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replumbed kitchen sink
Sunday, March 8 2026
We had a good solid thaw today, with sunny conditions and temperatures in the 50s. High overhead, cirrus clouds were streaming north, as we thousands of geese in V-formations, their constant honking coming from all directions. Just west of the Esopus Valley, we're clearly beneath a major geese migration route, as I've never lived anywhere where large high-flying flocks of geese were so common during times of migration.
Gretchen was feeling better today and actually went to pilates at around noon, which meant I could take the dogs for a walk. I took them down the Stick Trail to the Gullies Trail (the first time I'd walked on much of it in nearly two months). Snow was generally still present along it (it's on a northeast-facing slope), though when I looked across the valley to the southwest-facing slope on the other side of Dug Hill Road, I saw that there was no snow at all. Charlotte and Neville both came on the walk, though they were so distracted by a juicy bone left by one of Crazy Dave's dogs that they didn't really walk with me.
After a few more failed attempted, I gave up on trying to get my I2C bootloader on at Atmega168, a device I probably won't be using as a slave anyway. (I only wanted to get it working on that microcontroller to round out my slave bootloader GitHub repository.) I then switched to implementing the master code that does reflashing as a state machine, something that does its work over the course of many passes of the loop() function instead of all at once in a synchronous, blocking operation. This would allow for things like aborts and better retries. But of course I tried to do it the easy way and have ChatGPT make my state machine and it didn't work because such things are still too complex for an LLM to get right on the first try.
So then I returned to household hot water replumbing project, the one where I run multiple half-inch PEX lines to carry water that had been carried by a singular inch-thick copper pipe, with the goal being to speed up hot water availabilty at distant taps. Today's branch of the project was to run a new PEX line to the kitchen sink. I'd be completely bypassing the existing sink hot water plumbing, leaving it in place as a parallel system I can theoretically fall back on or repurpose for some other use.
I began by figuring out the geometry by determining where on the east-facing window in Gretchen's library the sink plumbing above it was aligned. I then cut a small hole in the ceiling drywall of Gretchen's library directly below the sink. This was, it turned out, in the perfect place. I then needed a hole in the ceiling where the PEX needed to bend to make its journey to the basement hallway, which was in an inter-joist bay two joists to the north. To thread the PEX through holes in one inter-joist bay accessible only through the sides, I had to poke fish tape at a distant hole blindly until I found it, a technique I've described before that allows me to cut fewer holes in the ceiling. Unfortunately, above the ceiling drywall where I was working had been a home or highway to numerous rodents, some large enough to have carried and chewed on acorns (probably chipmunks). There were lots of mouse droppings raining down on me (I think chipmunks, like other squirrels, have much bettr toilet habits) along with little bits of fibreglass insulation from the bats placed along the outside-wall end of the interjoist bays. I'd foolishly failed to wear anything to control dust entering my lungs, and at one point I was coughing so much that I started gagging.
But the actual running of the PEX went about as well as such things can go. I found it very easy to advance the PEX, starting from a hole I'd sdrilled up from below into the void under the sink. From there it rounded five corners before arriving at the manifold in the boiler room. Once I'd clipped it on to a nipple there, all that was left to do was build a mini-manfold (with two taps, one for the sink hot water and one for the tank that pre-heats boiling-hot water for tea). But when I was out in the garage with my MAP gas torch, I noticed the tank was already running out. I'd barely used the damn thing and it had cost like $35! Clearly I'd somehow bought a mostly-used tank, something that should've been more obvious from its suspiciously-light weight, which I'd actually noticed and then dismissed as "MAP gas must be light." (Note to self, always get a sense of a tank's weight relative to others before buying it.)
Not wanting to stop mid-project, I immediately drove out to Home Depot (boycotting Lowes in this case, because that was where I'd bought the light bottle of MAP gas." It turned out that Home Depot didn't have any MAP gas in stock, so I bought two bottles of propane instead. Propane doesn't burn as hot, but it's much cheaper ($6/bottle) and would be good enough for this and many other soldering projects not involving massive fittings. Back at home in Hurley, I quickly built the manifold, installed it on the sink end of the PEX line, and then had the sink's hotwater was effectively replumbed.
I then took a bath to wash away all the drywall dust, mouse droppings, and fibreglass. That was where I was when Gretchen returned from dinner with Lisa P.
I was so convinced that Gretchen had recovered from her illness, that I slept in the same bed with her (and the dogs). But at some point in the night she had coughing fit and went out to sleep on the teevee room couch.
Fog over the snow around the house as the morning gets warmer. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte and Neville just south of the wall near the Stick Trail end of the Woodshed Path. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte in motion. Click to enlarge.
The Chamomile "River" swollen with meltwater. Click to enlarge.
The state of the Chamomile Wall just east of the Stick Trail. Click to enlarge.
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