Fruddled Gruntbugglies

Category: House

  • Browse NFPA codes online

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    I just found out that The National Fire Protection Association has a method you can use to browse all of its publications online. This includes the National Electrical Code and its associated offshoots. This is really nice, because printed versions of the NEC (NFPA 70) sell for upwards of $60, and then you still need to get NFPA 7A, which specifically covers single- and double-family dwellings. And on top of that, the codes are updated every three years, at which point you need to buy all-new copies if you want to stay up-to-date. This is a little pricey for a weekend shade-tree electrician like me. However, a copy of the NEC is essential if you want to do safe, code-compliant work that will be approved by an inspector. It’s always been frustrating to me that these documents cost so much — no one, be it contractor or homeowner, professional or amateur, should be required to pay for what is ostensibly a book of requirements. IMO, the high price point of the printed NEC promotes shoddy, non-permitted, non-compliant work, which is not good for anyone.

    Now, all is not perfect. NFPA still wants to make money selling hardcopy and PDF versions of the code, so the free access you get is a bit crippled. It works via a Java applet that doesn’t allow printing, cut-and-paste, or search. However, it’s better than nothing, and I have to give props to NFPA for recognizing the importance of providing easy access to these codes. There are certain things that are more important than making money..

    Oh yeah.. here’s the link.

  • Early end to swim season?

    Early end to swim season?

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    Several days of persistent cloudy, cool and rainy weather have conspired to drop the pool temperature to a nice, chilly 76 degrees. And, the forecast for the next week or so doesn’t look too promising. So it looks like we may be in for our earliest end to the swim season since we moved into the house. Combined with the late start, it was a pretty short season. However, in terms of usage, I think it was our best year since 2002. It seemed like someone (usually Michael) was in the pool more days than not. So I’m satisfied that we’re getting something out of the pool, though it’s still not quite worth all the work and expense.

    Anyhow, if the weather doesn’t turn around soon and extend the swim season, I’ll probably look at covering the pool just before we leave on our beach trip.

    9/10 – Well, we got a couple days of warm, sunny weather and I was able to nurse the pool back to 80 degrees.. So Michael and I spend a token 45 minutes or so swimming around this evening. The 5-day forecast doesn’t bode well for keeping it up, though.

    I definitely have mixed feelings about swimming in September. It’s a lot of work for diminishing returns (not as much swimming). I have to use the solar cover if I want to keep the water from getting too cold. I’m constantly having to scoop falling leaves out. And in the 5 years we’ve had the pool, Michael and I are the only ones who have ever been in the pool after Labor Day. But truth be told, I don’t really mind the work — it’s kind of like I’m prolonging the summer just a little bit more. Strange as it may seem, there’s still a tiny part of me that misses summer when it’s gone.

  • More pool fun

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    The inevitable happened yesterday.. I accidentally ran the vac booster pump for an hour or so with the intake plumbing shut off. Fortunately, it looks like it survived.. thermal cutoff switches are your buddy. Several years ago, a similar mishap happened to the main circulation pump, and it’s still alive and kicking. The damage this time was very similar to then: leaks at the threadded intake and output fittings. I disconnected them (plumbing unions are your buddy), re-coated with teflon tape, re-lubed the union o-rings, put everything back together, let the motor cool, tried again, and everything seems fine. Keeping my fingers crossed.

    Also, I’m going to need to go and fill in some low spots in my recently-applied deck caulking. The joint is holding water in a few spots. My tentative plan this week is to power wash and identify all the low spots on Tuesday or Wednesday morning before work, then do some more caulking on Thursday morning. Shouldn’t take me too long.

    As I’m fond of saying.. the fun never ends.

  • Scaling down the pool project

    Scaling down the pool project

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    Over the past weekend, I came to the conclusion that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with my swimming pool repair project this year.

    The moment of enlightenment came on Saturday, when I spent most of the day working on the pool. It occurred to me that to effectively re-bed my loose coping stones, I’m going to need to grind a lot more mortar off the bond beam than I was originally planning. Otherwise, the stones are either going to be uneven, or they’re going to sit up too high. Grinding the beam down is going to require a power tool such as an electric or pneumatic chipping hammer. And, it’ll make enough of a mess that I think the pool will need to be drained. And, that means it’s not happening this year.

