A Morning...

So, Emrys is gone to grade papers for the week.  The dog and I are home and I should be working.  I'm not motivated today to to much.  It started when I woke up and the house was chilly.  The pellet stove and the boiler were both throwing errors.  Grrrr.  

I took on Boiler first.  It had been goofy for a few days - confused about it's jobs and couldn't figure out if it was supposed to be giving us hot water or heat and just gave us heat through the hot water settings.  But it wasn't getting hot enough to actually keep the house warm.  We have a message into a local boiler guy but I figured I'd give it a shot.  I tweaked a couple settings and Boiler finally decided that it could get its act together and give us heat when said thermostats called for heat and hot water then the tank called for hot water.  But it still wasn't heating up very high.  So I checked one more setting.  A great little device designed to save us money on our utility bills -the outdoor thermometer.  This thermometer is tied into Boiler and Boiler decides how hot to make our heating water based on the outdoor temprature reading it gets.  Well, Boiler seemed to be getting some wrong information.  Boiler seemed to think that it was 90 degrees outside when in fact it was a quite chilly 40.  Here was the problem.  So I called our friends at the boiler company, talked to the technician, found out that if the wire to the thermometer is near any electrical load it will throw the reading off.  sure enough - it shares a teeny-tiny hole going to our crawl space with two major electrical lines. So I unhooked the thermometer, added a ToDo to Emrys' list and watched as the temprature climbed.  I'll give up energy efficiency for 4 days in order to have the heat work in my bedroom!

The came Pellet Stove.  Turned it on and got a flashing yellow light.  Having no idea what that meant, I resorted to the internet know-it-all, Google.  I got an online version of the manual and pulled it up, searched yellow and got trouble shooting results.  Heating coil or control box failure. Surprise, surprise.  So I opened up the Stove, pulled out the control box and pulled a Nintendo CPR move".  Those who have classic Nintendo skills in their past know exactly what I mean - blow the dust off the contacts on the cartridge and then blow the dust out of  the game machine and 9 times out of 10, your game works again... well, it works for the control boxes of pellet stoves too - at least it did this time for which I am thankful.  

So, two service calls diverted, I should be working on my candles now but I'm not really motivated!  I'd rather sit in front of the fire with my crochet and a movie.  Decisions, decisions...

~sjt