Sooo glad I'm not hosting the Christmas dinner...

[cameraman]

I'm finally finishing up wrapping the Christmas presents at 2AM:rolleyes: when I get hit by the sudden smell of burning wiring. There was an odd sound so I killed the music and I heard the 60hz hum of a jammed electric motor and low and behold there was smoke coming out of the cold air return. So I make a mad dash for the basement and kill the power to the furnace.

Nice, nothing like opening up the skylights and windows when it is 20° out.

Good thing that I was awake because that motor wasn't going to stop until it was molten. Aren't those damned things supposed to have thermal overload kill switches built in?:flame:

[G.]

Lucky no flames.

When it gets fixed, find out if there was supposed to be a thermal cutoff.
Something else to keep one up at night...

Take care.

[Insomniac]

Yikes! Glad you caught it!

[dando]

Good thing you weren't sleeping @ the time. :) and :(

-Kevin

[cameraman]

Did you know that if you have an electric clothes dryer you can disconnect it from the usual vent and attach a new length of dryer vent and use your dryer to heat your house...

[dando]

Did you know that if you have an electric clothes dryer you can disconnect it from the usual vent and attach a new length of dryer vent and use your dryer to heat your house...

:rofl: Sorry but... :rofl: ;)

-Kevin

[BigIrlFan]

HElls BELles my brother BUCk did that for one hole winter. HIs furnace stopped blowing teh hot air an he dint have the money to fix it so he hooked up a egstra long hose an would put it in the room he was in to keep warm. DINt need to be too long. WAsnt liek this was a double wide or nothin liek that. I use to take my clothss out of the washer and dry them at his place for free. THIs was a win win baby. hahahahahahahaha

[cameraman]

When your life rates commentary by BIF...

So did you folks know that as of May 2013 you won't be able to buy an 80% efficiency furnace? Those shiny new >90% units require horizontal PVC vents so you need to drill an access hole through the side of the house. My furnace lives in a root cellar, circa 1880. The current vent goes straight up where the original coal stove sat. Putting a PVC vent out through the side of the house would require digging a well outside the house and then coring through an 18" granite river rock foundation. The rocks are a mixture of granites and quartzites and the mortar holding it all together is 140 years old. The coring guys said that the wall would most likely crumble. There's no way on earth that they would touch it. It would also require a drain which would mean a sump pump arrangement to pump the water up and out of that root cellar.

So I have a 16 year old 80% unit that needs a new blower motor/fan unit. Fixing it will cost quite a bit but I'm not crazy about paying the rather inflated price to swap out the furnace tomorrow. But if I don't replace it with a new 80% unit by May I will be seriously screwed.

So I spend ~$500 to have this furnace repaired now so I can properly shop around for a full on replacement with much needed duct repair sometime in the next four months:shakehead

Yeah, my life is BIF-worthy

[dando]

When your life rates commentary by BIF...

So did you folks know that as of May 2013 you won't be able to buy an 80% efficiency furnace? Those shiny new >90% units require horizontal PVC vents so you need to drill an access hole through the side of the house. My furnace lives in a root cellar, circa 1880. The current vent goes straight up where the original coal stove sat. Putting a PVC vent out through the side of the house would require digging a well outside the house and then coring through an 18" granite river rock foundation. The rocks are a mixture of granites and quartzites and the mortar holding it all together is 140 years old. The coring guys said that the wall would most likely crumble. There's no way on earth that they would touch it. It would also require a drain which would mean a sump pump arrangement to pump the water up and out of that root cellar.

So I have a 16 year old 80% unit that needs a new blower motor/fan unit. Fixing it will cost quite a bit but I'm not crazy about paying the rather inflated price to swap out the furnace tomorrow. But if I don't replace it with a new 80% unit by May I will be seriously screwed.

So I spend ~$500 to have this furnace repaired now so I can properly shop around for a full on replacement with much needed duct repair sometime in the next four months:shakehead

Yeah, my life is BIF-worthy

Dude I just went through that last year...$15K for two new furnaces and two new compressors. Each less than 10 years old and serviced several times. I also didn't qualify for the tax credit that I was told was valid, and never received the rebate that what quoted. :irked: :saywhat:

-Kevin

[Gnam]

Those shiny new >90% units require horizontal PVC vents so you need to drill an access hole through the side of the house. My furnace lives in a root cellar, circa 1880. The current vent goes straight up where the original coal stove sat. Putting a PVC vent out through the side of the house would require digging a well outside the house and then coring through an 18" granite river rock foundation.

Are you sure you can't vent vertically?

This installation manual for a 90% furnace says a roof or sidewall vent is possible. (bottom left on page 7).
http://www.weil-mclain.com/en/multimedia-library/pdf/weil-mclain-pdf/products/furnaces/90-percent-downflow-furnace/90_furnace_manual.pdf

[Napoleon]

Are you sure you can't vent vertically?

I have a really high efficiency furnace (best available 10 years ago) and thought they vented it to the side I seem to recall them telling me that if they used the chimney they would have to sleeve it.

[nrc]

Excellent. Another regulation forcing choices on consumers. Gas companies objected to this rule based on the fact that it would be cheaper for some to switch to electric than to meet the requirements for a 90% efficient gas furnace. Hard to imagine electric being cheaper overall but it might be worth looking into.

[cameraman]

Actually if I could put a 95% unit in I would in a heartbeat. You would have to be daft to put in an 80% if you physically could put in a 95%. My previous house had a sandstone basement and we were able to carefully core a hole for the vent. If I could do it there I should be able to do it anywhere. Then this fall I took a closer look at this house...

