Let There Almost Be Heat

The OCD electrician's dilemma.   

Let me explain the picture.   When you are wiring AC, like you have in your house, black is the hot wire and white is the neutral.   But, when you are wiring in DC, like from batteries, red is the positive or hot wire, black is the negative or ground.   So this explains the dilemma.   In a mixed project like this where I have sometimes the black is electricity, sometimes it is not, it gets kind of confusing.   What I have been doing on the 12 volt side is to put a short length of heat shrink tubing around the black wire to indicate it’s true status.

But I really have to admit one crazy element of working on this project… I haven’t done anything with 12 volt in years.   I suppose it was model trains when I was in high school.   I have done so much electrical work is, “This is 12 volt”.   I can touch this if it is on or off.   And, this is 110 volt.   If I touch this, and it is on, it will kill me.”   Mixed system.

But mostly this night was filled with getting the final connections done on the furnace and getting the gas turned on.   I had been really close a couple of nights ago but I decided to change that design just a touch an put in a coupler instead of a place where I had a tee.   So after another trip for hardware purchase I was set to get it going.

It was a short coming of my past that lead me to a bit of trouble in getting the furnace all hooked up.  I am used to doing all of my building inside an environment where we are doing some cooking and cleaning.  When I was picking up stuff at Johnny Menards store, it didn’t occur to me dish soap would be in short supply where I was going to work.   Usually I work at home, there is always dish soap at home.   The magical dish soap fairy must see to that.  It wasn’t until I got everything hooked up and got ready to turn on the gas that I thought of it.  I dug around the shop and found some organic spray cleaner, whatever the hell that is.   Lucky to get that even, I guess. 

Basically, hooking up gas fittings with soft copper, there are two types.  The first is called flare, the second is called compression.  I think flare is the older of the two.  I feel like it is the most problematic to get to seal.  However most appliances come with flare connections.  So at least some of your work is going to involve these fittings.  To form them requires you have to buy a special tool but at least fortunately they are cheap.  I didn’t really plan for this.  I had one at home but this project is here in the city and I wanted to get it done.  It was ten bucks to buy the new tool.  Oh well. I think I will plan to leave it behind at the shop when I am done.

They are easy to operate, these cheap flaring tools.  Stick the gas pipe through the tool, the angled or flared side of the tool toward the end of the pipe.   Leave about an eight of an inch sticking up.   Tighten the screws down ends of the tool to lock the pipe into place.Then you have sort of a saddle deal that loops over the pipe holder and a pointy deal that sticks down into the pipe.   Turn the screw, the copper is flared out, or expanded, so that it will form the female end of the coupling, where the male end is what is usually coming off the furnace or stovetop.

You know the thing that is really funny?   I am going to leave it like this.  The way I wrote it, straight out of my head.   Because this is how I have done it more than once.   It wasn’t until I got to this point here of writing that I realized I had forgotten a step.   You will too.   It’s the easiest step to forget.   This project tonight had four flare fittings, in the process of creating them, I forgot this step once.   If you can do better than 75%, you win.  The flare nut has to go on first.   

What happens when you put the pipe into
the wrong size hole of the flare tool.   You
get a crimp in the pipe that makes it unusable.

You will be there.  Looking down at your work.  The perfect flare.   You will be thinking, “Finally, you have got this flare fitting thing figured out.”   You must have let just the perfect amount of copper stick through, tightened the flaring point the perfect amount.   Then you will realize you forgot to put the nut on first.  The way flaring works, you can’t get the nut on the pipe after the flaring is done.   You have to do that part first.   In a few rare occasions you will be able to work the nut up a short length of pipe if the other end hasn’t been flared, or had some other fitting attached.   Usually this doesn’t work out though.   It doesn’t take a whole lot of a bend in soft copper to make the sidewalls bow out into an oval.  You won’t be able to move the nut past this point.   Usually you end up having to cut off the perfect flare to make another one.

The second type of fitting is called “compression” and this is where you slide a nut with a brass band around the pipe and then tighten that assembly onto the copper pipe and it’s fitting.   These fittings have been improved in a couple of ways since I last used them.   The brass band is now permanently fixed to nut.   I thought this was nice because before it was possible to have the band too far away from the end of the pipe and when you went to tighten it, you couldn’t get it to lock down all the way.   Nice.   The second improvement adds a small brass tube to resist the tendency of crushing the copper pipe if it is over tightened.   Of the two I find compression to be the most foolproof and so was what I ended up using wherever I could.  

This is a pipe bending tool.   A spring which is sized to just
fit over the top of your soft copper pipe.   It will prevent you
from bending the pipe too far and having it buckle.

When I first turned on the gas I realized I had a leak.   I could actually feel it with my fingers between the tee and the valve.   A fairly strong leak so I shut off the gas right away and even opened up the garage door for a few minutes.   Then I dug around in the shop a bit and managed to find a bottle of spray cleaner.   It wasn’t the best, but allowed me to find where it was and thereby get that leak sealed up.  I really thought I had it stopped but as it turned out the soap solution of this organic spray cleaner was not that strong, it didn’t work all that well.

I had a class to attend at a conference being held at a local shopping mall.   The mall had a parking ramp attached and I was really just thinking of making this my first off grid night.   But, when I came back to the van after the day’s classes, the smell of propane gas in the cabin was very strong.    I opened up the back and turned off the gas at the tanks.  Then I cracked the windows in the front, and fanned the side doors a few times.   I didn’t want to create too big of scene.  When I was up at the bar for the social later I started thinking about what would have happened if that baby would have blown?  I would have been in the locked down shopping mall, watching FAUX News and seeing reports of a suspected terrorist car bomb at a large shopping complex.  I would have been looking at the helicopter footage on tv, thinking, “shit, that looks kinda close to where *I* parked.   I hope the van’s ok…”

Gas to the furnace hooked up, now just need
to add the run from the Tee up to the where
the cooktop will sit.

I was at The Professor’s last night, meeting his new gf, eating some pizza and sleeping a night on his sofa.  I was telling him this whole story.   We all had a good laugh.   He enjoys hearing about my predicaments and near disasters.  I think it makes him even more appreciative of his quiet, staid, university life.  Things almost never literally explode in his life.  So it was he, during my story, who was the one who laughed the loudest.   I felt like it was a bad time to remind him that I used his apartment address on my van title to get my in state license plates and just how unlikely the first person the FBI arrested would be the guy in the back row of an IT conference in the mall…