Midtown Ranch

Yeah – we have heat!

The pipes are thawed and we dodged a bullet. No ruptures, breaks, or other bad things. The furnace is merrily warming our abode, hot water is circulating with nary a gurgle, all is well at the Midtown Ranch.

Collected 6 eggs from the hens (we hadn’t collected for a couple days). They were mugging for corn. Although it was -10 F outside with four hens, two heat lamps, a thick layer of shavings the coop was 32 F with the small hen door open when I tucked them in tonight. We learned in our first chicken winter back in 2005 that keeping the coop much warmer than 32 led to respiratory problems, feather plucking and vicious fighting. When it is much above freezing in the coop the chickens won’t go outside. Birds that won’t go out don’t eat or drink enough, fight incessantly, and fail to get fresh air. All kinds of problems. They basically sit on their feathered butts and gripe, bitch, and moan. So 32 inside sounds rough but it is really a kindness. We keep Chanteclers and Chantecler mixes. The white Chanteclers were designed for these temperatures by Canadian Brother Wilfred who set out to design the ideal Canadian dual purpose bird. Our girls are Partridges, developed by a different Canadian (drawing a blank on his name). He wanted to call his bird the Albertan but presumably because of the Chanteclers wild popularity his lovely birds were dubbed Partridge Chanteclers instead.

Anyway – our girls were designed for the cold and as long as the coop isn’t over warm they’ll go in and out all day, and lay right thru the winter.

Tonight they got corn and extra thanks for their lovely brown eggs. I made cookies with a couple of their eggs after dinner this evening.

So it’s been kind of chilly lately. Most mornings have been -10 F.

This morning the house was chilly too. 55 F.

Hmm. Didn’t bode well for the furnace.

We placed a call to Central Plumbing and Heating and got on their wait list. Fortunately they were able to see us same day. Unfortunately they couldn’t give us a specific time. We’d had the furnace and baseboard heating system serviced by Central last September. At the time they didn’t believe the system needed to be bled. We speculated (before Central arrived) that the problem was an airlock preventing water flow in the baseboard heat.

The nice man from Central arrived in the afternoon. He did a great job explaining what and why he was testing for each component, educated us a little more about our system (disturbingly – ‘they don’t make that widget anymore, when it breaks we’ll have to reconfigure the system’). We soaked up as much as we could.

Regrettably the diagnosis was frozen pipes in the crawlspace. John was kind enough to slip into the crawlspace and help us identify several likely spots to check for frozen pipes. Some time ago we’d blocked a 3″ diameter hole. Our plug had worked loose giving our frigid weather almost direct access to the baseboard pipe. Could be a problem, you think?

John discussed our options with us. Central doesn’t do frozen pipes. They referred us to Libby Thawing.

We hauled space heaters down into the crawl space, pointed them at the likely spots, and crossed our fingers that we don’t have busted pipes.

We called Libby Thawing and got on their wait list. Libby’s list is very long, they were unable to give us a time estimate for when it would be our turn.

We do like living in Alaska very much. This is a hassle, but that’s all. We are able to keep the living space at a reasonable temperature. If pipes are busted we’ll deal. Grand scheme of things this is minor.

The mail/web server suffered a catastrophic failure. We’re in the process of getting the site back up.