The problem is this house. The saints:rolleyes: that built it collected stream stone from a prehistoric landslide/beach/canyon mouth area nearby. It is mixture of stones ranging in size from a baseball to a watermelon all goobered together into a wall 18"-30" thick. Nobody in their right mind would use this stuff to build a house, perhaps they were paid by someone to haul it off and they thought hey we could build something...

They did a strange stepped foundation in the 1890's around here. There is a taller outer section that holds up the sill for the exterior wall then it drops 8" and there is a second sill that supports the floor. The floor is not attached to the wall, it ends about 1/2 an inch from the wall. The sill for the exterior wall is actually an inch above the finished level of the floor. The gaps all get covered by the base board. Another "benefit" is it makes it impossible to run any kind of wire from the basement into an exterior wall.

No one here has ever seen a foundation built with this particular rock, they had to build it much thicker than usual because it is unshaped stones so the bigger ones are on the outside wonderful middle of small stones and mortar. The gas & water people who installed their lines in the 1910's punted and put the kitchen & bathroom in a back porch addition, no basement with a 3" "crawl" space.:irked: Then in the 1940s they put an addition off of that and in the 1960s they put on another addition off of that one which is on a slab. The plumbing for this house can only be accessed by removing the floors.

Anyway this particularly odd structure requires an 80% furnace and I'm going to buy the finest one that they make and hope that in 30 years they will have invented a better way to heat a house...

http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii35/Cynops/Utardconstruction_zpsb4b7a730.jpg

[cameraman]

Are you sure you can't vent vertically?

No the new ones are super efficient and generate CO2 and a whole lot of water and the gas is cool. If you try to blow it up it will condense on the tubing and all that water will come back down inside the pipe. That's why they have to have water drains and you can't put them in unheated spaces, like an attic, because the drain will freeze and flood your house. They're really energy efficient but they lack installation flexibility.

[Insomniac]

No the new ones are super efficient and generate CO2 and a whole lot of water and the gas is cool. If you try to blow it up it will condense on the tubing and all that water will come back down inside the pipe. That's why they have to have water drains and you can't put them in unheated spaces, like an attic, because the drain will freeze and flood your house. They're really energy efficient but they lack installation flexibility.

Thanks for the explanation, I also wondered about that.

[Napoleon]

camaraman, I assume you have thought of this but why not have the tubes go out to the wall, take a turn up through the floor then turn again trough the wall over the stones. You would have to (unless you didn't care about them coming through the floor in plain sight) do it somewhere where either it would already obscured, like under kitchen cabinets or where you could build something that would do the job (like, say, a built in bench in front of a window).

By the way, I am a little puzzled about your talk of condensation. I believe it happens, but in my case my furnace (I looked at it when I came home) the exhaust has a noticeable rise from the furnace to the wall so that any condensation runs back to the furnace then at the outside wall takes a 90 degree turn up (which would naturally block water) before heading outside. I assume in the furnace there is a way for any condensation to go into the tubes that run to the drain (which I have) but how is any of that different then just running it up the chimney?

[cameraman]

I could come up through the floor and then go outside on one wall but remember there are two lines required, in & out so it would be a rather kludgy looking thing somewhere in the middle of a long wall.

You can do vertical terminations easily enough but I can't use the current "chimney" because it is a vintage steel pipe left over from the 30s that is encased in a thick layer of asbestos. It is still quite solid & is usable for a new 80% unit but it would have to be abandoned in place and replaced with a new pvc pipe for an HE unit and I would have to open a wall to install it and add the air intake. But you're talking about opening a horse hair plaster wall that by some miracle isn't cracked or separating from the lath. I really don't want to do that.

Houses like this one define the term Catch 22.

[Indy]

eco-nazi

No politics? :gomer:

[nrc]

No politics? :gomer:

Fair enough. I've revised and extended my remarks.

[Napoleon]

I could come up through the floor and then go outside on one wall but remember there are two lines required, in & out so it would be a rather kludgy looking thing somewhere in the middle of a long wall.

Mine are about a foot apart from each other.

Anouther thing I suppose you could put over it is a gas fireplace. Run the lines through a corner area and put a fireplace in the corner.

It really sounds like you have an interesting place but your issues make me appreciate my late 40s/early 50s bungelow (with some additions).

[Insomniac]

The solution is obvious: move. :D

[Tifosi24]

Cameraman, I am going to forward this thread to my office's resident HVAC/building efficiency guru. You will have probably installed a new 80% unit before he is back from vacation, but he might have some suggestions because he does trainings all over the country. Plus, he will like the challenge that is your house. My hunch, from talking with him when I installed a new furnace, installing a high efficiency unit is possible, but might be overly cost prohibitive.

[G.]

I could come up through the floor and then go outside on one wall but remember there are two lines required, in & out so it would be a rather kludgy looking thing somewhere in the middle of a long wall.

You can do vertical terminations easily enough but I can't use the current "chimney" because it is a vintage steel pipe left over from the 30s that is encased in a thick layer of asbestos. It is still quite solid & is usable for a new 80% unit but it would have to be abandoned in place and replaced with a new pvc pipe for an HE unit and I would have to open a wall to install it and add the air intake. But you're talking about opening a horse hair plaster wall that by some miracle isn't cracked or separating from the lath. I really don't want to do that.

Houses like this one define the term Catch 22.

It's pretty common to use nested I/O vents - hot exhaust pipe nestled inside the cold intake pipe. Makes the vent collection a bigger diameter, but it's one hole, one visible pipe.

No idea if HE units can use the nested vents.