New Furnace Get!

  • August 6, 2011

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.

a

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:

b

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:

c

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:

e

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.

d

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!

Scan I Am

  • August 2, 2011

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!

d

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

c

There are just no funny cards…

b

Maybe this is the reason the natives here…

a

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!

  • Posted in Family
  • Robert

As (I) Predicted

  • July 29, 2011

On August 12, Nintendo is dropping the price of the 3DS from $250 to $170. This is because sales of the system have plummeted (only 700,000 units sold worldwide in the last quarter) and developers have started cancelling existing games or bypassing the system entirely.

3ds

I don’t have a 3DS. This is remarkable, since I am more or less a textbook ‘early adopter’. I spend more on games than any person I have ever met, but have so far passed on the 3DS for several reasons:

1) A stunning lack of good games
2) A reluctance to embrace a system with an average game price of $40
3) Irritation at the frankly terrible online support of the 3DS (no messaging, no achievements, no PSN or XBox-live-like system)
4) Virtually zero interest in the main gimmick of the device: the glasses-free 3D
5) The very poor battery life

You’ll note price is not one of the above reasons. Will an $80 drop convince me to buy it? Let’s see.

The above problems with the system are important and need to be fixed as soon as possible. They would be bad enough were Nintendo to not have any competition. Ignoring the old DS itself (which still outsells the 3DS), Nintendo is being absolutely steamrolled by this:

hhy

I’ve been saying this for a while, but the iPad/iPhone is changing the way we look at entertainment in so many ways. Why pay $170 for a dedicated gaming system where games are $40 each? When you can buy an iPad (admittedly more expensive), enjoy games for $2, $1 or even free and then use the device for oodles of other things as well?

Customers realize this, and that’s why the iPad has outsold the 3DS 55-to-1. This is why developers are moving to the iPad in droves (Electronic Arts recently said iPad is their fastest growing market and that traditional consoles account for only 40% of their revenue) and this is why the average quality of games on the iPad increases every day. Why spend millions to develop a console game when you can make an iPhone game for under $100 grand and make just as much profit?

I will eventually buy a 3DS. Maybe soon, maybe when Animal Crossing is released. There will be good games on it, of that I am sure. But I truly think the system will be a limited success, if at all. I think Sony’s upcoming Vita will follow the same fate (or perhaps exist more or less as a Monster Hunter enabler, if only in Japan). I think the days of dedicated handhelds may be behind us, to be replaced with iPads and iPhones and whatever future smartphones will be released.

I’ll keep my thoughts about the affect this change will have on the games themselves to a future post.

  • Posted in Games
  • Robert