Cold-hearted furnace

As I begin this entry, we are in fact in the middle of our current house crisis. I guess I'm using the blog to focus my nearly debilitating anxieties at the moment.

About an hour ago, I noticed that the thermometer reading on the thermostat was weirdly lower than where we'd set the thermostat, and that although the little icon said the furnace was on, it was clear from the behavior of the radiators (i.e., the lack of steaming and banging) that it was not in fact on.

A trip to the basement confirmed that the furnace was not on, and a shiny red light indicated that the water level was too low. That green box on the left is the shutoff for low water -- there's a tiny red light on the top of it.

The home inspector, those long many months ago, told us something about draining the boiler, but we don't remember what it was. There is a red lever on one of the water pipes that we suspect might be the way to add water to the system.



But we're not entirely sure this is what we should do. And given that this is a steam boiler, which, apparently can cause all kinds of horrifying damage to persons and property (if you read the right sources), I'm worried about a) hurting ourselves and b) doing something that completely fouls up the boiler.

At the moment, we're waiting for the pipes and system to cool down. When they do, we will try the red lever. And see if things work. After that, we call for help.

Outside, it is snowing madly, with temperatures below freezing.

We are heading to the basement right now.

Updates forthcoming.


Update: 1 pm:

We drained the system of its dirty water (gross!) and slowly added new water. We had read that we needed to raise the water level to between 1/2 and 2/3 or between 2/3 and 3/4 (depending on the source). Here you can see the gauge at its (we hope) correct level.

We turned the thing back on...
and nothing happened.
For about two minutes.
Two long minutes of (my) panic.
Then the thing fired, and at this moment, it is heating up all that water.

Hopefully, soon, the steam will start heating up the radiators.

Update: 1:15
It seems that everything is in order. Radiators are heating up and the temperature is rising. And the furnace is still running and the water level looks OK.

We are tentatively declaring victory.

We would like to thank:
The Lost Art of Steam Heating, a ridiculously comprehensive book we bought just last week.

There's precious little good information available on how to do these things, so it was all a bit nerve-wracking. We'll just need to keep a close eye on that water level. Some post-emergency researching has helped us find some good online information in a few places.

If you're wondering how steam heat works, here's a handy and informative page I just found via the BBC. We have what's called a one-pipe steam system, where just a single pipe feeds the radiator with steam and carries away the water.

My ongoing online research has also uncovered this terrific site -- a "Homeowner's Library" that has lots of great information on steam heat.

Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day. May your heart and your home be warm!

Thermostatic Adventure!

Today we finally installed the new programmable thermostat we bought a while ago. We even got a rebate for it from the gas company.

Here you'll see the snazzy old-school Honeywell. It was a bit of a challenge to remove it (Jake perhaps will update here) but with the help of someone else's blog, we figured it out. The next challenge was "which wire is which"?



To our great relief, we finally got it all hooked up. And no one was even slightly shocked!

Of course, the old thermostat was round; the new one is not. So you can see some of the quite charming wallpaper that lies underneath the pink paint here. It's sorta tan with both black and white trees on it (or at least that's what we could figure out from this patch).




Jake here. That old thermostat was a monument to simple design inside and out. Inside was just a mercury switch on a heat sensitive coil. No batteries or circuit boards. No bothersome labels telling you which wire was which.

After removing the old thermostat, we had a white wire and a black wire. The new thermostat has plugs labeled Rh, Rc, W, Y, G. The manual for the new thermostat told us what those plugs are for, but the manual for the old thermostat, being nonexistent, had nothing to say about the wires. In the end the winning combination was white to Rh and black to W, but I suspect that the reverse would have worked as well.