Repeat After Me:

"I am not an electrician."

I am not an electrician.

"Emrys, you are not an electrician."

I am not an electrician.

Yet here I am, under the house, wiring a complex instrument called a "zoning control panel" in order to get our boiler, our thermostats, and our zone control valves to play well together. I may not be an electrician, but I have to fake it sometimes. Especially when having heat in the bedroom of your pregnant wife depends on dealing with something that looks like this:

when it comes in the mail. Does it look daunting to you? Scared the piss out of me.

Of course, the next step is to hook it up to a mess of pipes and valves. Did you know that I am also not a plumber? And did you know that once I disconnect the existing wires from those valves, there is no way  I can put them back in the right order if I screw this up? Do you know how dangerous it is not have have hot showers in my household? At least I got the thing mounted well enough. It ought not to fall off the wall anytime soon. Well, all right, it's not the wall: it's hanging from a floor joist. But that's good enough, right?

Note the coiling wires in the above picture. I think electrical jobs are particularly scary when they involve coiling wires. They're like serpents ready to strike.

Now I want you to know that I didn't go into this thing alone. We've tried calling service guys, but they seem never to be able to totally fix the problem, and they charge fees for coming out. I can not fix the problem myself for free. So I called up the tech support at Alpine Home Air products (the folks that sold us our new boiler and this nifty zone control panel), and David--rapidly becoming one of my favourite people in the midwest--took me through the installation step-by step.

So I spent a few hours in our cellar (a glorified crawlspace) cutting, splicing, fearing electrocution, and alternately spouting "Aha!" and words that I can't print here. At last, here's what I had:

Pretty sweet, eh? Yeah, I know you're jealous, particularly of the transformer attached to the bottom. Nearly fried myself getting that out of its previous location, I did.

Anywhoo, now I've got the zone control panel hooked up, and I'm feeling pretty proud. (And thankful that David has saved me from embarrassing blunders--like buying a new boiler and zone control panel without knowing how to use them.) The domestic hot water--very important to nuptial bliss--is even running steamy. So far so good. Then I hook up the household thermostats, which came with the house. One is an old-school dial and mercury switch that was purchased from the estate of the Flinstones. The other is a mid-80s digital thermostat that became obsolete with jeans and leg-warmers. Thinking that a 2-wire thermostat is a 2-wire thermostat, I hook them up. And nothing happens.

So I call David back (bless his electrical-engineering soul) and fear the answer he does indeed give me. My state-of-the-art zone control panel is so state-of-the-art that it only operates with a certain kind of thermostat.

I love David dearly, but I could have throttled him over the wireless phone connection just then.

$187 later . . .

Note the void where the Flinstone thermostat used to be. (Ahhh, when life was simple.)

Now we've got two thermostats that do precisely what the Flinstones models did, but with a digital display.

And Hallelujah! we have hot water, heat, and more things covered by our homeowners insurance.

I am not an electrician. But I am a homeowner--hear me roar!

Check out our sexy new zoning control panel that will keep us satisified with warm rooms and hot showers:

And kudos to David from Alpine, for his patience and persistence, wherever he is. You rock!

~emrys