Robot Claw

So as you probably read on twitter, the air conditioning in our house broke a couple of weeks back. As it turns out the culprit was neither the AC unit nor the heat pump outside, but the blower fan inside the furnace, which is used to move the cool (and hot, in winter) air into the house. The fan inside the 40 year old furnace was very broken, and we deemed it wiser to simply replace the entire furnace rather than pay good money to get the fan fixed.

Here’s a shot of the old furnace.

It was installed with the house in 1970. Very low efficiency and poor filtering (actually, it had no inbuilt filtering and the system we used was rigged by the previous owner). Last Thursday two guys came and ripped this guy out and put a new one in. This included replacing lots of ducting and pipes in and around the furnace itself, and putting two new pipes through our garage and the garage wall to vent the exhaust from the furnace (our old one had no exhaust system).

Here’s what the laundy looked like sans furnace:

And here’s a shot of the heat exchanger of the new one prior to installation. It will be many years, if ever, before I see this part of the unit again:

The new furnace is vastly superior to the old. It has a two stage fan, fully enclosed combustion, hot-surface ignition (so no pilot light and no open flame) and is very high efficiency (95% apparently). It also contains an impressively large circuit board so it can regulate all this stuff.

Here it is after installation, with all the new ducting in place:

The thing on the ground next to it is a pump that is part of the new system. It removes the water the new furnace removes from the combustion process. The two pipes on top are the separate intake and exhaust pipes, which are different from the old furnace (which had none, and vented through the roof of the house).

Once it was installed it took the guys quite a while (~2 hours?) to actually get everything working. The culprit was eventually determined to be the heat pump, and one of them spent a lot of time outside tinkering with the wiring.

It works well now though, and should save us money with the increased efficiency. The house is cool once again, but we’ll have to wait a few months to see how well it heats!

My old scanner is ancient and didn’t work on the Mac so I bought a new one. A Canon Canoscan LiDE 110, for $56 on Amazon! It arrived today and I just tested it using the four postcards my dad sent me from Germany as test subjects. Here they are, each accompanied by an extract from what he wrote!

I suspect he has some of the same genes as you Robert

There are just no funny cards…

Maybe this is the reason the natives here…

We drove up to Seelisburg to enjoy beautiful views over the lake of Willhelm Tell

One day I shall visit The Fatherland 🙂

As for the scanner, it’s swell and groovy for the price, and I have big plans. Watch this space!