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flakey light in the living room
Monday, January 15 2024
This afternoon, I connected up the refrigerant pipes that need to be connected in the laboratory under the steps from the teevee room. Since I will need to cut and flare the pipes where they connect to the outdoor unit, I looked to see if a flaring tool I'd bought about ten years ago for brake work on our old 1998 Subaru Legacy was compatible with 16 mm outside-diameter copper pipe (the fatter of the two refrigerant lines). It turned out that it stopped a size too small, forcing me to buy another one online. (I also have a flaring tool up at the cabin that I bought for working on gas lines, but it might stop a size too small as well, and it's, well, up at the cabin.)
I tried to take the dogs for a walk at around 2:00pm today. It was cold outside, so I put a purple jacket on Neville (and would've tried to put on Charlotte too, but she wouldn't stand for that). But we only made a couple hundred feet west of the Farm Road before Neville stopped and would go no further, which meant Charlotte circled back to join him and would go no further either.
So then I took a bath with water partly heated by the low winter sun. After that, I noticed an anomaly with the one switchable light in the living room (another, a light that was part of a ceiling fan assembly vanished when the that fan unexpectedly crashed to the floor while we were in Portugal). I'd turn on the light and it might come on or it might not, and sometimes it would switch off when I flipped another unrelated switch nearby. I thought perhaps there was an issues with the tandem circuit breakers I'd installed the other day to make room for the new 240 volt split circuit, since that light might be on one of the moved circuits (and one of those tandem breakers had been difficult to seat completely). So I took the circuit breaker panel apart and tested the output of the new breakers, and they were all working as expected. The flakey light is connected via a 12 volt DC converter, so perhaps that has begun to fail. If so, I could replace it with a modern (and efficient) switching power supply, since it is about 30 years old and is likely an inefficient linear power supply containing a large transformer.
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