    So, I’ve elected to put off the major repairs until spring (probably late April or early May). This summer, I’ll make repairs to the deck and caulk the expansion joint in the areas where the coping is sound. I should be able to finish that up over the next couple of weekends. Then when I close the pool, I’ll tarp the areas where the coping is off. Then I’ll drain the pool next April around the same time I would normally start up the equipment.

    This past weekend, I got most of the expansion joint cleaned and filled it with foam backer rod. I learned something about backer rod in the process: After about 24 hours in the joint, it “settles” lengthwise. My butt joints now have about 1/2″ of space between them. No problem, I can fill them with little bits of backer rod. But, I’m glad I didn’t caulk right away.

    With the pool empty next spring, I’ll have the opportunity to do some maintenance, such as..

    • Touch-up areas of loose or peeling paint
    • Inspect and re-caulk around light niches, return jets, main drain, etc.
    • Inspect and repair a return jet that appears to have a threadded sleeve stuck in it
    • Patch skimmers where necessary
    • Inspect shell cracks and re-putty where necessary
    • Install an overflow line (maybe)
    • And of course, repair the coping stones and tile in the deep end

    Hopefully after that, I’ll be good for another 5 years.

    I love pool ownership. Really, I do.

  • Pool coping project drones on

    Pool coping project drones on

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    Work on the pool coping project continues slowly but surely. I didn’t intend for this to be an all-summer project, but that’s how it’s turning out. The hot weather has really slowed it down, which is not all bad, as it’s keeping me from overextending myself. I’ve done most of my recent work in the early mornings on weekends.

    Today I finally finished prepping the individual coping stones for re-mortaring. This involved using a hammer and chisel to laboriously chip old, loose mortar off the bottom of the stones. From the appearence of the mortar, it looks like someone attempted a similar repair at some point in the past. Hopefully, this one will last a bit longer — that was the idea behind saw-cutting the expansion joint, anyhow.

    Next up is to chip any loose stuff off the top of the bond beam, and finish cleaning out the expansion joint at the deep end. Also, one of the coping stones needs to be glued together. This week I’ll figure out what product I need for that. Weather permitting, next weekend I’ll try to get all this prep work finished up so that I’ll be ready to reattach the stones.

    I will update this entry as I gather info.

  • Pipe Insulation Adventures

    Pipe Insulation Adventures

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    Now that our boiler job is complete, I’m going through and insulating all of the near-boiler pipes, which put off quite a bit of heat. First priority is the primary loop (1-1/4″ copper), followed by the secondary loop for the indirect water heater (1″ copper), followed by the DHW piping near the indirect (3/4″ copper), and lastly the secondary loops for our 3 heating zones (mix of 1″ and 3/4″ copper). I’m using the pre-formed fiberglass pipe insulation that has a white scrim jacket, as that’s what was recommended to me. Home Depot carries this stuff. I found it in the aisle with the furnace/air handler filters, thermostats, and ductwork. Here’s the catch — the stuff is tagged as being for various sizes of copper pipe, but the tags have no bearing on reality. I initially bought the stuff labeled for 1-1/4″ copper, but it was way too big for my 1-1/4″ pipe. I had to return it and get the stuff labeled for 1″ copper, which was a snug fit on the 1-1/4″ pipe. And, the stuff for 1″ pipe is actually more expensive than the stuff for 1-1/4″ pipe (by about 50¢ per 3′ length), which makes absolutely no sense.

    Fast forward to the actual installation. The insulation slips easily over the pipe, and seals shut with an adhesive strip on the scrim jacket. However, on the stuff I bought, the adhesive doesn’t hold up very well against the expansion and contraction of the pipes as they heat/cool… a lot of the seams were popping loose just a few hours after I wrapped the pipes. I’ve compensated by adding some strategically placed wire ties, but I may need to track down a better adhesive to apply to the problem areas.

    For butt joint (and possibly seam) sealing, I found some white scrim tape at Grainger, but it’s mind-numbingly expensive: Around $35 for 50 yards. That’s almost 25¢ a foot. I can’t imagine what’s in the stuff to make it that expensive.

    On a totally unrelated note, I see that Home Depot is now carrying trench drainage systems. This could come in handy for my driveway down the road….

  • Hump Day Ramblings

    Hump Day Ramblings

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    I accidentally shut down my X server yesterday before I left work, so I took the opportunity to install the custom nVidia driver on my X desktop. And I must say, the proprietary driver is much nicer than the nv driver that comes with X.org. Someone at nVidia has put a lot of work into making these cards work well with Linux. The installer script produced a working config file that started right up, with acceleration enabled to boot.

