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radiator valve hell
Sunday, November 4 2018
I gathered two backpack loads of firewood this morning, the second from the pile of prepared pieces just west of where the Chamomile crosses the Stick Trail and the first from that big downed tree a couple hundred feet south of the Chamomile. I had to use the big Kobalt 80 volt saw for that first salvage mission, but by then there was something seriously wrong with it. I'd saw for a few seconds and then it would stop, churping like the battery was dead. But the battery still had three bars on it. I managed to get just enough cutting out of the saw for that load, but after that, when (after letting the saw cool down) I tried to cut a piece from the fallen tree at the north end of the Stick Trail, the saw chirped a complaint and then its motor never ran again. I was going to have to take it back to Lowes, just like I predicted back when I received it as a present on my 48th birthday.
The plan today was to go over to the brick mansion on Downs Street and attempt to replace the two broken radiator valves in the second floor unit. This would require figuring out which zone that was in the basement, draining it, replacing the valves, and then filling it back up with water again. Meanwhile Sandor had offered me an old non-functional Apple Cinema display that I could try to repair, and, as we negotiated how I could pick it up, he offered to help me with the plumbing project. I easily imagined that destroying my whole afternoon, but he really seemed eager to join me on that, so I said sure, I'd pick him up.
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After Gretchen left with Neville to work the Sunday bookstore shift and after I'd gathered that second backpack load, I loaded Ramona up in the Subaru and we drove over to Sandor and Eva's place east of Woodstock. On the drive southeast on Sawkill, I told Sandor about what my worklife has been like lately. We also discussed our various firewood chores. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten to bring the broken Kobalt electric chainsaw, so there was no sense in driving to Lowes. We went directly to Home Depot instead, and there I bought a $30 1.25 inch radiator valve (I already had the 1 inch one for the bathroom) and 50 feet of cheap hose for use in draining the zone.
At the brick mansion, I station Sandor up in the apartment with the tenants while I went down into the basement and banged on pipes, asking (via cellphone) how loud the banging sounded at one of the radiators. Doing this, I narrowed down the possibilities in tangle of pipes. The second floor had once been supplied with massive steel pipes as thick as my leg (probably dating to when the radiators were heated with actual steam), but when the household heating plant was upgraded, all of that stuff necked down to a couple one-inch (or are they three-quarter-inch) copper pipes. I was delighted to find my theory of what pipes represented the second floor zone confirmed by tiny writing on the plywood near the actual boiler. All I had to do was turn off two valves, hook up the hose, pass it out a window, and then I could drain the zone into the yard. Because of all the water in the radiators and those big thick pipes, draining the system took a fairly long time. To speed the process, I made it so air could be drawn in at the air escape valves on the two radiators whose valves I hoped to replace.
Next I disconnected the valve from the radiator at its union fitting. That was fairly easy, but the next subtask was brutally difficult: try as I might, I could not remove the old valve from the black iron pipe it had been screwed onto. I even had Sandor holding that black iron pipe still using another pipe wrench, but I just couldn't deliver the torque. And there were no pipes available for me to use as handle extensions. So I drove with Sandor over to Herzog's in hopes of buying a suitable piece of pipe. Strangely, they had nothing appropriate in stock, at least there in the store. At that point it made more sense to drive back to my place and rummage around in my scrap pipe collection. So that's what we did, and there I found a few pieces of pipe that looked like they could work. One was brass, one was PVC, and one was steel. They weren't all that long, but how long did they need to be?
Ramona was evidently sick of hanging out in the car by this point, because once back at the house, she went inside and tried to snuggle under a blanket on the living room couch. Meanwhile, it seems the cats had eaten most of a chipmunk that Ramona had managed to kill on her walk this morning.
Back at the brick mansion, the pipe extensions failed to provide enough additional leverage to remove the valve. By now I was so desperate that I disassembled one of the new valves to see if I could use parts from it to fix the old valve. But its internal components were completely incompatible; like a software API, it was only compatible at its input and output. So I had to abandon that valve as a lost cause for the time being. I then tried to replace the broken valve on the bathroom radiator. This time I was able to remove the old valve (which was smaller), but only just barely. In so doing, though, I realized that the other side of the union fitting would also have to be replaced, that the old one had a mating face that wasn't compatible with the new valve. But to remove that other side would require a spud wrench, a specialized tool I hadn't known existed, a rod with little slots to grab two teeth on the inside of the fitting so that it could be turned out. I was going to have to put the old valve back on this radiator too! In the end, all I managed to accomplish after hours of work was the installation of a couple air release valves. When I left the brick mansion, I wasn't even sure whether or not the radiators would leak (or even work) once they refilled with water, a process that looked destined to take hours. This had to be one of my least successful landlording days ever.
Since Sandor had been such a good sport about all the tedious (and at times dirty) work, I decided to treat him to drinks at the Stockade Tavern. But it's closed on Sunday, so I took him to the Two Ravens Tavern nearby. We sat at the horseshoe-shaped bar with a smattering of others: a couple women together, a couple male-female couples, and 30-something woman all by herself with a glass of red wine. A football game played on two big screens near the ceiling. Sandor and I both had two beers each while talking mostly about computer technology. At some point our pump bartender brought out french fries and other foods that were compliments of the chef. Being vegan, we went for the fries, though Sandor sensed that perhaps they weren't entirely vegan. That didn't stop me.
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