Sometimes You’re The Windshield…

Sometimes, you’re the bug.

The week started off well with the electrician showing up (on time) Tuesday morning ready to get started. We had a couple of things inside the house for him to do while he was here so he started on those first with the hopes of working outside once it was a little warmer.

Two hours later (he wasn’t the speediest guy) he was finished and proceeded to begin working on the shop.

Over the course of the rest of the afternoon, he finished running the conduit, pulling the wires, dry fitting the sub-panel and wiring in one plug. He also was able to mount the chains for the lights, but not the lights themselves.

At that point, he called it a day and left without telling me when he’d be back. Two days later I got a call saying he’d be back next Tuesday to finish. /sigh

So now instead of this powering my shop:

I can now do this:

Which is an improvement I suppose, but not quite to the magnitude I had in mind.

Nevertheless, one plug was enough to plug in my heat pump:

and enjoy the warm blissfulness of a heated shop.

Well, not so much. I knew the heat pump didn’t have the bunnies to make the shop tropical, but I didn’t expect it to be totally unable to make any dent whatsoever in the cold, bitter air.

Zippo. Nadda. Nothing. Zilch.

To say the least, I was fairly disappointed. So I went with plan “B”:

That’s a picture of the forced air propane heater that arrived this afternoon from Amazon Warehouse Deals. The plan is to move the heat pump back into the office (where it had done a great job heating and cooling my work environment) and use the propane heater for heat instead. I’m giving up cooling in the shop, but I think that will be OK. I worked a fair amount last summer in the shop without cooling and it wasn’t ever much of a problem – I can deal with heat much better than I can with cold.

So… things didn’t go as planned ^(tm)

First of all, I knew that by ordering from Amazon Warehouse Deals that there might be some cosmetic damage to the heater. However, it was advertised as being in “Used – Very Good” condition so I decided to roll the dice and try to save myself 15 dollars.

The unit arrived with only one of two handle attachments – and no instructions whatsoever.

“No big deal,” I thought and 10 minutes later I had an improvised handle attachment ready to go:

I then read what little instructions existed on the unit, hooked up the propane and fired it up.

I learned much later in the evening that the fan in this heater is supposed to turn on immediately once you plug it in. There was no mention of this on the unit itself so once I lit the propane, I diligently followed the instructions that were on the unit that told me to keep the ignition switch pressed in for up to 30 seconds to let the thermo-couple heat up so the gas flowed by itself.

After about 10 seconds though, the half of the handle I did have caught on fire and melted:

The fan that should have been on wasn’t – allowing the heat from the flame to build up inside the unit to the point where the handle couldn’t take it and Fahrenheit 451’d.

So, I fixed the fan. The body of the unit had also apparently been bent by whatever happened to it that caused it to be an Amazon Warehouse Deal and the fan was catching on the interior of the tube. This took all of a minute to fix by the careful application of the highly technical process known as “squeezing the tube until it bends enough to be out of the way.”

With the fan finally working, I tried again. Huzzah! The unit fired up without the extra-curricular flames this time. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t stay fired up. I had to continually press on the ignition switch and no amount of holding for 30 seconds convinced the thermo-couple to allow the gas to flow by itself.

As usual, Amazon’s customer service was stellar. I was able to return the unit and purchase another one (new this time) that will arrive next Wednesday.  Amazon even threw in a 5 dollar “we’re sorry” credit for the hassle.

So…. 0.5 for 3 on shop activities getting done this week. Snide comments regarding “par for the course” can be left in the comments section…