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the quickest possible dinner
Friday, November 15 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning before I got going again on the minisplit install, I took the dogs for a walk a short way down the Lake Edward Trail, though once at the bottom of the hill atop which our cabin sits, I turned northward and gradually climbed that hill again, ending up not far down the old dock trail. Along the way, I saw a few interesting rock formations, one of which looked so unnatural that I wondered if perhaps a Boy Scout had made it.
Back at the cabin, I began to fret about whether or not the brackets I had bought for installing the minisplit's outdoor unit could be attached to the wall. The problem, as I saw it, was the half-inch air gap between the clapboards and the underlying material (styrofoam, plywood, then studs, a bottom plate, or joist headers) would cause an issue. Part of the problem was that the brackets had to be 22.5 inches apart, which is a different spacing from the studs (16 inches apart), meaning only one of them could be attached to a stud (or the strips of wood that allow for that half inch air gap). I figured I could lower the brackets enough that they would be guaranteed a contiuous band of wood in the form of the bottom plate or the joist headers, but even in that case that air gap was going to be present for at least one of the brackets. I asked ChatGPT what it thought, but it had so little grasp of the situation that it suggested I changed the bracket spacing so that it coincided with the studs. (It absolutely had to have a spacing of 22.5 inches, as that was the distance apart of the feet on the unit that I had to bolt to those brackets.) Eventually I decided that the air gap probably wouldn't matter, since all the forces on the bracket (except at its bottom) acted to pull it away from the wall. And at the bottom where it wanted to push into the wall, I could just have that press against the treatment I'd given the foundation wall. Remember, I'd covered that with two inches of styrofoam followed by a half inch of Wonderboard. That arrangement of material can withstand large compressive forces, particularly if pre-spread by a plank of larch (which I would install in the little gap between the foundation wall and the corners of the brackets). Ultimately, my fretting about the air gap was a waste of mental energy, and the brackets installed very nicely on the clapboards using some long 3/8 inch galvanized lag bolts.
Next I had the problem of getting the outdoor unit up onto those brackets, which meant lifting it about two feet above the ground. The outdoor unit was heavy, and lifting it two feet all by myself was basically impossible. So came up with a way to lift it in stages. Using four upside-down five gallon buckets as table legs and a pallets as a table-top, I was able to make a surprisingly-stable surfact that I could actually stand on. Even working from that height, though, I couldn't lift the outdoor unit high enough. Instead, I used some smaller bulky objects (a small cooler, a small stool, and a small bucket) as blocks and gradually raised the outdoor unit up onto those. From there, I just had to lift up one side and ease it onto a bracket. This whole thing could've easily gone pear-shaped and flung the outdoor unit down the slope, but no, I managed to get it up onto the bracket and bolted down. Soon there after, I'd attached the refrigerant lines to the air handler in the basement.
I then turned my attention to installing the air handler for the other zone, which was going into the one place of available wall real estate, in the kitchen. After figuring out where it went and installing the bracket to hang it upon, I then used my stupid toy hole saw to drill through the wall. This time, though, I wasn't drilling though any framing lumber. I cut through the half inch of drywall, pushed the five amnd a half inches of fiberglass insulation out of my way, then continued through the half inch of plywood, then through the inch of foam, and finally through the clapboards to daylight, clearing each layer out of the hole saw before continuing into the next. I really should've done that last layer from the outside, though, because when the plug of clapboard was pushed out, it tore a triangle of additional wood away with it (wood I was not able to glue back in place). After that, I ran the refrigerant lines to the outdoor unit and tightened down all the flare fittings.
At some point in all this, I took Charlotte (Neville didn't come) on her late-afternoon walk. This time we walked down to the Woodworth Lake outflow, continued into the woods to the north along East Bifurcation Creek, which had hardly any visible water running in it due to a severe ongoing drought. The sun had set by then and we were losing light quickly, so I hiked back up to the cabin via the steep terraced slope to its north.
My work on the minisplit installation has been so focused that I haven't spent much energy on preparing food. I'd make the occasional sandwich, but that was it. Otherwise I'd eat a handful of mixed nuts and then drink some booze. I knew that I needed better nutrition to stay healthy, so this evening I opened a can of black bean, mixed in a trace of ghost pepper shavings, heated it in the microwave, and ate it with corn chips. That was pretty good, and required almost no effort.
The rock formation that seemed a little unnatural on this morning's walk.
Click to enlarge.
A view from a low angle above our dock of Woodworth Lake late this afternoon.
Click to enlarge.
A thin layer of ice forming on the surface of the pond between Woodworth Lake and its outflow creek.
Click to enlarge.
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