Whatcha doin????

Previously I was flying from the UK to the US every three months and within the UK/EU every ~6 months or so. Post-COVID that will all slow down permanently I think, and not that I'm complaining.

 

It's slightly over three years since I boarded a plane. I hate flying but it's hard to get abroad any other way. I figure that if I'm going to spend time driving to the airport, parking, checking in, flying, having to deal with being told what I can and can't take with me, and then still have to pay to rent a car at the other end, I might as well just take my own car and be done with it.

We have friends who live about 9-10 hours drive away and typically drive to see them on the (too infrequent) times we do see them. The local airport doesn't offer a useful flight so the best case is we'd be driving an hour and a half to an airport that does, with two hours drive at the other end and probably 2-3 hours of flying, plus checkin time, plus leaving a bit of a buffer against traffic problems. Next time we go I might consider renting a car so I can rack up 1200 miles on someone else's vehicle rather than my own.

 

I hear you.

I do wish that the US had decent rail service, but the county is so big that getting enough population density to make such service economical other than in DC-Boston corridor is almost impossible.

 

Even in smaller countries "decent rail service" often looks very different depending on where on the network you are. Even in the big cities a service that's largely radial in nature is of limited use if you're on one arm and need to get to another arm - by the time you've got to the station, waited for the train, ridden the train into the middle of the city, then maybe had to cross the city to get to the other arm, waited for the next train and ridden it out to where you wanted to be, it can be tediously slow.

Years ago I took the train to get from my apartment to a friend's apartment, and the journey took me 45 minutes. To get home I took a taxi and was home in 5 minutes. I had another friend whose house was a solid two hours and usually a bit more from mine by public transport (again based on train times and the need to walk to/from stations at either end). Depending on traffic I could drive it in a little under an hour. I could usually cover the distance on a bicycle in slightly less time than the train would take.

 

I'm pretty sure I read in Trains magazine a couple years ago that the long distance Amtrak runs were not the big money losers. It was the NE Corridor that was much tighter. Probably due to higher infrastructure costs. The western long distance trains though are subject to the vagaries of the owner of the rails moving the freight.

 

I remember the annual price rises of train tickets, usually many times the rate of inflation, so the operating companies could "invest in improving the service". All the while the service got progressively worse. I really don't miss riding the train to work.

 

Dirty water + power tools = opportunities to utter naughty words.

I've been ripping out some cast iron pipework from my basement. I'm replacing it with PEX - partly because I want to move radiators and don't feel like paying someone to shorten cast iron pipes by an inch or so, but mostly because I'm sick of banging my head on the pipes in the basement and really want to be able to use the space. So I've got some metal cutting blades to put onto my reciprocating saw. The pipes in question have been drained for many months now.

The first few cuts were uneventful. But then one of the pipes started spraying dirty water as I cut it, and of course the action of the saw blade meant the water splattered in both directions. Spraying away from me was fine - it just splashed against the basement wall. Spraying towards me was less good - this was water with decades worth of sludge accumulated into it, spraying into my reciprocating saw. It wasn't very long after that I found I couldn't get blades in and out of the saw without additional levels of persuasion over and above pulling the blade release lever.

Since it was too late to take it to the hardware store to see what they could do I decided to dismantle the saw myself. As expected it had a lot of sludge in all sorts of places that weren't designed to get sludge on them but after a bit of tinkering, a bit of creativity trying to get a spring out of place, a few near misses involving a small ball bearing and an opportunity to get on my hands and knees looking for it, and much pondering how to get a spring back into place, it's now almost as clean as when I first brought it home. Most importantly, the blade release lever works again.

Now I need to figure out what to do with a fairly substantial amount of cast iron pipe that's currently resting across the floor in my basement. At some point it's going to the metal recycling depot where I hope to get some money worthy of the name for it, but that will wait until I've got a bunch more of it ripped out. In the meantime I need a home for it where I won't trip on it and won't bang my feet on it in the half-light.

 

You could hide it in the oven or the bathtub but I’m afraid that might result in more naughty words, probably on the receiving end...
I’d just stack it outside, hopefully where no meth addict would steal it

 

It wouldn't fit in the oven and in its current form it wouldn't fit in the bathtub either. I'm going to have to cut each piece in half to get it to fit in the car if I want to take it away. It might well end up in the garage for a time, but first I need to move a wall unit that has been there for a while. I need to finish sanding it first. Maybe now it's warmer I can move the car outside, shift the unit into the middle of the floor and run a power sander, with a fan to blow the dust outside so i'm not breathing it.

