Thumb and Hammer Blog

Today was the third day of the heating upgrade and the plumber re-configured the boiler and mounted the zone pumps. At this point, he expects the job to take another 2 and a half days to complete. He has another commitment tomorrow, so that means he will likely finish on Tuesday. There wasn’t much for me to do today besides stay out of his way as he meticulously made the plumbing connections. Tomorrow I can get to the business of reconnecting the wiring for the kitchen that I disconnected last weekend so I could sister the damaged floor joist. I’ve uploaded half a dozen pictures to this blog entry, so you can finally see what I have been talking about.

Some of the old plumbing:

Old pipe configuration in boiler room.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. I removed the partition wall last year, so this was in an enclosed room (the window was on the other side of the wall). What you see here is a jumble of cold water supply lines going to the boiler and to the hot water tank and the hot water lines coming from each. And keep in mind that when we first moved in, we had solar panels on the roof, so there was a solar tank in this space as well along with all the plumbing that went along with that.

Some of the old plumbing, part 2:

Pile of old pipes.

This is a partial pile of the pipes from the old single zone hydronic heating system. Some of it is being reused, but the new five zone system requires a lot of new copper.

It’s a work of art

Boiler and zone pumps.

This is how plumbing should look.  It’s easy to tell the difference between a professional and a hack. Neatness does count.  All the fittings you see coming out of the boiler are brand new.  The zone pumps are mounted on 3/4 inch plywood.  Each of the two bedrooms upstairs is on its own zone, the main floor of the old part of the house and the family room addition are also on separate zones.  The fifth zone is for the indirect hot water tank.  And in the future, we can expand the system so the basement is on a separate zone as well.  I’m almost looking forward to winter, now.

The wall

The original landing support.

My big project on Tuesday was constructing the wall where the pumps could be mounted.  It was a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone–  the first:  make the plumbing neat and accessible;  the second: solve yet another structure problem.

Close up of the support for the landing. Yikes!

The fact that the one corner of the back landing was supported by a two by four that was not only twisted, but had been notched near the top had been bothering me for quite some time.  But the old plumbing was in the way so there was nothing I could really do about it.

In this closeup picture, you can see how the 2×4 was notched and how it was coming away from the rest of the structure.  Who knows how much longer it would be before the nails popped right out?

Thanks to a similar repair in my old house, I was able to attack this one with confidence, and, dare I say, overkill. I jammed a couple of temporary over sized studs to support the landing while I cut away the old 2×4 and built a new supporting wall.  The bottom plate is fastened to the floor with tap cons.  I used a sill gasket between the bottom plate and the concrete.  The top plate is attached to the 2×8 joists of the landing.  The studs were cut for a tight fit so there would be no movement once the temporary support was removed.  The triple stud is a little deceiving.  The corner is actually only supported by two of the studs.  The third stud was used to make the wall 42″ wide.   Then the plumber asked me to make the wall wider, which is why you see another stud on the right.  That last stud doesn’t actually support anything other than the plywood sheet that I attached to the structure.  Not only is the corner of the landing now supported by a double 2×4 stud, but the weight of the entire side of the landing is now displaced along the entire supporting wall, which is extremely strong with the 3/4 inch plywood screwed to it.  This is one part of the house that ain’t going anywhere!

Now that's support!