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split pipes reach the outdoors
Friday, January 12 2024
I spent most of the day routing the split's refrigerant lines and wiring through the laundry room and out through a hole in a short section of north-facing wall. (Normally going north from the house in this part of the house takes you into the garage, but the garage is staggered westward on the house, meaning there is some north-facing wall on the laundry room.) To do all this, I had to first clear the route, which mostly meant temporarily removing a shelf running about three feet above the floor above the cat litter boxes that I'd installed several years ago as the home for chainsaws and tool battery chargers. I also had to remove several large movie posters (all mounted on foam-core) that Gretchen had hung on the wall. The plan was to route the insulated refrigerant pipes and wires in a neat upside-down L-shape, first going east about four feet from where the assemblage emerges from a wall en route from the laboratory, the turning downward through a notch in the chainsaw shelf and out through a hole just above the baseboard. After cutting that exit hole, I then had to wrestle the assemblage through it. First, though, I used regularly-spaced wrappings of duct tape to organize the assemblage and keep the signal wire and 240 volt power-supply wire separated by a couple inches. I also lined the hole to the outdoors (both through the drywall and through the clapboards) with duct tape to keep it from tearing off the insulation as I pushed the assemblage through. I managed to tear the insulation a few times anyway, but not as badly as I'd torn it when pushing it up into the laboratory. Fortunately, spray foam can fix all of that, but what can't be fixed is damage to the copper lines. As I was trying to gently bend the assemblage to form the apex of the L, I felt one of the pipes give in a way that didn't feel good. I then tore of the insulation to see how bad it was. I managed to unbend the pipe, though now it had a little dent in it on the inside of where it had been kinked. Hopefully it will still work as intended, though now I had my doubts. (The only way to fully repair this would be to cut out the kinked section of pipe and splice in a new section, both ends connected with flare fittings; maybe it will come to that.)
Meanwhile, Gretchen went on two separate walks with people, the first being with our newish neighbor to the west and her little dog Henry (whom I got to meet this morning). Later this afternoon, our friend Fern came over. Neville doesn't normally go for walks, but if there are unusual people or dogs on the walks, he is sure to go. So he went for both walks. On that walk with Fern, they encountered our neighbor Crazy Dave and his dogs in the forest, and there was some sort of bad altercation between Charlotte and Dave's dog Brigette that Gretchen hoped wouldn't leave Charlotte traumatized about meeting all random dogs in the future.
This evening, while Fern and Gretchen were chatting in the living room, I used a little cart to move the split's bulky outdoor unit from the garage to the top of the slope near the northeast corner of the house. Then I laid down a wide plank, using blocks to support it and keep it generally level in the width dimension while allowing it to slope gently southeastward along the slope in the length dimension. With things set up this way, I had Fern and Gretchen help me slide the outdoor unit down the plank and then across the ground to the general vicinity of where it will be permanently mounted against the concrete east foundation wall of the garage. Once I had it out there, I could figure out where exactly that would be and begin installing the mounting brackets. This required drilling holes into the concrete, and I didn't really have any good tools for that. Both of my good 120 volt hammer-drills are up at the cabin, so I was forced to used a combination of a 120 volt drill and a Ryobi battery-powered drill that had a hammer function. (The latter seemed to work better than the former.)
This evening after I'd climbed in bed, Gretchen came in and mused that we rarely do anything together except watch teevee and eat. So she pulled out a book of the collected works of famed magical-abstract artist Paul Klee and we looked at his paintings together. Interestingly, though we're both Paul Klee fans, there isn't much overlap between the paintings she likes and the ones I like. I tend to prefer his more muted palettes and more carefully-drawn lines, while she likes his messy eruptions of color.
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