Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Posts related to the places I call home
SCE&G had some workers out today doing some work on the power line easement behind the house. Over the afternoon, they took out a fair number of trees to widen the easement. Not sure what the reason was for all the tree removal, if it was just for moving the tree line back from the power lines, or something related to the planned move of the power lines that’s supposed to be happening further up the street.
Whatever the reason, it sure left a mess behind the house.
At some point Thursday night, or very early Friday morning, the mailbox post got knocked down. No idea what happened or who knocked it over, but it was hit hard enough to snap the 4×4 post right off a few cm above the ground. I was just walking out of the house to the car Friday morning and saw it lying there on the ground.
sigh. Jerks.
So, it was off to Lowes to buy a new post and some concrete. This morning I dug out a hole next to the original post, cut what was left of the old post off at the ground and put in the new post. Got it nice and straight, set it in the ground with the concrete and filled in the rest of the hole with dirt.
We had been planning on replacing the mail box with a new one anyway, so I went ahead and put that on to the post. Shiny new mailbox post, shiny new mailbox. Maybe it will help add to the curb appeal of the house.
There’s something to be said for fresh starts. Connie and I decided a few weeks ago that it was time for a new start for our lives together, beginning with a new house. It’s a little sooner than we initially planned on, but we also had a few other reasons pushing us toward this.
Connie had some specific things she was looking for, and we managed to find that in a new development going up between Moncks Corner and Goose Creek. We went up there just to have a look around and by the time we left, we had:
Talk about your impulse buys!
Being new construction and since the house hasn’t been built yet, we have the opportunity to add a few additional features to the house to make (radio) life a little easier.
The new house will be a fair bit smaller than the current one (1500ish sq ft vs 1880 sq ft) but I think we’ll actually gain a little more storage and functional space thanks to taller kitchen cabinets and additional wall space. We’ll also get the back yard fenced so that the dogs can run around outside (they’ll love that). We’ll lose our current library space so the bookshelves and their contents will end up getting split up to various places.
The commute between work will be significantly longer than the 10 minutes I have now, but it’s something I can live with. It will be a good excuse to put a mobile radio in the car and get in on whatever drive-time repeater chatter there is around here.
For now, the new place feels a little bit like being out in the middle of nowhere, even though there are a lot of other new-ish developments in the area. Nothing is terribly far away though. Goose Creek and Moncks Corner are both about 15 minutes away along some of the back roads. When we head out on road trips, there will also be a little less city to wind through before hitting the open highway.
It’s a big thing to buy a house, and just a little bigger thing to worry about having to sell one first, but after all the dust settles the new house should actually be better for the finances since we’ll end up with a slightly smaller mortgage and more energy efficiency than the current one.
Now we just need pack everything up, do a little bit of fixing up and renovating of this house (I don’t think we need to do a whole lot) and hope we can sell it fairly quickly.
The dishwasher is original to the house and is getting on 10 years now. It’s a pretty basic model and nothing very fancy. Lately it started having problems where it wasn’t filling with water. Figured the dishwasher was finally starting to give up the ghost and it was time to start shopping for a new one.
Fortunately, I had remembered someone I follow on Google+ describing a similar problem and that the solution was a stuck flood float. Giving it a tap got it working again a few times, but then the dishwasher started doing the same thing again.
This time I decided to dig a little deeper. A single screw holds the cover of the flood float on so it wasn’t hard to remove.
Warning: If your dishwasher is as old as mine, this operation is not for the squeamish.
Underneath the cover is the actual flood float, which is a similarly shaped plastic cup that sits on top of a plastic pin that does the actual switch/valve actuating. Between the cover and float was years and years of built up gunky moldy goo that used to be food debris. Lifted the float off and inside there was even more built up gunky moldy goo. Well, no wonder the float was getting stuck.
I didn’t think to get any pictures, but it’s probably better that way.
After clearing out all the goo and giving things a bit of a rinse, I put all the pieces back together and the dishwasher went back to work like it was supposed to.
If your dishwasher has one of these, you might want to grab a screwdriver and see if it needs clearing out. Might save you a bit of trouble down the road.
After a quick call to Nest support (only spent 10 minutes on hold) and speaking with one of the support guys, I was able to get a new base plate sent out to me which seems to be staying cool. The support guy mentioned that the FETs in the base plate can go bad and create a short, which can be confirmed by moving some of the wires around. SInce I didn’t have the Nest mounted at the time, we couldn’t test it out.
Installed the new base plate and left it for a few minutes. It stayed cool, so it looks like the new base plate solved the problem. Hopefully we don’t run into any more problems with the Nest.
Pro tip: If you’re going to replace a thermostat with a Nest, keep the old one around. Might come in handy as a temporary replacement if the Nest goes down for any reason.