New hot water heater!

So for the last 6 months it's been kind of difficult to have two showers during the same 4 hour period, the second person just never gets a really good shower. Today I investigated... My original plan was to drain the tank, flush it a few times to see how much sediment came out (our well had some trouble a year or so ago and there could have been extra grit in there). Since that didn't leak oodles of grit, I decided to pull out the elements to see how much calcium buildup had happened on them (one trip to hardware store to get a 1 1/2" socket wrench to remove elements and check availability and price or replacement (3800 Watt), $14 and they only had one). So I could get the buggers out no matter how hard I tried. Another trip to a bigger hardware store to see if they had better sockets that would fit the huge mac socket wrench I found on the road a few years ago. I'd checked online and they do make them, but nowhere near here sells them. However the big box hardware store had replacement elements for $7 each so I got two and another tool to try on the elements. I also noticed a new electric water heater was under $200. Headed home, still couldn't get the elements out... Waited for authorization to return home to see what was going to be the plan, we ended up getting anew water heater. It was somewhat easy to install although I still need to work out the routing for the emergency pressure relief valve thing. We had piping hot water in under 30 minutes and I even took a full long shower within an hour of first turning it on. It's a 4500 Watt/element heater and we're very happy with it. It'll probably end up being the best $200 we've spent in a long time.

moved website over to blogger publishing

This site used to be run with PHP-Nuke which was a colossal pain in the ass. Today I moved over to using blogger to publish the site (via a chrooted sftp server if you care). now you can subscribe to the atom feed perhaps read it with google reader?
or add it to your personalized google homepage?

House Painting Finished

Tony finished painting the house yesterday. He did a great job! so good we're hiring him to come in and finish the trim around all the windows that just got replaced.

I'm a lumberjack and I'm o.k.

I chop down trees....

While Dad was visiting we had a go at getting rid of some of the dead branches off the huge tree that's in the corner of the property. We got rid fo some by climbing up the ladder and cutting them, but the best way was to throw a rope over tham and just pull. They were so dead they snapped like twigs (but they were really logs!). For the biggest one we tied it to the back of Tricia's truck and used a bit of leverage to bring it down.

Bathouse Relocation

Since the house is being painted I put up a 25 ft tall batpole with the bathouse mounted on the top, it came out pretty good. We didn't shine a light into the bathouse to see if it was occupied but there was signs under the old location that there had been something living in there.

You should give money to the California Bat Conservancy.

Windows and Doors installed!

They managed to replace all the windows and doors in the house in 4 days! 4 days! amazing. This includes adding TWO bay windows complete with overhead lights and dimmers, one is 12 feet wide!

We're very very happy with how it came out. Now we just need to get the outside of the house painted as soon as possible.

Solar Panels Installed!

The Solar panels have been installed and the pool is slowly getting warmer!
They're just to heat the water for the pool and don't provide electricity.