Shoot the trouble

For the second time in 2 weeks our heat has gone out. On the coldest day of the year, of course. The reason has nothing to do with the cold, but it's just one of those things, where it couldn't go out on a day when it's in the 40's or 50's.

It was a fortuitous blend of luck and logic that allowed me to figure out that this was going on before it got really serious. We've been spending most of our time in the den and have an extra heater in here to keep it warm without having to heat the whole rest of the house. So it wasn't cold where we were sitting.

The lucky part is that I decided to work out shortly after this had occurred. The first thing I noticed was that the temperature on the thermostat was down a degree, but that by itself didn't tell me anything. But when I went upstairs to change, I noticed that the radiator in our bedroom was cool, which it should not have been when the thermostat was down (logic there). So after I changed and went down to the basement where our Airdyne is, I peeked in the room where the boiler is and saw that the display was red.

Red is a nice color. I like red. But usually when some sort of electronic display is red that is not a good sign. So I went in and looked at it said a pipe was blocked and that the system had shut down. I pressed Reset, as it suggested, and it started up but quickly shut off again.

This was not good. So I immediately called and emailed our plumber, who called pretty quickly and came over. He was able to unblock the pipe. He said the boiler probably needed maintenance, but that it would work fine for the moment (which it has been for over 12 hours now).

I stood and watched him because, you never know when you'll learn something. I had no illusions that I'd know how to fix a boiler, but I wanted to watch his process.

One of the summer jobs I had when I was in college was working for my father's company in California. Most of my duties consisted of what is called bench tech work. I sat with a few other people along a bench with a soldering iron, a voltage tester, some spare parts, and a meter. I would take a non-working amplifier from a pile, check it on the meter to see if it needed fixing or merely adjustment, and then check the individual components with the voltage meter to see which of them were no longer behaving as they ought to. Once replacing the non-working parts (transistors, capacitors, little electronic stuff) I would test with the meter and adjust settings inside the amplifier to make the readouts look right for putting it back in service.

There was nothing interesting about this job. I grew to hate it after a while. But I did learn something from it, a basic life technique called troubleshooting. Anything, be it an amplifier or a boiler or a vacation, that requires some sort of process should be fixed by troubleshooting it. At it's most elementary, it means understanding the process, seeing how something has to get from beginning to end, then checking the key points along the way to ensure that it all works properly.

This is why any troubleshooting guide for something electronic starts with the question, "Is the unit plugged in?" Because that's the most basic thing. Electric things won't work without power. From there it can branch off any which way, depending, but there's always a logical progression of locating where the problem is.

So what does that have to do with plumbing? Nothing. Everything. I watched the plumber as he worked through finding where the blockage was, and he started at where the first hose attached to the boiler itself. As soon as he did that, a bunch of water poured out and he was able to restart the boiler. The hose was fine, so he moved on to the next section and found the blockage. He put it back together and it seems fine now.

So what did I learn? Generally, that troubleshooting is troubleshooting. If the readout says drain blocked, you start at the beginning of the drain and follow it through. If the people who "fixed" it last week had followed the pipe all the way through, piece by piece, they would have found that the blockage they released had lodged in a subsequent pipe. Before leaving the plumber watched that water was draining through to the pump that eventually moves all the drained water to the sink.

The specific thing I learned is how to make the heater run when the drain is blocked. Just remove the hose from the boiler, let the water spill out, and the worst you'll get is water on the floor. A better alternative than no heat when it's 8 degrees outside.