Home Ownership And You!

Yeah, see, the thing is if the yard was wide open and all dirt, I'd certainly get a tractor like that because I'd be farming half of it for sure.

But that thing is too big to get back to the tighter parts of the property and maneuvered around the trees plus it will not get over the dam bridge. The smaller tractors I have will go places that thing can't.

The biggest problem I have with them is the turf tires. They won't tear up the yard but when you want traction, they will slide and slip and spin.

So Tow Pig is going to get V-paddles front and rear like this:



Tow Pig also came sans engine and sans mower deck. Well, it had an engine but a friend had brought Tow Pig and another Troy-Bilt unit over. He wanted Tow Pig's engine in the Troy-Bilt because the Troy-Bilt turn it's Kohler engine into a planter with a nice, south face window. So I spent a Saturday stuffing a B&S engine into a spot designed for a Kohler engine for him. He said he was going to just take Tow Pig to the scrap yard and I asked if I could have it. So I saved Tow Pig from certain death.

So Tow Pig is going to get a B&S 24 HP Vanguard V-twin and probably a new Hydro-Gear 317-0510 transaxle to replace the weaksauce Peerless LTH2000 that is in there now.

The only other thing I want to get is a "snow" blade that I can mount on Tow Pig so I can easily spread dirt, mulch or compost. I'll have to reinforce the blade to handle stuff heavier than dirt but that's nothing some mild steel angle iron and an arc welder can't fix.

Also, we decided that Tow Pig was going to be bodied like Thomas the Tank Engine.

So I have a Thomas the Tank Engine face that is a little narrower than a 30 gallon oil drum.



So I will cover it in plastic wrap and then cut a wooden spacer to fit around it and sit flush with the face. It'll get a sheet of polyester fleece soaked in fiberglas resin laid down with all the nooks and crannies filled in with resin soaked fleece and left to cure solid to make a mold of the face.

Then I'll take the face and wooden mold spacer out, pull the plastic wrap out and coat the inside with acrylic to make a mold. Then I will remake the face with the wider ring and embed a steel mounting ring on the edge so it can be secured to the drum base and make a fiberglas Thomas face to paint and put on the front of the tractor. Then it's just bending some sheet metal up for a tank body and painting to match. Will likely bend up a custom exhaust to send the exhaust gases out the smoke stack. I might also mess with the eyes and turn them into headlights but my brother thinks I should make little lanterns to go on the front and rear towing plates to be the lights 'cause that's what Thomas has.



So I might do that.

No, I have a cleaner from Scotts that is biodegradable and not harmful to everything else. Where I live I'm in a watershed area and on the edge of the Pine Barrens. I'm not an environmentalist or anything like that but I do believe in conservation of resources. So anything I do, I do my best to make sure it isn't going to damage the ecosystem around me.

Besides, the pressure washer and a brush attachment will clean it all off just fine without any cleaners.

So, now that I have full access to that service panel, I decided that this was going to take longer than I thought, on purpose. The reason being is one I don't have pictures of because I didn't think to take them.

The biggest problem with the master bath was it would run out of hot water 10 minutes in to your shower. It's not plumbed into the hot water for the rest of the house 'cause...I don't know why. All I know is that there is a dangling feed line in the wall that isn't connected to anything and another feed line that supplies cold water to the bathroom. The way Captain Halfass had hot water coming in was a 30 gallon electric hot water tank in the walk-in closet.

The problem with that was that he had it hooked up backwards. The in-flow was at the top of the tank and the outflow was at the bottom of the tank. So as long as the tank had the time to recover completely, you'd get hot water. But it took about 45 minutes to an hour to recover which, for a unit with 3 elements, was pretty insane. Additionally, he had no safety valves on it and the overflow/overpressure release system just drain right on to the carpeted floor. At one point it or the previous unit had done so because there's water damage to the subfloor under the carpet. So, in addition to all that, the water heater was new in 2016.

But I decided to replace it with a tankless water heater. I'll get to that fun in a little bit. When the plumber was here and pulled the old unit out, he drained it in the tub first and it stunk to high heaven. The reason? One of the three elements was shot, the coating that goes on the electrode was kinda burned off and because of the hard water we have, there was a corrosion and calcification mass on it that shorted it out. The smell was that burned coating. So, because Captain Halfass **** it all up on the install, a water heater that was new in 2016 was pretty much useless in 2019.

