homeowner funtime.. No heat @ home

Heat was out for 3 days in my house.... I eventually figured out the errors of my ways.

We temporarily heated the house with a pretty neat old kerosene heater. It is pretty old, and in fact was used to heat the house I grew up in starting around age 1. Which happened to be my first winter in NH.

Now I'm in Mass and need it frequently because I'm cheap and run out of oil all the time. My biggest fear in regards to this is that my girlfriend will get pissed. She says as long as the kerosene heater works, there is not that big of a problem.

So I didn’t want to order new oil until I got the furnace working. I got up early on Saturday morning to go buy some diesel fuel from the local Shell. I made 2 trips and bought 10 gallons total. My first mistake was detaching the oil feed line and then not re attaching in tight enough. I shouldn’t have disconnected it in the first place. I actually needed to unscrew the fuel/ air valve that was made to help prime the furnace. This was due to me not taking the time to remember what the oil guy did last winter. Lesson number 1…

Lesson number 2 would have been to not screw with the oil feed line if possible. Because of possible damage that can be done to the flare at the end of the pipe. I was forced to cut the old flare off and make a new one. To do this required some research into what it was actually called, and what tool did it. Homedepot.com and amazon.com helped me with this by browsing their tool selection. After expecting to pay $70 for the tools at Home Depot I got them for 20 dollars and tried it out on the feed tube. With my fuel soaked hands I made a pretty good flare and reattached the feed line to the furnace. While priming I was leaking air and just a little bit of fuel. So one more night without heat. People at work suggested I make a new flare, I did this and it turns out that what really needed to happen was to tighten the flare nut all the way. After I did this, the furnace lit up after a good prime. Lesson 3, tighten the nuts well enough so that air can’t leak through the “seal”.

Now we are warm and can burn through tons of the black gold!

What fun it is to be a home owner. Pure bliss and self confidence building tasks are quite abundant.