Okay, the refrigerator saga is finally drawing to a close. (recap: fridge broke. wait 3 weeks for part. Wrong part. pick replacement fridge. wait for delivery.) Yesterday our replacement fridge was delivered, and today it is just as cold inside as the old one ever was. Yay! And it's even a little nicer than the old one (it's a "gold" model, with clear shelves on the doors, and two freezer pull-out baskets instead of one).
Now I just have to get the water supply tube re-attached (for the in-door dispenser and icemaker). Had a little trouble with that when I tried to do it yesterday; I didn't get the compression nut attached properly and I ended up with about a half-gallon or so of water all over the floor, the back of the fridge, and dripping into the basement (through the little hole where the water supply tube comes up). Hopefully today, with no audience, it'll go a little better. Regardless, though, we now have 25.4 cubic feet of cold again! Yay!
The other thing that we did this weekend was to add about 8 inches of sprayed insulation to our attic. Hopefully you're all familiar with that stuff... anyway, I got the non-fiberglass type (it's made of recycled newspaper, in fact), rented a blower, and planned to take about 2 hours (as advertised) to get it all sprayed in and be done. Had a friend who has a truck help haul all the stuff. We certainly needed to get this done, we had about 4 inches of insulation before. (Total R-value: maybe 10, if we were lucky. Now we should be in the mid-20's.)
Now in this recitation of issues you may have cause to begin doubting my blog title. ("just your average superintelligent geek.") However as this was the first time I've ever done insulation spraying I am cutting myself a little slack.
So first of all, we couldn't quite fit all the insulation AND the blower into the truck at the same time. Okay, not a big issue, we'll just have to make another trip. Whee.
After the second trip, we get the blower all hooked up. Well, not quite: it needs TWO extension cords to run. I have only one suitable cord in my house. Fortunately we borrowed one from my neighbor and were progressing again in short order.
This is when we discover that the amount of hose we got from Home Despot was not enough to reach a large portion of my attic. So, back to HD for the third time, to pick up another 50' of hose, a roll of duct tape, and some more dust masks. Duct-tape the new hose onto the old hose, and we're on our way!
Well, not quite. We then spend 3 hours trying to make the damn blower work reliably. If you feed too much raw material into the hopper, the entire tube jams. With almost 100' of tube, shaking out a 30-foot-long blockage is one hell of a pain. Several times we cut the hose open at one of its joints, empty it from there, and duct-tape it together again. We try it with different lengths of tubing. We try it with different-sized chunks of material going into the blower. Eventually my friend has to leave for a previous engagement but he promises to come back later one. We got three bags blown in three hours.
Well, I ponder things over dinner and clear out the latest jam. Eventually when our friend comes back, I believe we have enough things figured out that we can make it work. And we do, pretty much. Over the next 3 hours (8:00 pm to 11:00 pm), we get some 16 bags blown into the attic. Sounds pretty good, huh? Well, that's out of 39 bags. And the blower is advertised at 20 bags an hour. So while we're doing a damn sight better than in the afternoon, we're really limping pretty badly.
Our friend leaves, and Ann starts feeding the machine, stepping up the pace a little. We get through the last 20 bags in only 2.5 hours (yay, 8 bags/hour! Crank it, baby!) This means we are done at about 2:00 a.m. But we're done! Yay!
And we are both caked in newspaper-dust, along with most of the garage. But okay, we'll clean that up.
Just to add to our misery, by the way, after we get the machine cleaned, the hoses re-arranged, and ourselves cleaned up and in bed (at about 4:00 am), guess who decides to wake up and go on a crying jag? Yes, that would be Krystal. We end up getting to sleep at about 5:00. Oog.
Next morning, Ann points out to me that the entire kitchen, the hallway, the stairs, the dining room, and part of the living room are all coated in insulation dust too. This is because when we were blowing, the blower was in the garage right next to the house door, which was wide open. And so was the garage door. And there was a pretty good breeze going most of the evening, blowing in toward the garage.
And when I say coated in dust, I mean that the carpet on the stairs was actually obscured by a layer of insulation to the point where you could not tell what color the carpet was supposed to be.
Well, that was on Sunday night/Monday morning. Now it is Friday and I think MOST of the dust may be cleaned up. I know there's still a lot left in nooks and crannies. We've gone through 2 vacuum cleaner bags, 3 swiffer dusters, and I don't even know how many wipes. It hasn't quite been non-stop cleaning and dusting, but it's pretty close.
I have subsequently been told by other people who blew insulation that I must have gotten a crappy, half-busted blower. I believe them, I just didn't know enough about it at the time to decide it for myself. And I have also learned first-hand the importance of airway management. If I ever do this again, you can bet there will be tarps and covers protecting the entryways, and the blower will be out in the yard somewhere. And if you ever do it, and the hose gets jammed with material after dropping half a bag of insulation into the hopper, take the damn blower back immediately and demand a functional unit.