My brain is toast.
I’m on my 20th 9+ hour day of work in a row, and I feel like I might be halfway or so to completion. Still a week or two away from being able to take a breath and get a day off, and another month or so until I can finally call it a season on opening cottages.
It’s an interesting gig. Other than the ridiculous hours it has a lot that suits me. I work completely alone. The only time I have to deal with someone, I ask them for things, and they provide them as fast as they can. The only thing anyone wants from me is their house up and running by a specific date. A lot of people want on by April first. Most want on by mid may. After that it tapers off and suddenly there’s time to circle back to fix whatever problems were able to be put off for another day- namely, anything I can jam a cork in so water isn’t pouring onto a floor or carbon monoxide isn’t pouring into a basement.
Lansil’s cottage, my all time favorite- but something of a nightmare for the same reasons I love it- very old, mostly original everything, very unique. Odd add-ons, huge sprawling rickety wooden place that feels like a hunting lodge or liminal space hotel. I turned the gas on at the meter, lit the pilots on the water heaters after bleeding the gas off at the drip legs, flipped the main breaker in the outside box, and the furnace breaker inside- set the temperature up up up and let it fire out the cobwebs, and set about prepping the rest of the plumbing for the reintroduction of water since I blew it out back in October.
I was about to go under the house, which is packed full of bicycles and sail boats I have to climb over, in order to get to a bevy of drain points and valves, and I was immediately hit by the warm stench of exhaust. Whoever shoved all the bikes in there completely took out the crawl space furnace exhaust, cracking the plastic port on the furnace itself in half. Power OFF. Gas OFF. Phone call placed. Wham, bam, one lap down. Crack the water main to 1/2 power. One more lap, check for pressure. Rip the valve to full, bleed the air from the water heater at the furthest most full port tub. Flush rust out of the system. Take apart everything after rust clogs everything up, flush the rust out again. Repeat a few times. Check for leaks: find 3. Fix one, note the other two. Put a bucket under them, cross it off the list, and on to the next.
If nothing goes wrong, I make good money. If things go wrong, I still make good money, better money even- but I have no time. The process is universal. We have it down to a science. Every year I fine tune it a little more. This year my thing is to hit the power first (as always) but then get everything fire related done second- gas on, lines bled out, fireplace pilots lit, boilers lit and fired, furnaces lit and fired. One I can cross everything about that off from my brain, I can move on to water. So once the system is filled and I’m on my final check-everything-with-a-flashlight pass, I can just turn the gas valves from pilot to ON (for anything that requires water to be fired).
It’s an interesting game, because I am basically trying to reengage the most dangerous and potentially damaging elements of a home, to a home that hasn’t had them up and running in months through a frozen winter, as fast as I possibly can- but also without making a single mistake, because most of these are multi million dollar victorian antiques light years out of legal building code.
After filling the boiler at (Proctor and) Gamble’s cottage, and letting it warm up- I came back down to the basement on my final pass and found steaming water pouring out of the relief valve- I checked the pressure and it was right at 29 psi. I had set the boiler pressure to 12 psi when I filled it cold, which is recommended. The relief valve will blow at 30 psi, and if it blows hard it can completely drain the entire boiler system- in this case into a basement. Now something like this happened last year, so I had replaced the expansion tank- a boiler heating up should not cause a pressure spike of 12 psi to 30 psi, unless the expansion tank had ruptured- which I assumed was the case.
It was not the case, however, despite all evidence and logic pointing to that. What was actually happening, was that the boiler was running way too hot, over 200 degrees, and turning the water inside of it to steam- Chernobyl style- causing massive pressure spikes. To make the situation worse, I quickly appraised the the boiler had no low water cut off safety feature- meaning, if the temperature spiked, and the pressure then spiked, and the relief valve then blew, and the system completely emptied- nothing would communicate with the boiler that it was empty and should shut itself off. Instead, the thermostat way above would continually call for heat that the dry pumps could not provide, and burn and burn and burn until the radiant heat alone ignited the area round the boiler, and burned the house down. And nobody would have been in the house to notice for weeks if I had left it like that, and that had happened.
So instead of flying on to the next house, I had to spend a huge portion of a day installing an aquastat- something kind of like a low water cut off, but instead of shutting the boiler down when it ran out of water, it would just shut it down if it ran too hot. I also got into the gas valve and dialed the burners way back so they would stop firing at 200 degrees and advised her that we should replace the entire antique “Tubefin” hunk of crap next winter in the off season.
Today, on day 20, one of my favorite least-problem having cottages typically, had two massive blow outs in the water main. One from a freeze up that is concerning me, since I blew it out with compressed air quite thoroughly- I suspect the curb stop valve, which is an ancient piece of shit, is leaking by over the winter and filling some of the ancient pipes buried in the dirt below the nasty crawl space full of old tree stumps from the late 1800s. One blow out I had to dig a foot below the dirt with a spade shovel to get to- a big enough hole to completely expose it, cut out the bad section with a hack saw, and use these life saver coupling connectors called “dresser couplings” that fit over ancient galvanized pipes for patching.
The other hole involved copper work, so I had to lug my blow torch in for that. I reworked the pipes while I was at it and installed a drain point where the water got trapped and froze, to prevent it from happening again. But if that curb valve is leaking by like I think, something else will have to freeze and burst before I can really lean on the township to dig it up and fix it.
I could go on like this all night, but I am dying of brain rot and exhaustion. Gnight.
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