HereForTheBeer: Oh yeah, cold steel is no fun. Just sinks right into your hands.
Did some work on submarines, beneath the skin and outside the hull. January, sitting on that cold black steel... We'd have to peel our butts off the hull whenever we moved - body heat would thaw the sheen of ice and then re-freeze once we got settled in.
Emob78: That puts a hilarious image in my head. Bunch of sailors frozen stuck to the hull of a submarine, screaming in terror as it submerges into the depths. Call me sadistic, but that thought of that cracks me up.
At the time, it would have seemed like sweet release from that crappy task.
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Job went pretty well today. Not quite as cold inside (about 37F) as I thought I would be, though tomorrow looks to drop another 8 degrees.
The HVAC guy called today. The place we bought has a pretty nice older heating system in it, but the original owner had some really dumb ideas for controls. Instead of zoned thermostats turning the boiler on and off, he has it set on a manual switch and has the blower fans on thermostats. Unless you turn the thing off by hand, it runs 24/7, sucking up LP gas like there's no tomorrow. I scrounged up an old mercury thermostat and wired it up in place of the switch he used, so at least there's a little bit of control now. Though I'm out of town, told the HVAC guy to poke around and see what he thinks we could do. Just happy he has an opening to take a look at it. And glad I checked the level of gas in the tank - woulda sucked hard to run out on, say, Christmas day and the house starts freezing.
The longer we live here the more I'm discovering about the previous owner's screwy way of doing things. Nothing that a pile of money can't fix, I suppose. Anyone got a pile of money I can use? ; )