utenzi

Here in North Carolina we've been having some hot weather of late. Most of the US east coast has been hit by this heat. Here we've had a week in which we've gone over 100F almost every day. Unfortunately for me, my A/C system decided this was a good time to fail. It must have died sometime Monday night 'cause Tuesday morning it was a mite humid in the house. I didn't think anything of it at the time though. When I got home from work late that afternoon the temperature was up to 82 in the house. I generally keep it around 77-78 so this was a bad sign. By the end of the evening the heat and humidity got a lot worse. Of course it was still a lot better on the inside of the house versus the outside. As you can see there, the temp outside was 103.1 at 6pm and was still climbing a little. *whew* My grass needs mowing but I'll tell you--I'd have to be nuts to cut it in this heat! I'll wait until this weekend when I can cut it in the morning when it's only...

I still don't have any heat and it's a mite cold in here but since it's 10 degrees warmer outside tonight, it's not as bad inside either. As you can see here, the repair fellow did make a visit to see me. He checked out the underbelly of the house first since that's where the periodic ills of my HVAC system are usually found. While he was there he dropped the fan speed of the unit. The thing had been set so high it was like a gale was blowing through the house everytime the heat or A/C went on. And the noise! However despite careful and studious examination of the system, no problems were to be found. Thereupon the examination made its way to the outside unit. Yep, that's the inside of the outside unit. That makes for a rather confusing sentence, y'know? Most of the unit is empty space but the outer rim is lined with heat exchange coils like the radiator of a car. But it was the tubing in the middle that contained our errant part. The repairman told me it wa...

Today my girlfriend and I did a little surgery. Her kitchen range had two burners that weren't working and in a moment of daring we decided to fix them ourselves. Scary thought! It actually turned out to be fairly easy though there were two episodes of minor fireworks during the troubleshooting session. The worse of the two left some scorch marks on the lip of the door from where a couple of wires fused in a moment of electrical ecstasy but all ended well. At least the house hasn't burned down. Yet. The problem turned out to be that a wire that supplied power to the left side of her range had broken off right where it connected to the power source. We just needed to disconnect the other leads (there were a total of 5 and of course the one we needed to fix was on the bottom so they all needed to come off). The only fly in the ointment was that we had a small arc when we reconnected everything for reasons that weren't clear. That arc fused two wires (and made me jump nearly 2...