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two different guys from Bottini
Wednesday, June 29 2016
Waiting for me at the brick mansion this morning was a guy from Bottini Fuel. Gretchen had sent him there to meet with me and give me an estimate for redoing the house's heating system. The other day Gretchen had ordered maintenance for the mansion's ancient oil-fueled boiler (which only heats the apartment on the second floor). But the person who came out and looked at it was dismayed at the state of things, particularly the oil tanks, which were corroded and threatened to rupture at any moment. Were that to happen, the cleanup would be costly. Our best option seemed to be to convert everything to natural gas, and that was what the guy from Bottini was there to price out. It wasn't long, though, before the Bottini guy had found issues that he expected would alarm me. The most serious of these was the fact that the existing natural gas boiler and natural gas water heater vented into an unlined chimney, an illegal state of affairs. He said the gasses from burning natural gas are especially corrosive and eat at the mortar between the bricks. Short of lining the chimney (an expensive proposition), the only alternative was to replace all the boilers with one or modern efficient ones that can vent out the side of the basement using a PVC pipe for a chimney. Of course, that wouldn't be cheap either. In the process of pointing out the issues in the basement, the Bottini started pointing out problems with the plumbing too, minor issues that I could easily repair myself such as slow drips from faucets. I think this increase in scope was designed to overwhelm me and make his suggestions seem more reasonable, but that was not the effect. The distraction annoyed me, causing me to impatiently say, "Let's stick to the gas stuff."
Upstairs, the Bottini guy measured all the radiators in hopes of calculating total BTUS and thent went looking for thermostats, though he only found a total of three in all four apartments.
Dealing with that guy kept me from getting much work done, and after he was gone I realized I needed more stuff from Home Depot. With a different non-wax toilet "wax ring," I was able to reseat the toilet in 1L without it leaking, though the bolts holding it down were too fucked up for me to finish the job completely.
Back at the house, Gretchen's idea of having the brick mansion's boiler maintained had metastasized into boiler maintenance appointments for all the boilers in our control, including the one in our basement, which hadn't been professionally examined in the 14 years we've lived here. A different, skinnier guy from Bottini spent hours down there in that cramped boiler room. Like most of the places I've exhausted my focus, it's something of a wunderkammer down there. When that guy eventually appeared, he politely made his recommendations. I wasn't surprised to learn that the boiler had been burning with too much oxygen, since I don't have the tools to properly make that adjustment. But I was dubious when he claimed that my choice of a tiny nozzle was inefficient. Initially I wanted him not to replace that nozzle, something he would've been content not to do. But Gretchen, talking to me in private, was pretty close to adamant that we take the professional's advice. She dislikes what she sees as my excessive distrust of professionals in every trade I interact with. But in this case I remembered downsizing that nozzle for a good reason, and I wasn't completely convinced that I should trust the fuel consumption rate advice of someone in whose interest it is for me to burn more fuel. But he insisted that a bigger nozzle was really more efficient overall. It was ultimately a calculus problem whose answer was unknowable given the absence of data, and I couldn't be sure he wasn't right. So in the end I acquiesced to Gretchen's desire and let the guy install a bigger nozzle. He charged us $60 for the new one, a price that was almost worth the entertainment of Gretchen's shocked reaction. (Typically boiler nozzles cost about $10 online.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160629 feedback
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