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soldering in a closet
Thursday, February 12 2026
We'll be going on a trip soon, and the kooky house sitter we will be hiring came by late this morning to hang out with the dogs, perhaps to get them more accustomed to her for when we actually leave. I thought the she would be here for a few hours and that I could go into town and leave her with the dogs when I did. But by the time I was ready to do that, she had gone. So I just continued doing what I'd been doing.
The thing I'd been doing was trying to get my I2C bootloader working on an Atmega168, which is the second form of AVR that Arduino adopted in its evolution. I have a fair number of Atmega168s, partly because, early in the history of the Arduino, I briefly prepared and sold bare Atmega168s that I had burned an Arduino bootloader onto. The Atmega168 has enough flash for my Arduino I2C code, but not quite enough RAM to do much with its serial parsing functionality (which, let's be honest, will be a niche application). So I thought it would be good to be able to flash Atmega168s via I2C. I got stuck in a conversation with ChatGPT about why a restart of the Atmega168 was failing to run any code in the bootloader, something that should've been happening based on the fuses. But according to ChatGPT, it should've been working. This went on for a few hours until I couldn't waste any more time on it. If I can't get my bootloader to work on the Atmega168, it's not much of a loss.
I took the Charlotte for a walk down the Stick Trail, and to my surprise, Neville decided to come with us. I went at about a third of a mile before turning around and heading back, meeting Neville roughly a quarter mile from home. Charlotte had already run home at that point. For most of the walk homeward, I allowed Neville to lead the way. He was slow but steady, only getting distracted by the smell of something a little north of the Chamomile at a place he'd gone off-trail at on the walk out. Neville seemed to like that I was letting him lead, and when I'd stop to piss, he would stop and wait for me to finish. He would also look over his shoulder periodically to make sure I was still following him.
Early this evening, I resumed work on the hot water replumbing project. I turned off the house's hot water and then began sawing a ten-inch segment out of the one-inch-thick copper hot water pipe at the top of the east wall of the entranceway closet, headed for the bathtub area in the upstairs bedroom. There wasn't enough room for a pipe cutter, so I started out with a reciprocating saw. But such saws are violent and can be unpredictable, so after make two partial cuts ten inches apart, I had to proceed with handsaws. I had one built like a pistol that would've been great had the blade not been so dull. But I ended up finishing with a brand new hacksaw blade just held in my hand like a prisoner cutting through a bar in his cell window. I thought this would take forever, but eventually I had a gap on the pipe.
Next the plan was to cap the newly-created end of the pipe coming up from below, as water would not be flowing that way any more. I'd bought a copper cap at Herzog's but couldn't find it anywhere, meaning I would have to use an inch-to-half-inch adapter and cap it with a half inch cap. But then I ran some pressure tests revealing there was no air escape from where I would be putting the cap except the cap itself, since apparently water was pooled in the pipes below, blocking an air channel to the basement faucets I had opened. This was bad, because it meant any water vapor boiling off the inside of the recently-wet pipe would need to escape through the solder I would be using to seal the joint, making it difficult to seal. The solution was to put a half-inch ball valve at the termination of the pipe instead of a cap.
After doing a lot of setup with wet rags, squares of sheet metal cut from peach cans, and a scrap of Durock to protect the carpentry and an adjacent PVC sewage pipe, I installed a fan so there would be sufficient air flow into the top of the closet (which was otherwise a bit cut off from the air of the entranceway). I then cobbled together a simple breathing device. It was basically just a washing machine hose attached to a rubber hose with no fittings on one end for me to hold in my teeth. I thought having a metal fitting in my mouth while trying to solder might cause me to break a tooth should I get panicked by something unexpected (like a fire breaking out in the wall). With that hose in my mouth, I could inhale through that tube, pulling clear air from near the floor, and exhale through my nose, thereby avoiding the noxious flux gases and high quantities of carbon monoxide. Nervously, I climbed up into the top of the closet and lit the MAPP gas torch. I then blasted the big one-inch-to-half-inch adapter for a good while until it started changing color. At that point, I tapped the solder to the joint and it slurped up into it, something I hadn't seen with every joint in that manifold that later turned out to have leaks. The other joints soldered about as well. I then squirted everything with water to cool down the ball valve and keep the sheet metal from catching anything on fire and then left the closet. This had gone about as well as one could hope, and I hadn't even much sullied the atmosphere with flux fumes.
I could then turn on the hot water, since the rest of the plumbing was no longer part of the existing hot water system. It held without leaking, which, given my recent run of bad soldering luck, counted for a win.
Soldering the one-inch-to-half-inch adapter and PEX connector onto the stump of pipe coming down from the shower was a little trickier. Heat rises, and that soldering had to be under a piece of framing lumber. To help protect it, I packed a bunch of glass wool insulation around the pipe up against the framing and then covered it all with bits of sheet metal. Again, the soldering went well and fairly quickly, although there was some molten solder that ran down across some of the PEX fitting barbs. I smeared it away before it could harden, but there remained some rough texture between the two end barbs that I couldn't do much about. Despite all my flame precautions, I'd nevertheless managed to blacken the wood at the top of the stud bay just above the fittings I'd soldered to the bottom of the top pipe.
With all that done, this phase of the hot water replumbing project required no further soldering. All that was left to do was to run the PEX lines and install fittings, but that would have to wait for tomorrow. In the meantime, I celebrated by watched some teevee with Gretchen and then drinking first a stranded loon and then a stranded grebe, what I am calling a cocktail that consists of gin spilled into a glass of snow. I'd taken a recreational 120 mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning and needed to wind down.
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