So, tankless deal, went with a Rheem 18kW unit:

https://www.rheem.com/product/professional-classic-tankless-electric-rtex-18-electric-water-heater-with-5-year-limited-warranty-rtex-18

To do this, we needed two, 40 amp breakers and a 90 amp line. The current service panel that you can see the back of in the pictures above...it was unclear what the load rating was on it. It was quite old and while there's nothing wrong with it the standard markings on the jacketing said it should be an 80 amp service. But it was installed before the current markings standards were in place. Research showed me that despite the markings, it was a 90 amp line, but we weren't taking a chance. So we ran a new line and new service panel.



You can actually see the old water heater in the left side of this picture. Anyhoo, we fished a new, 100 amp service line all the way up from the basement, to the attic and across to the new service panel. It got stuck on a wall switch and we kinda messed that up 'cause it ripped the switch box out of the sheetrock, had to fix it. DOH!



But the supply line for the water heater goes up in the attic and down through the wall where the shower is. We did this because we used existing holes.



Here's the full installation with the service panel cover off.



So the thing is, at 18 kW at 240 volts, they have it spread out over 2 elements, each 9000W. So they spec a 40 amp breaker for each element circuit. Total draw is 75 amps. So a 100 amp service line is plenty big for this 'cause it's running at about 75% or so of capacity. Well within operational limits. So when we fire it up for the first time, there's a whole lot of buzzing and groaning that lessens after a minute or two but it's still a loud buzzing. You can walk out of the bedroom, close the door and still hear it. So I shut it down and called my electrician friend to come help me troubleshoot and make sure we got it right with the wiring. We did. But Jackie was nervous about the buzzing. Especially since it got louder as the hot water level was turned up.

So I called the plumber and talked to him and he said he did have some folks complaining about the buzzing but he had it all checked out and found no problems either. Said it's probably just the design.

Well that wasn't good enough for me. I started testing and I noticed that when it was running, the lights in the kitchen that were LED bulbs and on a dimmer switch were flickering badly. They aren't even on the same service panel. So I was wondering why would there be such a level of feedback on the line? Well, two things I figured out.

First off, two 40 amp breakers for a 75 amp load means it's running at about 94% load on the service panel. It's only 37.5 amps per 40 amp breaker but that's still a 90%+ load. The buzzing is because the breakers are on the verge of popping, pretty much constantly. The second issue is, and it took a while to figure this out and I still don't have 100% confirmation on it but the way Rheem is handling the load on the heating elements is via a Silicon Controlled Rectifier (SCR).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_controlled_rectifier

The reason that is causing the flickering is because of the amperage draw and the overload situation on the breakers in the panel. You shouldn't be running a breaker at more than 75% load, 80% at most. But the flickering is cause by how an SCR operates. At anything under a certain load level, say 70%, the SCR will cycle the power on and off rapidly to control the amount of power getting to the heating element. The control unit does this as a way to vary the current in a system that doesn't have a way to vary the current. This lets the element operate at 50% of capacity without having an elaborate system of capacitors, rectifiers and diodes that let the control unit control the temps of the elements through direct current level manipulation. The SCR basically sends full current and then cycles off rapidly and manage the element temperature by managing the cool down periods between the power cycling periods. When you get a load higher than 70% of capacity, the SCR either hits a bypass mode and you get full power to the elements or the SCR just cycles the power on and leaves it on until demand drops below 70% again.

But, because electricity flows, it can "hammer" like water in your water pipes can when an open valve is rapidly shut off. The hammering is when the mass of water moving in the pipe is carrying momentum and hits the wall of the closed valve. It can makes your pipes clunk and bang as the water hits that wall hard. The backwave running into the still moving water collides and causes cavitation in the pipe which vibrates the whole thing. Well the same thing can happen to electricity and when it "hammers", it sends a voltage wave back down the line. This causes a surge in the line elsewhere that can cause something sensitive like an LED to get momentarily brighter. Significantly enough that to your eye it seems like it's flickering off. This isn't apparent in incandescent or florescent bulbs because the surge isn't strong enough for it's short duration to create a noticeable brightness difference. These surges are why we have line conditioners and UPS systems on our stereos or even why there are those magnetic cans on power tool power cords that are called chokes. They either stop, dampen or absorb those surges to protect your sensitive equipment in the rest of the house. Dimmer switches can exacerbate this surge because they are varistors and can get easily overwhelmed by the surging when there is a load on the switch.

Pfft!

What?

Why would you do that?!?!

C'mon, man!


The only place there's GFCI is the outlet in the bathroom next to the sink. That's sufficient for code. The water heater itself has a GFCI circuit in it so all you have to do is give it power as per the wiring diagram and you're good. Everything else is just standard wiring.

Service lines really aren't that big of a problem, though. Especially since the water is at the other end of the bathtub from where the panel is. As long as it's not leaking like it was, there really shouldn't be an issue.