Week 2 Wrapup

I’ve been hanging in there through 2 weeks of remote work, and it’s certainly had its ups and downs. It takes a little getting used to, though I think we’ve been amazingly successful teaching remotely. Of course it helps when your fellow staff and also your students are all universally awesome. ^.^

I’ve also got some solid home improvement progress to share. I finally got a 2nd light up in the kitchen. Woot! It is quite bright. This is great though, as I put up another LED light similar to the ones we have in all the other rooms last week, but it isn’t really bright enough for cooking dinner as it gets dark.

Last weekend I started the basement painting. This weekend I replaced the basement heaters & thermostat in the main living room. There were 2 old heaters, but one would trip the breaker when on, so it was disconnected when we moved in. The other worked, but quite clearly the thermostat it was connected to did not. It either had to be entirely off or it was cooking down there. Now I’ve got a thermostat that actually works and keeps it a reasonable temperature down there. Woot!

It was, however, a bigger adventure than I anticipated. Fortunately Martin again came by to help out again, which was so much appreciated as I was never going to get those on the wall by myself. The bigger one is 8 feet long & the smaller 6. They were tricky to handle and install with two of us. I definitely couldn’t have done it alone.

We also had to move the heaters up higher on the wall to leave room for the subfloor, new flooring & baseboards. This was the first adventure. You can see my half finished patch job there. That part wasn’t too bad. Cutting the dry wall was almost fun! On the other hand, patching it was terribly messy. And yes, I only painted where the heater would go. I’m trying to leave a week between painting days to let my still tennis-elbowed arm recover a bit. :-P

The next adventure was electrical. The old room had two 8 foot heaters, so that’s what I got when I went to buy new ones. However they’ve apparently gotten better & more efficient as the new ones were 2500 watts each, WAY too much for the circuit to handle, nevermind the thermostat. Fortunately I realized that before we put them in. We had to return one and get a shorter 6 foot one, which someone else (grrr…) had fried before returning without explaination so it was reshelved. Even then, I still had to down convert the longer one to run at 2000 watts for it all to work out.

The final adventure was the new thermostat. I wanted a programmable thermostat, but little did I realize when getting it that would mean I couldn’t just disconnect and reconnect the wires in the same config. The old mechanical thermostat had an off setting, but programmable ones don’t. Fortunately the instructions were pretty clear, and I had my dad on the phone to confirm all my wiring plans. It was after 7 by the time everything was complete.

As I was cleaning up, I decided to put the date/time into the thermostat and get it programmed to my schedule. That’s when I noticed that the box was warm… Ack!!! Was that OK? Did I do something wrong? Was my house going to burn down overnight? Another call to Dad put my mind at ease as he said there was a resistor in there and it would get warm, but shouldn’t get hot. It didn’t get any hotter, and my house still stands. Just have to say, my dad is totally awesome. Not only did he teach me to be handy with the house, he always has my back when I’m caught in the middle of some job with questions.