So, if you’re following along in your playbook, we got the beast into the basement. My son thought about disowning me, but visions of heat in his bedroom took the edge off his discomfiture, if not off the ache in his arms. Of course in the basement didn’t exactly mean in place. This paperweight had to go, first:
There was a tag on it from the last time it was checked and cleaned. Ronnie Raygun says hi. It was good and rusty, and the jacket inside it was cracked. It’s possible it weighed more than the new furnace. But we didn’t mind that much, because we could treat it like the government treats taxpayers. We had a jolly time cutting all the pipes and wires.
We saved the copper pipe, because we’re honorary crackheads. We don’t take drugs, but we’ll tear out copper plumbing and bring it to the scrapyard for a few bucks. I’m sure the fellow there thought we were the neatest and politest crackheads in line, but I doubt he thought we were regular folks who needed the money. We’d be a rara avis in that milieu.
My older son sorta dreaded moving the thing, until I explained that I not only didn’t mind if we broke it some, I’d prefer that we broke it some. Sooner or later it would have to go to the scrapyard, too, and smaller pieces weigh less. We walked the thing across the floor to the door, looked both ways to avoid any deer wandering by who deserved a more dignified death, and then let that beast roll down the ramp and into the snow, where it lay until spring arrived. Fun.
We shouldered the new furnace into the old spot. There’s a concrete pad there in the floor, and it’s original equipment, so I’m sure there’s been something burning something there since 1901. There is a coal pen in the next room. There used to be a pass-through gap in the brick wall so you could finagle a shovel into the coal pile and load a furnace. I imagine they switched to burning oil not long after the house was built, though. Fuel oil heat has been pretty standard in Maine for a century.
So our furnace needs stove pipe into the thimble in the chimney. We’ll use the same thimble as the old unit. It will also require ducting to transmit the warmed air up into the rooms upstairs. We used galvanized stove pipe, 8″ in diameter, and made a little box to accept the pipe up under the dining room floor, which is almost right over the furnace. That box serves what used to be a big, cast iron cold air return in the dining room floor, which you might remember:
Instead of bringing cold air down to the furnace, we were going to blow it up into the dining room, which is more or less the center of the house.
The usual idea behind this kind of furnace is to make it a backup, or supplement to your existing furnace. You’re supposed to meld your new furnace hot air ducts into your existing hot air ducts. It’s essential if you do, to put a damper in so you’re not blowing hot air from your oil burner into the stove, or vice versa. Since our existing furnace was a boiler, not a furnace, and was slumbering in the drive under a blanket of snow, this wasn’t possible, or necessary. But if you’re interested in how it’s normally done, here it is done by a normal person with a much more piquant twang in his voice than I possess:
We haunted the aisles at the local hardware store for the stove pipe and other amenities. Burning wood for heat isn’t unusual around here, thank Jeebus, so they had most everything we needed. The furnace was a floor model, and had been pawed over more than a taxi-dancer after a shore leave. Everything was wrong or broken, but honestly, even the most determined Orange Place imbecile can’t really hurt a quarter-ton lump of cast iron and welded high-temp steel. I had some head-scratching moments trying to wire the beast, what with instructions being scarce, but the only really “busted beyond repair” things were the refractory bricks that line the furnace. But once again, the local hardware store came through, because busted refractory bricks are generally the only kind anyone has around here. They had a pile of ’em, and they were cheap.
Now there was only one problem. We needed to buy firewood in March in Maine. It would have been a lot easier to get the witch’s broomstick.
[To be continued]
4 Responses
There’s a certain level of pleasure in dumping an old, non-repairable appliance into the wild. When our dryer died and turned out to have been manufactured with the back side GLUED ON so that the only way to fix it was to destroy it, we pulled it out of the laundry cubby and stuck it into the garage pending replacement.
While our small town in NW Wyoming has a program to pick up and “recycle” appliances, it means that you’ve got to wait up to two weeks for them to actually grab the thing. Having a dead appliance in your driveway does NOT endear you to the neighbors, so we just went for the help of a sucker/neighbor who helped me load it into the back of the truck, and hauled it off to the landfill. Once there we had an inexplicable half-hour wait for the entry attendant, who happily took our five bucks and directed us to the appropriate area of sagebrush desert.
Lo and behold, a veritable mountain of junked appliances! Piled up by (I presume) a front-end loader, it was quite neat and compact, but at least 20 feet high. I backed up the truck to the pile and at the appropriate signal from the wife, stopped. Got out, dropped the tailgate, and stood there for a moment contemplating the utter waste of good sheet metal, various pieces of wiring, and a control panel that still functioned. My wife and I said a brief word (I think “good riddance to bad rubbish” was part of it) and I heaved the thing overboard into the fringe of the pile of dead appliances.
Ah, the satisfaction of the removal of the weight of something worse than useless; an actual negative (since it cost us money to dispose of it) from the house. The new dryer was already in place and working with the old power cord salvaged from the old one, and all was well.
Can’t wait to see how your new wood-burner works out.
Dumb question: I saw your costs on various heat sources, but don’t they have propane in Maine? Around here propane is the fuel of choice when a natural gas pipeline isn’t available.
Hi Blackwing- Thanks for reading and commenting.
Dumping stuff like that out the door is an appliance version of a Viking funeral, I think.
When the spring came, I broke the old boiler jacket down using a maul and wedges. Cast iron fractures pretty well if you whale on it. We brought the pieces to the scrap yard.
If you press the “HVAC” tag at the top of this essay, you can scroll back and read the entries with fuel prices again. Propane is the last fuel in both lists. It’s the second-most popular fuel around here, after oil. T’aint cheap.
Ah, for the pleasures of a low-income big city! Here in South Texas, you just dolly that dead appliance out to the curb next to your driveway, and some entrepreneur with a beat-up old pick-up will cruise by on the weekend and spirit it away. In fact, one such fellow lives about 6 blocks away, and does a steady junked appliance business.
And a dead dryer? Once upon a time I had a $25 used Kenmore dryer that kept burning through heating elements. So every year or so, I’d stop by the Sears part store and pay $20 for a replacement. After 2 or 3 iterations, it gave up the ghost, and was last seen in the bed of some entrepreneur’s truck in Montgomery, Alabama, headed off, like a tired old dog, to some nice farm, I’m sure.
hmmm. . . does throwing a printer down a flight of stairs count in this comparison?
I warned DH multiple times I could no longer endure the pain of trying to print something on that printer. Finally, one day while he was out shopping for a car part, I delivered the printer down the flight of stairs from the upstairs office. The stairs ended up next to the front door. As fate would have it DH pushed open the front door just as the printer was rolling down the stairs. His response was calm and concise–“Nice.”
I do love that man whose wit began while growing up as a farm child and developed while serving four years in the Navy. Then to put the final polish on his humor he did an advanced degree at Berkeley while trying to avoid anything that was going on there in the 1970’s!! His wit has been polished to a fine keen edge perhaps best demonstrated win encountering the rolling printer! 🙂