biggerboat's building boondoggle blog

I need to stay out of P&S. It brings out the worst in me.

Only because many of the posters there are, in fact, the worst people.

Let's go back to fishing.

We've got a few things that we kinda want to do with the new house. It really doesn't need anything, but a couple of things might make things a little better.

We've been thinking about putting our AC unit on the roof. It's on the patio and crazy loud in the summer when we want to sit out. A lot of our neighbors have theirs on the roof. Not sure how much that will cost. Might be on our "maybe later" list.

Our next project I think only requires a bit of sweat and not much money.

We don't have any water outlet at the dock. It's a pain to not only run hoses to the boat and cleaning table, but the watering the back yard is a pain as well. We have to run 100' hoses from our screened in porch. Pain in the butt.

We initially thought we might just try to tap into the faucet on the porch, but that would require pulling up a LOT of pavers. We don't really want to go there. So, we have another faucet on the side of the house that we think we're going to tap into. It's going to require a lot of trenching but little disruption to our patio. I've thought about trying to find the water line coming into the house but forget that.

I'm just going to try to put a T on the faucet coming out of the wall.

Here is the faucet (pic from the top)

Here is what I think I'm going to try to do

On the AC, a couple things to think about:

If it's loud, make sure it's located well away from sleep areas. Also, consider maintenance up there vs on the ground.

I don't use my AC, so can't really say if noise and problems are correlated or not.

Yeah, the logical place to put it based on where it is, is right above our bedroom. Right now it is right next to our bedroom window so I'm not sure if it would be worse.

Fortunately, my next door neighbor owns an AC company so I can get the scoop from him.

LOL, we would die if we didn't use our AC.

I sort of imagined I could find threaded brass pieces to do this. Wrong.

It looks like the best way is to run copper to the ground, then thread pvc into a copper threaded adapter. This will mean sweating the pipe, something I haven't done in quite a while. IIRC, it wasn't too hard but I'm a little nervous that somehow I mess something up and we are without water until a plumber can come clean up my mess.

I already bought the parts so I guess I'm just gonna have to roll the dice.

No seven out!

Are you having to sweat where you cut the existing faucet or is that threaded? You shouldn't have to to convert from copper to pvc.

https://www.sharkbite.com/us/en/brass-pu...

Oh geeez. Too late.

Ah, don't sweat it.

hehe

Sooooo...... I tried to get the existing faucet off and it came off, kind of. It didn't unscrew from the pipe. It was a two piece faucet, which I didn't even know existed. I figured I would try to just screw the pipe adapter to the piece of the faucet that would not come off the pipe. I didn't want to risk breaking the pipe with too much force.

We got everything put together, then turned on the water. All of the sweated joints were A-OK, but the place where I screwed on to the existing faucet piece had a drip. Not too bad, but still. I unscrewed it and put pipe dope AND plumbers tape on it and screwed it back. Only it ended up not in the right place since I didn't start it where I had started it before. So, I messed with that until it ended up where I wanted it. Turned the water on and it has an ever so small drip. Like one drip ever minute. We put a small jar under it to see how much water was coming out and after 2 hours the water didn't even cover the bottom of the jar. Maybe a teaspoonful at most. I'm inclined to leave it for a couple of days to see if it seals itself, which I think is possible. I don't think I will just let it drip even if it is almost negligible. It probably won't hurt anything but it will bug the heck out of me.

I decided I can't live with that. There is barely any thread holding the whole thing together and it's at a funky angle. Called a plumber to do it correctly, however that might be.

I feel a little stupider right now.

The old existing faucet was simply sweated on to the pipe sticking out of the wall. The plumber just heated it up and it came off. Then he soldered back the assembly that I built to save me a few bucks. He said it was ok.

Didn't cost too much so there is that.

I think I mentioned my wife's daughter is getting married in June.

I really want to go on a detailed rant about this but I'll stick to the tl;dr version. WAAYYY expensive and soooo much anxiety. I just don't get it. Just go to the jp for goodness sake.

And spend the money on a car or house or something.

This gave me a nice giggle. It's amazing how a pro can diagnose and fix something in a few minutes I've been dicking around with for 2 days.

For example at one of my rent houses, the air handler inside the house started dripping condensation onto the floor underneath. YouTube said the coils were probably freezing up and needed to be cleaned. Which I did and put in a new filter. No dice. Called my AC guy. He walks in, opens the door, takes a look, goes to his truck and gets his air compressor, blows out the drain pipe, and says you should be good to go.

I use him a lot and I guess he felt sorry for me so he didn't charge me.

Worked on the boat today. I'm replacing the sirius weather module and antenna in hopes i can get the xm satellite weather working. It is really nice to have if you go offshore. You can see where storms are forming and which direction they are moving. We have regular radar too, but the range is limited and it just doesn't show as much. Both together are great.

