So a couple weeks ago I broke the fireplace. Here's how.
The significant problem with our fireplace insert has been that the fan underneath, which switches on when the heat is high enough, squeals. It's not very loud but it is at a pitch that drives ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger nuts, so, we were looking at ways to do something about that. There's not much to do about that. But in showing that we could in theory do something about it, I showed how you can slide the fan out from underneath the insert and back in. Except we couldn't get it back in exactly.
The trouble is the fan doesn't quite just slide into the slot. There's little metal shelves on the insert and on the fan that need to fold together, and you need to lift the insert off the floor a little bit to be able to fit them together. And while I could lift the insert, I couldn't simultaneously slide the fan in. And bunnyhugger could slide the fan in ... almost. It didn't quite get all the way back to snap in place firmly.
So I called the fireplace guys to ask them to come out and put it in for me, and in the meanwhile hey, it's still a fireplace, right? Only when we tried starting a fire the fan never, ever came on. So I added that to the pile of things to ask about. And then a couple days later we were starting a fire and the smoke was pouring out the insert, on the side, into the room and making a terrible polluted mess of things.
Fireplace guys came Thursday morning, after calling to ask what exactly the problem was again? But the happy news is there wasn't much wrong at all. Some experimentation concluded that the problem was vapor lock, the column of bitterly cold air in the fireplace being so much that the smoke was pouring out the insert's air intake instead. Heating the air up with the hair dryer for about ten minutes was plenty to overcome that, though. And the fan came on without any trouble when the thermocouple controlling it was put up to a heat source. They were also able to slide the fan in easily.
The downside is they didn't have time to see how the fan sounded when it was going, because that requires the fireplace being up to full heat and ready to go. When it was, we had an awful racket, like a washing machine off balance. I suspect it's something that could be fixed by pulling it out and pushing it in again a little different, but if we could pull it out and push it in again without their help this whole matter wouldn't have started. So, they're to come out on this coming Thursday. I'll be building a fire ahead of their arrival.
Next day on our summer trip --- June 30th --- started in the outskirts of Kennywood and gave me time to photograph our motel. Here:
View outside our front door, of the main office and something or other going on in the corner. Like you see, classic motel design here.
And there's our front and only outside door.
Peering down --- everything around Pittsburgh is on a hill --- at the road sign.
The front office is behind this wonderful tilted window. And they have the setup for nights to spend grilling, which is nice. And say, what about those stairs concealed behind the grill?
That leads down a couple narrow steps to the promised hot tub, not photographed because there was a closed door in the way.
There seem to be a lot of ripped-out electric sockets around here. Not sure what that means.
Trivia: Shortly before the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, International Olympic Committee President Count Henri Baillet-Latour personally demanded that Adolph Hitler remove anti-Jewish signs around the city be removed because during the Olympics the host city becomes ``sacred Olympic territory'' of which he, the IOC president, was master. Hitler complied. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.
Currently Reading: Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense, Elliott Kalan. Kind of suspect Kalan has literally read everything anyone has written about what makes humor works.