    The nVidia driver has a built-in option called “TwinView” which provides multihead support via the VGA and DVI ports on the card. It replaces Xinerama, although supposedly Xinerama can still be used to provide the same functionality. However, TwinView seems to be the better alternative because it provides acceleration on both displays. It also adds Xinerama-compatible “hints” to the X server so that window managers will work the same as with Xinerama. It’s really very well done. So now I have a full 24-bit display across both monitors, with acceleration. Right now I’m still using the widescreen as my “main” display and the standard display as my “secondary” screen. I’m going to try it like this for a while, and if I don’t like it, I’ll switch them.

    The only configuration challenge was getting both displays working at their respective resolutions. I accomplished this with the following Device section:

    Section "Device"
Identifier "nVidia"
Driver     "nvidia"
BusID      "PCI:1:0:0"
Option     "TwinView"
Option     "MetaModes" "CRT-0: 1680x1050, DFP-0: 1280x1024"
Option     "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
EndSection

    The MetaModes line is the important one.

    [More:]

    While testing things out, I also learned something about VNC: It compresses the pixel depth over slow connections. To force full-color rendering, I need to do

    vncviewer -FullColor host.name:display

    I was initially scratching my head as to why it was still rendering limited colors despite the 24-bit display. That explains it, and I may want to keep full color rendering disabled to maximize performance over my slow DSL uplink.

    Also, this morning I hooked a scavenged SCSI disk up to my PC at home, mainly as a proof-of-concept: The disk uses 68-pin wide SCSI, and my controller uses 50-pin narrow SCSI. However, all I needed to make it work was a 50-to-68-pin adapter cable. I just jumpered the drive to SCSI ID 1 and plugged it in. Initially I had an external terminator on the drive case, and that hosed things. When I removed the terminator, it worked. Apparently my controller wants to terminate the bus itself. At any rate, now I have a spare 72-gig drive with its own case and power supply.

    And finally, what’s a summer blog entry without a mention of the pool? Last week, the backup valve on my Polaris 380 broke. The valve mechanism itself is a big mess of gears and turbines, which fits into a plastic enclosure. The enclosure is made up of two halves held together by a screw-on collar ring, with a couple of o-rings to prevent leaks. The screw-on collar piece is what actually broke, probably after the valve was dropped onto the concrete pool deck one too many times. The mechanism itself was undamaged. Fortunately, Polaris sells a replacement case kit separately, and it’s much less expensive than an entire valve. The annoying thing is, the case kit only includes one of the two necessary o-rings. The included o-ring seals the two case halves together. The other one seals the backup jet to the case. It’s “technically” not part of the case, but if I’ve got the valve disassembled anyhow, I might as well replace both o-rings as they’re both probably worn out. It’s a small o-ring (1/2″ O.D. x 3/8″ I.D.) and it would have been nice if Polaris had seen fit to throw one in with the case kit. Oh well. For future reference, I found a replacement o-ring at Home Depot, in the plumbing section where they have the faucet repair kits.

    Well, I guess I should get to work now.

  • Load center upgrades

    Load center upgrades

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    Continuing in my grand tradition, I’m writing about yet another house project that I’d like to do… the problem, as always, is finding the time for it..

    We have two circuit breaker panels which really should be replaced. They are FPE panels with known safety issues. One panel is our main house panel, and the other is a subpanel. The FPE subpanel is fed by a third subpanel, a Square-D QO type.

    The Square-D subpanel has 20 slots, of which only 9 are currently in use. Because we’ve abandoned a few circuits in the FPE subpanel that it feeds, I could actually squeeze all the circuits into the Square-D if I wanted. However, if I did that, the panel would be full with no room for future expansion. So.. it would probably make sense to replace both subpanels with a single 24-slot Square-D QO type.

    I would need a panel, a cover, and a ground bar kit, as well as a bunch of breakers. It looks like the project would cost around $500. Probably worth it for the safety and peace of mind — maybe I should slate it for this winter.

    The main house panel is a bigger project. I would need to involve BG&E to get them to shut off my power at the meter, and to tell me what kind of service I have — the panel is 150 amps, but it appears that the service may be 200 amps. In this case, I’d get a 200amp, 40-slot panel. This project would probably run closer to $1000. If I can get the subpanel project under my belt this winter, maybe I could tackle the main panel next winter. Again, the main issue is finding time and prioritizing it amongst all the other stuff that has to get done around here.

