Alright guys get ready for a doozy
Everything was trucking along fine. I painted all my doors and trim. 10 doors at 15 min per coat per side = 20 hours of painting...For a math major I really struggle with extrapolating the temporal consequences of tasks....Should have bought a paint sprayer and been done with it. 1000 ft of trim meant over a mile of painting and sanding hunched over...I painted it before I put it on the wall but still....my god....I should have bought that sprayer....I had installed 8/10 of the doors and 70% of the trim.
Around new years I noticed that my heater had trouble keeping up with a cold snap. I have a heat pump so they are naturally not very efficient when it is 9 degrees. I call somebody out and it turned out I forgot to program the emergency coils to kick on when I installed my new digital thermostat. Silly me! So he gets them to kick on and everything seems good. We check the refrigerant pressures and the high side was a little low. He goes out to the truck to write up an invoice, comes back and tells me to give him a call in the spring time so we can take a closer look at the reversing valve and compressor. As he is leaving my cat starts meowing like crazy. All of a sudden I see him running toward the house screaming "YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!!"
Naturally I did not want to believe him, but he sounded very sincere...I went out to the courtyard and indeed, much to my dismay, there was a 10 foot column of smoke pouring out of one of the turbine vents. To the tech's credit he grabbed a fire extinguisher out of his truck, leapt back in the attic, and put the fire out. I had managed to get an extinguisher from a neighbor and got in to the attic right about when he put it out. PSA TIME...IF YOU DON'T HAVE A FIRE EXTINGUISHER...GET ONE!!! OR TWO!! I have never felt so powerless as when I was staring at all that smoke with no means to stop it immediately. I got very very very VERY VERY very lucky. The only damage was to my plenum...
It turned out that when I had sanded my wood floors the dust had settled on the coils. A mouse had chewed its way in to the plenum and that was the first thing to smolder when the embered dust blew on it. Because the fan was blowing, it managed to ignite my fiberboard plenum (I hated that plenum the moment I laid eyes on it). So I have spent the last few weeks tearing out the plenums and the near by duct work. It turns out that half my metal ductwork by the plenums had been trampled by previous attic goers and was split wide open unbeknownst to me as it was all covered in insulation. I also found several copper to aluminum splices that were wrapped in electrical tape.... One particularly egregious run was a 30 amp breaker > Al wire > Cu wire > lights....Hopefully my house will more resistant to spontaneous combustion in the future. I am making new metal plenums and I got enough fiberglass to re insulate the entire house. This has to be a record as it is the first time I spent $1000 on fiberglass that did not look like a Lotus!
I have a fear that upon driving the last nail in the house, it will explode like something from a nuclear test site movie. It almost came true.....