 

Got some more pipe ripped out today. I nearly managed to drop a 12-foot length of cast iron pipe onto my (freshly filled) oil tanks, which might not have ended well. I forgot just how much power a new battery has compared to a nearly dead battery, when running my reciprocating saw. There's another piece of pipe I want to take out but I'm not sure how best to get at it. The ideal place involves getting into a tight spot behind the furnace and the other end involves cutting uncomfortably close to another pipe that is still live and that I can't afford to damage.

For now it can stay where it is, while I figure out what best to do. There's a bunch of tangled copper pipework running all over the place from the furnace that I need to cut away and rationalise. It's as if whoever put the original pipework in had a bunch of spare copper pipe and a desire to use it all up even if it made no sense. Tracing the pipework was an interesting exercise, even if largely pointless now it's all being ripped out. At least the copper will have some value when it's time to visit the metal recycling depot, although I'd imagine the amount of cast iron I have should be worth something too. I only hope the price of aluminum is halfway decent because I've got a bin full of crushed cans to go along as well.

 

Almost finished ripping out pipework. I managed a few unexpected things today. Firstly I managed to drop a bucket of sludgy water which made for an interesting splash when it hit the ground. Thankfully it hit the ground bottom-down, so it splashed upwards rather than emptying all over the floor. I trashed a reciprocating saw blade, although the fact it was still going after so long was remarkable. I also managed to pour some sludgy water over myself, when I twisted a pipe connector not noticing it was the lowest point on a pipe run so, although the pipes were drained, there were a few place where the sludge had pooled. I got the awkward piece of pipe cut, although I had to take a few precautions because it was a section with pooled water in it, and I needed to make sure water didn't drop onto the power switch for the furnace. That would seem like a bad outcome.

Now I've got a bigger pile of pipework ready to go out, a bunch of pipe taken out to the garage, and patches of sludgy mess on the floor in the basement. I'm not sure how I'll clean it up just yet. I might move some stuff and see if I can wash it away.

There's a small section of copper pipe I want to cut out and get rid of but aside from that the entirety of the heating pipework for half of my house is gone. Now I just need to run a bunch of PEX to replace it. Along the way I can strengthen a few joists - where the house was extended some genius decided that 2x4s were strong enough as floor joists for the extension part. Maybe they are - they've lasted a while - but I'd rather have something a bit more solid in place. Months ago I bought some wood and some joist hangers to do the job only to find I couldn't actually do the job because the pipes were in the way. But now the pipes are gone, so I can get on and make that happen. That will be good.

 

Pretty much all the pipework I wanted out is now out. Just lately I've been trying to tidy stuff up a bit, get things into more suitable storage so I can make good use of the shelves I have. I need to shuffle some stuff around so I can clear some space along a wall to put in some new shelves in place. I also need to figure out how I'm going to run new pipework - I'm thinking about putting in some kind of water manifold and maybe add an electric hot water heater so I can just turn the oil-fired furnace off completely during the summer.

 

Leaning more towards PEX, simply because I can feed it through holes drilled in the joists rather than having to run it underneath everything.

Is there a reason to use copper over PEX? It seems to me everything is moving towards PEX these days.

 

So far I haven't seen problems with PEX but it's only been in place for one winter. I needed a radiator from the drained loop active, so I cut into the other loop and ran some PEX between them.

It kinda pained me to rip out the cast iron that's got walls 1/8" thick and hasn't leaked a drop in decades but I'm so sick of banging my head on it and really want to recover the space around where the pipes are run. What knucklehead decided to run cast iron pipes at head height when they could have been raised several inches remains a mystery, but there you go.

In many ways I'd prefer to use metal than plastic but feel leery about having to use a blowtorch to braze everything together, especially in confined spaces very close to lots of wood. Push-fit connectors are there but are horribly expensive. I'm also really drawn to the idea of being able to drill holes through my ceiling joists and feed pipes through the holes, which doesn't seem like an option with copper. That said if there are good reasons to use copper over PEX it would be good to know before I start pulling out the existing copper.

 

Copper is a greater incentive for thieves to steal if you go on vacation for two weeks and leave the house empty...