Thumb and Hammer Blog

The plumber finally finished working on the heating system on Thursday. The entire project took 7 days for a total of somewhere around 50 or more hours. We now have 4 heating zones in the house with room for one more. Each of the two rooms upstairs are separate zones, and the main floor and the addition are separate zones as well. Additionally we have an indirect fired hot water tank that is run off of the boiler (yet another zone). As you might guess, we now have a vast network of copper piping in the basement, but it is incredibly well organized, especially when compared to the system that was there before. Best of all, it actually works. When you turn adjust a thermostat, the boiler fires immediately and you can feel the heat coming from the rads within a minute. It’s a shame that we have temperatures in the 90′s right now because I would love to put the system through its paces. And when I say that the pipes in the basement are well organized, that’s an understatement. The plumbing is practically a work of art. Mind you, we paid a premium for this job and it will take us a while to pay down the debt that has resulted, but it will be well worth every penny just to be warm in February. Of course, by the time we finish paying for it, the heating system may be rendered obsolete by global warming, but we’ll worry about that later.