Day: December 30, 2017

Pellet Stove Fan Control

Pellet stoves can’t really, in my opinion, be controlled by a thermostat. They take a long time to start, and up to 30 minutes sometimes to shut off. And in my situation, I need a fan to blow the warm air into other rooms of the house. So, there is a pedestal fan next to the stove to blow the warm air to the rest of the house. But I had to manually start and stop that fan.

The problem is that if the fan is started with the stove, it blows cold air for a long time before the stove warms up. And when I shut off the stove, I have to come back later and turn off the fan, maybe at night when I just want to go back to sleep.

So here’s the solution. There are “Temperature Controllers”. I found several on Amazon. This one looks very fancy, but was only about $35. It can control heating and cooling of something and has a large wattage rating. So the fan is plugged into the Cooling socket and the temperature is set to 85 degrees. So the fan is always off unless the stove is hotter than 85 degrees. So when the stove is turned on, the fan comes on about 5-7 minutes later when the stove has warmed up, and when the stove is shut off, the fan shuts off up to 30 minutes later when the stove has cooled down.

Notice the thin wire sneaking over to the top left of the stove? That’s the thermo sensor that controls the controller.

Works great. Now I don’t need to worry about the fan at all. Just turn the stove on and off when I need it.

:ww

Watch Out. Rats in the Kitchen

I just had to replace an expensive kitchen faucet because a rat apparently chewed through one of the supply lines. See the little nip in the line on the right picture?

 

Apparently this is quite common. Rats seem to know that they can get a drink by chewing through a faucet supply line. Unfortunately, these very expensive faucets – about $300 for any of the major brands – all use nylon other plastic for the mesh around the supply lines rather than stainless steel mesh. As you may know, replacement supply lines for toilets and many other faucets are covered in a stainless steel mesh, which rats will not chew. But the supply lines on these expensive faucets cannot be replaced or easily repaired.

The rat only chewed a little hole to get a drink, so it drip drip dripped and I didn’t find it for a couple of days when I noticed water on the floor.
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So after a new $300 faucet and a $150 plumber’s visit, I have a new faucet.

Now there’s a big rat trap in the cabinet defending the faucet from rats.

Update: I had a brainstorm early this morning. I just bought this and will slide this over the faucet lines.

 

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That ought to keep the pesky rats off the faucet lines. So there.

 

 

 

Side Quests, etc.

Don’t forget to check out some of the side quests. While you don’t actually need them to level, even if your world is not on the “Road to 60” list, there are some that give interesting gear rewards and they aren’t nerfed like other games. In Tera, after a few changes, only the story quests give good rewards. The Zone Quests and Vanguard Requests in Tera used to give great XP, but now the Zone Quests give about 20% of a story quest and Vanguard Requests give very little XP, but give tokens that are good for gearing up. I’ve never seen what I would call Story Quests in Wow, so the quests in a zone pretty much give all the same level of rewards. Which is fine. No complaint here. 7-20 quests per level depending on your place in the game. Although, like I said, all that may change with “Level Scaling”. sigh.

Near Camp Drybone here in FFXIV, I ran across a side quest that rewards a nice weapon of level 20 for very little work. And side quests give about 1/2 the XP of the Story Quests, so two quick ones now and then can help a lot. I’ll keep my eye out for them when my gear is getting stale. Since I’m leveling pretty fast I’m not really psyched to learn and apply Materia to my gear. I’ll get back to that when I get high enough that the gear will last some time.

Continue reading “Side Quests, etc.”