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suspicious sprinkle of soot
Saturday, November 2 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
We had our usual Saturday morning experience at the cabin, complete with collaborative Spelling Bee on the whiteboard and fun treats from Balsam Bagels. At some point Gretchen went for a walk, but it was kind of cold and unpleasant outside, and all I did was begin relocating some leftover clapboards and other wood from where it's languished on the side of our driveway (where it's been since the cabin was built) to its new home under the east deck, where I've finally stopped obsessively burying styrofoam (this year, anyway).
I also finally installed a proper ceiling light in the screened-in porch. I bought the light over a year ago, but delayed installing it, thinking I should maybe install a ceiling first. Now, though, there was no longer any reason to delay. I'd bought the light without any consultation with Gretchen, which is always risky. But it's the simplest possible device, a simply black-rimmed circle that glows. Since it incorporates an array of LEDs instead of bulb, it doesn't protrude from the ceiling more than inch or so.
We needed to be back in the Hudson Valley by 3:00pm, so we left the cabin a little before 12:30pm, with me driving fairly rapidly on the route through Middleburgh. We drove directly to the Wall Street rental in Kingston, since that was the place whose boiler had been turned off by a suspicious HVAC contractor while we'd been on our way to Rochester. Our bladders were full, and while we took turns relieving our bladders in that little powder room I'd made from a tiny closet, we chatted with the tenants. One of them is a web developer who still actually has a job, and I asked her what tech stack she works in. She said "MERN," which involves MongoDB, a NoSQL technology. This led me to say that I dislike the disorganization of NoSQL, and the tenant pretty much agreed.
Down in the basement, it took me a little sleuthing to figure out that switch that the HVAC guy had flipped to turn it off. When I turned it on, the boiler roared to life, and as it did so, I looked carefully at its exhaust. If there was a problem with its combustion, it would be visible in the exhaust. Healthy exhaust is absolutely invisible unless it is mixing with very cold air, and then it will be white as the water vapor condenses out of it. I didn't see anything when I shined a light into the flue via the barometric draft regulator (which allows fresh air from the basement to go up the chimney in some situations). So then I went outside and looked at the exhaust leaving the chimney. It was absolutely invisible. Not only that, but the inside of the flue visible via the draft regulator was devoid of any sort of soot or any other build-up. The HVAC contractor had sent us pictures of a black powder sprinkled below the draft regulator, and that was still there. But where could that have come from? It couldn't have come from the draft regulator if it was spotless. It was looking to me like the HVAC guy might have brought a parmesan jar of soot and shaken it out beneath the flue regulator to provide the evidence he needed to upgrade his work from a $200 procedure to a $600 one. Most of the time, homeowners have no idea about how their boiler works and he can get away with it. But not this time. We left the boiler on and told the tenants it appeared to be working normally.
Back at the house, Fern was still there hanging out and would be spending the night in our master guestroom, but her boyfriend Josh had left. Gretchen made a thick stew of tempeh with cooked greens and the three of us had a nice sit down dinner together. We even had a bottle of red wine. We eventually continued our conversation in the living room in front of a roaring fire, though eventually I snuck off so I could drink alone the way I like to. I didn't have any liquor at all, so I had to settle for a very strong double IPA until the diphenhydramine kicked in.
The finished porch ceiling, viewed from the southwest, complete with the new light.
Click to enlarge.
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