Furnace, First Fridays, and Endless Projects

This weekend has already been busy. Friday we had a new water heater and furnace installed, went to first Fridays with Jared where the planters, end table, and chairs were on display, and then ended the night at BB's with some BBQ and blues. The chairs turned out awesome, and no one took any pictures. Jared will have to post some later this week. Today Sam did trail maintenance at Wyco park while I cleaned up after Friday's furnace installation and tackled some weeds in the backyard.

I can't seem to find the original furnace room pictures, but as with all of these houses it was a big low efficiency furnace next to an even bigger and less efficient water heater. With the new stimulus money we figured now is as good a time as any to get things replaced. We ended up going with a Rinnai commercial tankless water heater and hydronic air handler. We used Rieck Mechanical, which are the same guys that did our earlier plumbing work and fixed our air conditioner. They are the best. Brad, Paul, and Corey started about 8:30 Friday morning and immediately ran into some interesting problems being this is a 60 year old house that has had half a dozen lives. They ended up ripping out all of our old gas lines and replacing them. Since none of them wanted to work on Saturday and we didn't want to go through the weekend without hot water, it ended up being a long day. By the time they got the water heater and air handler working it was 2:30 am Saturday morning. They will have to come back next week to tie up some things and finish our other plumbing project, but the effort was appreciated.

For scale, the new water heater is the far piece with the yellow tag. Not only is it much smaller than the old 50 gallon tank, we mounted it outside next to the air conditioner.

The new air handler. The hot air from this furnace comes from a radiator coil filled with hot water from the water heater, pretty cool. They both are 92.5% efficient and since there isn't an open flame in the house we don't need to vent the furnace and the air will be much more humid in the winter. It is also about 2/3rds the size of the old furnace.
The old dinosaurs sitting on the back patio.

Imagine a furnace and water heater in there.

Nice and new. The old furnace used to sit on the cinder block on the right side that is now exposed. Some of these pipes are just temporary and will be readjusted next week. Since the water heater is now gone we are having them rework the plumbing so an extra sink can go in.

Cinder block gone. You can see where the old water heater used to sit. This is a good excuse to pull up the tile, at least in this small area, and replace it.

Then Saturday after cleaning up the mess leftover from 18 hours of furnace work, we headed to soil service and picked up some plants for an herb garden.

Sam also picked up some funky looking flowers for the upper beds.

It was pretty fun, while out planting we could watch the foxes jumping around in the bushes across the creek. There are two baby foxes living on the circle with their parents in a hollowed out old tree behind Eric's house. Oh, tomorrow we have to get something accomplished inside.