clearance between the handle and the jamb that the gate closed against, so I shifted it over by a half inch to keep my knuckles from getting scraped.

I may be a bit biased but I think the results look quite good.

Squeezing My Caulk Into Tight, Wet Places

 When I moved into this lovely wooden box on the hill I noticed the previous owners had applied some caulk-of-desperation in both of the showers. The fundamental problem was that the tile job had not been done correctly, and applying caulk overtop of it haphazardly had really not solved the problem, just caused new ones.

That said, I'm not in any mood to replace the tile just yet, but replacing the caulking the right way is at least going to hold things together for a while.

I picked up a tube of sanded, colour-matched caulking that promised to blend in with the grout, and buttered up the joints nice and neat.

You can still tell it's caulking, but the sand in it really breaks up the usual bright glossy white shine and makes it stand out from the grout a lot less.

I've got half a tube left so now that this shower has cured and survived a test run, I'm planning to give the other shower a once-over as well.