Posted by Matthew
Tue, 06 Feb 2007 15:36:00 GMT
My previous boss hails from the UK and one of the first things he told me about after we bought the house was tank-less water heaters. Apparently these appliances are big everywhere but here in the US. An article in the latest ReadyMade magazine confirms it. Therefore I started looking into the Rinnai tank-less water heater. Here are the specs for future reference:
Model: R53
Btu input: 15-180
EF NG: 0.82
EF LP: 0.87
Flow rate (gpm): 0.8-5.3
(EF = energy factor)
List price: $990
Maybe when it is not 0 degrees outside and we have more than $0 dollars in our bank account we’ll have a gander at this unit.
Posted in Modern amenities | Tags heater, water | 1 comment
Posted by Matthew
Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:36:00 GMT
The new fridge in all its glory. It is a 30" GE.
All praise the new fridge! It is a
wonderful GE fridge that fits our space and has a lot of interior room. The old fridge was desperate. The seals no longer sealed and the racks sagged. Now we enjoy opening up the fridge.
Posted in Remodeling: Kitchen, Modern amenities | Tags generalelectric, refrigerator | no comments
Posted by K
Sun, 10 Dec 2006 20:02:00 GMT
There’s nothing like having a party to finally motivate you to do something like hang the lamps that you have had around for the last three months but have been afraid to put up because electricity is scary.
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Posted in Modern amenities, Remodeling: General | no comments
Posted by K
Wed, 29 Nov 2006 13:13:00 GMT
So belatedly (I had to go to CA to eat a thousand good burritos and wish they had them here and then the Thanksgiving holiday derailed me), I am here to say that we did get a new boiler installed. We talked to a few people but in the end went with John Fulcher of Trans-Potomac Heating and Air Conditioning, Inc (202-258-6158), who is great. He’s been in the business for over 40 years and is a DC local and knows these old houses very well. I wish I had known about him when we got the heat pump installed, but oh well, hindsight is 20-20.
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Posted in Modern amenities | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by K
Fri, 03 Nov 2006 01:20:00 GMT
Sooo, the latest fun has been heating, as mentioned before. We have a heat pump and could probably get through the winter on it but who can’t wait to hook up the stinky but pretty radiators and push hot water through them, making them more stinky (albeit useful and energy efficient)? Us! So we are in the get-a-new-boiler business.
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Posted in Modern amenities, Remodeling: General | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by K
Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:44:00 GMT
So exciting things have been going on, which I did document via Flickr a few days ago: we got the radiators back. And they look great! There is the small problem of one not fitting where it should because of a duct (the neverending Curse of the Ducts: I understand an elbow joint or two should take care of it so it isn’t the end of the world) but other than that, we can’t let the facts that we have yet to paint a thing and don’t have a boiler deter us from getting them installed. Anyway, I can’t stop looking at them and thinking that The Stripping Workshop is the best place ever. I don’t have a picture of it since I just noticed it Sunday night, but it says “ROCOCO” at the bottoms of them and I guess that was the model/style…they certainly are Rococo.
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Posted in Remodeling: General, Modern amenities | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Matthew
Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:53:00 GMT
Our land line phone hasn’t worked since Tropical depression Ernesto hit over Labor day weekend. The line was dead when we returned from vacation. It came back for a day or two then went dead again. K. called Verizon and they sent a guy yesterday. But, miraculously it started working before the repairman arrived. Then when we awoke this morning, the line was dead again. Fun!
So I decided to get with the program and buy a VoIP enabling device called PhoneGnome. It uses your broadband connection to make a VoIP call. You can choose one of their plans or a plan from a provider that supports SIP (there are many). If your broadband is down or you are calling 911, it uses your regular phone line. Hopefully it will not care much about us not having a working phone line most days. We’ll see.
Posted in Neighborhood, Modern amenities | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by K
Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:47:00 GMT
So we have the sink and faucet now. The dishwasher and disposal were supposed to be worked on on Saturday, when the electricians were here, but it seems they spent all their time 1- drilling things into the back of the house and 2- breaking our AC (sort of).
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Posted in Modern amenities, Remodeling: General | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by K
Thu, 08 Jun 2006 05:08:00 GMT
Well, today was a day of highs and lows. Actually, it started out good and ended up bad. So, not really highs and lows, but more of a slippery slope into misery.
The good: THE DAMN TILE IS HERE. Thanks to our friend S and her trusty Golf, (and under the disbelieving eyes of the tile guys who thought it was impossible to put all that tile in a Golf and drive it into DC and, uh, I guess we should have sent Jorge to get it in his truck), the tile is now safely in the house. She even carried some in. We sent grout (yes, we shipped 16 pounds of grout across the country because the alternative was too tiring to consider) on Monday so grout will be there very soon.
Also, I have a ticket on a plane that will get me into DC at 10.33 PM on the 29th of June (and supposedly the house will actually be mostly done at that point). I am usually happy about this, although right now the thought makes me want to cry.
The reason I want to cry: the AC ductwork. Right now I think the AC guy is crazy and I have no idea what the hell he was doing when he put in some of the ducting. I understand that not all of it could be put in the walls the way he wanted. That is fine. What is not fine is the enormous and crooked double duct in our living room, that, when framed in, will obscure some of the doorway trim behind drywall. Also, an upstairs bedroom has that problem with some trim at the top of a door. Beyond that, there appears to be a (crooked) thermostat installed where there are going to be cabinets on the kitchen/dining room wall. Check out the horribleness here.
Sigh. I sent Jorge a What The Hell (I said it all as nicely as I could) email and I guess now I will go sleep fret.
Posted in Modern amenities, Remodeling: General, Remodeling: Bathroom | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Matthew
Sat, 13 May 2006 18:35:00 GMT
UPDATE 07/27/06:
We ended up getting the Nordyne/Gibson JT3BD Heat Pump. We’ve only been in the house a short time but we’ve been through some very hot and humid days and thus far it is working fine.
OLD POST:
We’re now considering installing an Anderson Envirosure 1400 Heat Pump. It uses puron instead of freon and performs the cooling by pulling heat out of your house. It then utilizes an air handler inside the house to distribute the air around the house. It is setup like an air conditioner but flipped around so that the hot coils are on the inside and the cold coils are on the outside.
Heat pumps are generally considered more efficient than air conditioners. Unfortunately, when the temperature drops below freezing the cold coil outside can ice up and it has to switch back to ac mode to heat the coil up and melt the ice. However, we don’t plan on using it in the dead of winter, for that we’ll get a natural gas boiler to send hot water to our radiators. But for cool nights in Fall and Spring it will be fine and should be as simple as flipping a switch to go from cool to hot air.
Posted in Modern amenities | no comments | no trackbacks
