|
|
|
mystery lamp water
Wednesday, August 3 2016
I was back at the brick mansion this morning, and was able to rapidly complete the unfinished sink sprayer installation I'd begun yesterday. I then moved on to the other little items on the annoying honey do list, including a stuck drawer (I just had to tighten a screw) Then there was a tub spout loose in the wall with a gap around it where water could get in. You can't just caulk such a thing; you have to secure it first. I used a wad of spray foam to wedge the copper pipe supporting the spout against the wall and then sprayed foam around it to lock it all in place (thankfully I had access to the inside of the wall via a hatch). And then I was done. As I worked, I was much more cheerful than I had been yesterday, and went out of my way to be nice to the tenant, who will sadistically come up with another annoying chore soon enough. But for now she seemed happy.
This cooler weather isn't ideal for snakes. They have to spend more time warming up in the morning in order to get the speed to catch things like frogs and grasshoppers. Often they seek warmth in the worst possible places, such as asphalt pavement. This afternoon I saw the flattened remains of a large garter snake smooshed on Dug Hill Road near our mailbox. I noticed it was more that one dead snake, it was actually a large mother and perhaps a dozen babies that had apparently been inside her. While she was probably two feet long, each of the babies was about three inches in length. They were all flattened together. It was a sad thing to behold.
In recent days Gretchen and I have noticed that there is a light in the upstairs bathroom that trips a ground-fault-interrupter (GFI) outlet every time it is switched on. Today I investigated this light by removing it from the wall. It's an upward-pointing L-shaped bracket made of tubuluar steel with a square cross-section, and I when I had it loose from the wall, I found it contained a couple tablespoons of brownish water! How had that gotten in there? I checked the end nearest the wall, and there was no evidence of roof water coming from that direction. That meant the water had been added from the bulb end. But how? It was as if someone had dumped a cup of water into the glass lampshade, which had acted like funnel. But the bottom of the lampshade opened too large to funnel the water into the narrow open end of the bracket containing the mini (candelabra-style) socket. Evidently what had happened instead was that little droplets (either from rain blowing in through an open window or condensing out of shower steam) had formed on the globe-shaped bulb and then run down into the socket. Once in the bracket, there was no place for the water to escape. Had the fixture been attached to a vertical wall, it would've escaped out of the wall end where wires enter it. But because I'd attached it to a wall-ceiling sloping at 45 degrees, it had accumulated in the elbow. Evidently there wasn't enough evaporation from there to remove the water, and it had gradually filled until it reached the socket, throwing the GFI. It's possible that it took 13.5 years for water to have accumulated in the manner I described. To keep this from happening in the future, I drilled a little hole in th elbow to promote drainage. If you're confused, I've made this diagram:
This evening I cleaned 12.65 pounds of ashes out of the woodstove, though I'd only burned 1057.15 pounds of wood and measured paper since March 23rd. This confirms yet again my theory that paper and magazine burning generates a lot more ash per pound than woodburning does (if only for the staples and other metallic debris).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160803 feedback
previous | next |
