- It's really not that bad, but it sometimes feels like our house is falling apart. Our three-story house has a top floor that gets very hot and stuffy during the summer months. We've had the builder come out to assess the situation once before, and they simply said that it was the design of the house, and there was nothing that could be done. More recently, I was investigating whether there was something we could do, and I noticed that we have no hot air return on the top floor. There's a grate in the floor, which I always thought was a cold air return, but out of curiosity, I pulled the grate up and looked underneath -- there's nothing seemingly there! It's a channel in the floor about 6 feet long that is bounded by ceiling joists on the sides, and an inside wall and some blocking on the ends. Moreover, being the third floor, a cold air return in the floor is almost useless because all of the heat rises. So with three fans plus a ceiling fan, the hot air just gets blown aronund with no where to go.
- To add insult to injury, I went down into the basement the other night, and got a soaker. After I turned the light on, realized that the floor near the furnace was wet -- in fact the whole area on the floor near the furnace was wet, and it was hard to tell where it was coming from. After speaking with ny father-in-law, he suggested that I check the drainage pathway for the compressor coil. Sure enough, the drain adapter was plugged and so all of the condensated water was running down the inside of the furnace instead of through the drainage pipe. What came out of the drainage adapter was the surprise -- using a coat hanger, I unplugged it, and dirt, dust, and a piece of carpet came out too! Since then, everything's been fine. We had a similar issue with our furnace this winter, though it was apparently a buildup of algae in the exhaust tubing.
- Surprisingly, I received a call today from Greenpark's service department saying that they got the projects mixed up and our HVAC contractor is indeed still in business and will be coming out to attempt to rectify the return air duct problem in our loft. I also called the Town of Richmond Hill to find out how houses get inspected and things like this are missed -- it appears that ductwork is not something that is required to be given more than a cursory evaluation prior to sign off. The gentleman I spoke with was tremendously helpful though and said that if the builder wouldn't fix the problem, the Town would get on them on our behalf to have it fixed. Nice to encounter friendly people who are willing to help.
- Thanks to Wendy, my new IBM Thinkpad T42 has arrived. Have I mentioned I love Thinkpads? The T42 has a fingerprint scanner built-in to the front right side of the base underneath the keyboard that can authenticate you to Windows XP and also as a power-on password. The neat thing is, if you authenticate using your fingerprint at power-on, it passes it through to Windows and you don't have to authenticate again. This T42 is a 1.8GHz Dothan P4, with a 60GB 7200RPM hard drive, 1.5GB of RAM and a 15" SXGA+ (1400x1050) screen. It's a piece of work. ;)
- I've started work at a new job at iServ Ontario. iServ's the company that provides shared technology services infrastructure for the Ontario Government and all of its ministries. I'm part of the Solutions Design, Build and Integration group, more specifically dealing with network matters amongst a small team of people.