  • Troubleshooting cloudy pool water

    Troubleshooting cloudy pool water

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    For the past several years of pool ownership, I’ve always had off-and-on problems with cloudy water. I’m generally pretty good at keeping up with the water chemistry, so I’ve always been a bit curious as to why the water clouds up so regularly. The pattern is the same every year: it starts out crystal clear, then after a month or so, the water slowly starts getting hazy.

    The only way to get to the bottom of this is to apply the scientific method: assume that the problem is caused by x, try a known solution for x, and see if it works. I’ve worked at this over the past few seasons, and I’ve come up with three potential causes.

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    Problem: Yellow algae
    Cause: Lack of superchlorination

    Yellow (or brown) algae presents as a fine “dirt-like” substance that accumulates on surfaces. When brushed, it dissipates easily and clouds up the water. It re-settles when the pump is off. I had big problems with yellow algae last year and the year before. At the time, I was superchlorinating very infrequently (only one or two times a season). This year, I have been superchlorinating weekly and also using a polyquat type algaecide semi-regularly, and I have not had an algae problem (yet). If this is the ticket to keeping it at bay, then I need to figure out the ideal frequency of superchlorination that will prevent algae blooms without wasting too much chlorine.

    Problem: High pH
    Cause: Prolonged use of hypochlorite sanitizers without adding acid to compensate

    High pH and/or Alkalinity can cause cloudy water. Once this year I let the pH drift to almost 8, and the water was noticeably turbid. Adding acid cleared it up after 12 hours or so. I’ve found that supplementing the hypochlorite with a trichlor floater (in moderation, to avoid high levels of cyanuric acid) can help to keep the pH down, particularly during the hot months when the chlorine demand is high.

    Problem: Inadequate filtration
    Cause: Undersized pump and/or not running pump long enough

    I’ll freely admit to running the pump as infrequently as I can get away with it, to try to save electricity. Unfortunately it appears that I’m paying the price for this in the form of cloudy water. Currently, the pump runs around 9 hours a day (6 hours in daylight and 3 hours after dark). With turbid water, a pH of 7.4 and no visible algae, I ran the pump for 24 hours straight and there was a marked improvement in clarity. So it appears that I need more circulation. This seems odd to me, because 9 hours really should be enough to fully turn the water over and keep it from clouding up. So I’m curious if my pump and/or filtration system is undersized. When I get around to it, I’ll measure my flow rate and see what kind of numbers I’m getting. If they’re low, I may want to consider a larger pump and/or filter. Until then, I guess I’m stuck running the pump longer if I want clear water.

  • Mortar for pool coping stones

    Mortar for pool coping stones

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    I swung by Lowes today to see what kind of mortar (and mortar ingredients) they carry. Neither they nor Home Depot seem to carry white Portland cement, so unless I go through a supplier or lumber yard, it looks like my only choice is gray mortar. However, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing. Most of the stuff is going underneath the stones, where it won’t be seen. Gray Portland is cheaper than white Portland. What about using gray mortar to bond the stones, then filling in the gaps and other visible areas with white grout? That might be a plan. I just need to look into what kind of “grout” (I put that in quotes, because grout, mortar, etc. all seem to be basically the same thing, namely portland cement, sand, and additives in varying ratios) I would need to get.

    Lowes carrys Quikrete products (Home Depot carries Sakrete). They have a bewildering variety of different Quikrete products on the shelf…

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    Number Description Bag Weight Bag Price
    1102 Mortar Mix 60lbs $4.00
    1125 Type N Masonry Cement 70lbs $8.00
    1125 Type S Masonry Cement 70lbs $8.50
    1136 Mason Mix – Type S Mortar 60lbs $4.50
    1136-58 Blended Mortar Mix 80lbs $5.32
    1124 Portland Cement Type I/II 94lbs $9.64
    1103 Sand/Topping Mix 60lbs $4.00
    1230 “Quikwall” Surface Bond Cement – White 50lbs $17.00
    1962 Medium Sand 50lbs $5.00
    1152 All-Purpose Sand 50lbs $2.90
    1133 Vinyl Concrete Patch 40lbs $13.43
    1585 Precision Grout 50lbs $14.00

    The task now, is to go through all of these, check the Quikrete web site to see what’s actually in each of them, and determine which product(s) are appropriate for my job. Stay tuned.