Anyway, got it all hooked up but no feed from sirius. I went on the website to transfer service to the new unit but it says my subscription won't work with it. It's a brand new unit so there shouldn't be a technical issue.

Unfortunately nobody mans the phones on the weekend.

Ugh. I already hate sirius so this just makes me hate them more. Their website sucks balls and it's so difficult to get anything to work.

I suspect there is some sort of activation fee or something.

Just wait til you go to cancel.

Sirius came with the Subie. I was on a trip when the free period ended. Once I got off the wait list, it took about another half hour of me trying to get the CSR to stop hard-selling me, and just end the subscription.

They did send me a check of $.02 later, I can't remember why. Maybe it wasn't really a free period, but a super-low-price.

I hate Sirius so much.

Excuse me while I rant.

Soooo... as stated before, Sirius has a frickin' web page to transfer service to a new device. Only, guess what? It doesn't work. Or, it didn't work for me.

So, I called and got a somewhat unknowledgeable human. She told me I didn't have the right plan. Only I did. We went back and forth for a while before she finally told me she could do it for a $16.00 fee. I figured as much.

So......I go to my boat and it tells me I don't have the marine subscription or the audio subscription. (You have to get both, no option to just get marine). So, I called again. The guy, who was somewhat more knowledgeable but not much, told me I didn't have a marine subscription. I explained to him that I've been getting billed for 2 years now on a marine subscription. We argued for about 20 minutes about this before he finally says "oh, I see you have a marine subscription." GR...... So, he said he would have to set me up on a new plan and that it would cost me $47.00. I asked if there was anything different between the plan I've been paying for and the new one and he said, "no, they are both the coastal plan." So, why am I paying 47.00 for a plan that isn't any different from the plan I've been paying for. We went round and round on that for a while before he told me because I've been a customer for a while he would waive the $47.00. Gee, thanks. Anyway, he set things up and told me he would call back in 45 minutes to make sure it was working.

Only he didn't. I went back to the boat and it said I did have an active marine subscription, but not an audio subscription. So, I called back again. I got by far the least helpful human of the bunch. She told me that my equipment was faulty and that I needed to get that fixed. I explained that it was a brand new piece of equipment. Then she told me that I needed to get an audio receiver. This was untrue as well. The device I have is designed to handle both. It even says "Sirius XM" with a weather feed and an audio feed out. We argued about this for while and never got anywhere. She sent another signal to my device and told me to wait for the second guy to call me back. Basically blew me off.

I went back to the boat and turned everything off and back on. Both things are working. Not sure why they didn't before.

My head hurts.

probably <0.01% of their customers use marine features

Yeah, that's true.

I have to say, it's pretty slick. It's just an overlay on the existing map on my simrad. It shows a lot - lightning strikes, wind direction. Nice to have if you are offshore and see stuff off in the distance.

That being said, when storms pop up on the coast and you are offshore, it doesn't matter much what radar you have if you have to go through it to get home. I guess maybe a little help determining which pass to come in through.

My niece came to stay with us for about a week. She volunteered at the St. Petersburg Grand Prix. She's a huge F1 fan but likes all racing.

She got me in on Friday. Not really my thing. Loud and crowded. Just doesn't interest me. Cars were driving around, but not actually racing I don't think. She wanted to get some autographs so we went to an extremely long line. We couldn't even see the beginning of the line and they hadn't even started to sign anything. I ended up sitting under a shade tree while she waited in line. Actually, there were two lines. They split up the drivers. Anyway, she got the autographs she wanted about 2 hours later. She got really lucky because she was the next to last person to actually meet the drivers. They all left right after she got her signatures. I think I would be pretty upset if I stood in a line for 2 hours and didn't get diddly. She got some selfies with some of the drivers too, but don't ask me who. She was pretty excited about it.

She was set to volunteer for 3 days so my wife and I decided to try to run a water line from the side of the house back to the dock. We trenched almost the entire distance (ended up being 110') on day one. We finished up digging on day 2 and put the pipe down. Glued the pvc, and soldered the copper and put it all together. Held our breath and turned the water on. SUCCESS!!! No leaks. It was truly a miracle.

I need to brace it a little better but here's the end result:

Meanwhile, my niece was working on race day and scored some cool videos. Got some good footage of Jon Bon Jovi and Brett Michaels, in addition to even more of the drivers who I don't know.

But, the big score (IMHO).....she got a selfie with David Letterman!!!! How cool is that?

Anyway, great weekend for everyone.

I might have taken on too much with this novel. I'm having trouble getting my arms around it. Too many moving pieces maybe.