Central Heating Woes :-(

Last week a small puddle appeared in the hallway. Closer inspection confirmed my fear that the water was coming from the heating system distribution pipes. Damm! I had to rip into the wood clad ceiling to fix the problem; fortunately not too much of it had to be removed - just as well as it is pretty difficult to do without causing a lot of damage! Anyway, after locating the leaking joint I semi-drained the heating system in order to re-solder.

Refilled, purged of air and tested - all appears to be OK. I really hope this is the last leak I have to deal with! Oh and of-course I had to fit new wood panels to close up the ceiling and refit the cornice. In all,  2 days to complete.

Tower preparation

The successful resolution of QRM re-kindled my enthusiasm to erect my antenna farm! Here the final section of my lattice tower is being painted. Once installed the tower will stand around 15m; but before I do that I need to add the supporting components in order to fit the antenna rotator.

There's quite a lot of science surrounding optimum antenna performance on HF; higher isn't necessarily better - it really boils down to what you what to achieve, the type of antenna, and the topography of your particular location.

G3TXQ has a detailed explanation on his website http://www.karinya.net/g3txq/hexbeam/height_2/

Quite honestly, 50ft is already scary high for antenna maintenance! .... and according to G3TXQ his study has shown that "if we can get the antenna up around the 40ft-50ft mark we will be within 1dB of the optimum height for short-haul and medium-haul paths on all bands 20m thru 10m. And we will probably accept the "half S point" penalty that our modest height suffers on the long-haul paths" 


- that's good enough for me!   

Hunt for QRM!

Since moving permanently to our country home I have been plagued with very strong S9+ QRM (man made electrical interference) on the HF bands. I've not noticed it before because I previously only operated 2m VHF FM. 

I've been very concerned about this noise since it was making HF operation unbearable with this horrific static. I was worried that the source of the interference may have been coming from a nearby faulty line transformer or perhaps even my neighbor's micro hydro generator! I didn't rate my chances of resolving the problem in either scenario. Who cares that their chinese voltage regulator is spewing RF garbage right? 

Well in a moment of desperation, this evening I decided to start investigating the source. I used my handy Yaesu VX-5 to track down the culprit. To my relief the noise disappeared as I moved away from the house. OK, something inside is generating this horrible noise. Since it was already dark, hitting the main circuit-breaker was not an option without incurring the wrath of my wife and son ;-) so I began eliminating fridges and electrical gadgets one-by-one.

Eventually I found the evil pollutant - a crappy AC/DC adaptor from Taiwan that was providing power to an equally badly shielded GSM box that provides a cellphone circuit to the house alarm system.

What a difference! I can now hear faint signals on all bands! No more QRM :-)

Heating Success!

I purchased the radiators from the same company that supplied the pellet boiler. To be perfectly honest I didn't do any fancy calculations to work out the thermal load of each space/room that I wanted to heat. I just made a reasonable guess based on what I've seen installed in other buildings etc .... Naturally to some extent the radiator size is governed by the physical location, under windows etc ... so I used double panel radiators to ensure that I had enough heating output range - I figure that I can always reduce the flow if the room gets too hot!

So I labored for 7 days, installing all 10 radiators; I had most of the pipework already in place during the initial house construction but I had to make some modifications and additions to accommodate the new location of the boiler and several other radiators - it took me longer than I expected and I'm shocked at how expensive copper is these days! No wonder PVC is now used.

On Tuesday afternoon the heating engineers finally turned up to install and setup the pellet boiler. It took them a day and a half to plumb everything in and setup the system parameters. Then came the moment of truth - to fill the system. Consider the fact that most of the pipe-work was soldered together several years ago and that 90% of the system is no longer easily accessible you can imagine my apprehension and concern for possible leaks! It was also quite late 9:30pm, so even less keen to potentially flood the house!  but the installers were eager to finish the job so I reluctantly agreed to continue.  As the water rushed around the pipes I held my breath and listened for the worst. As the pressure reached 1 bar I began the process of purging the system of air by 'bleeding' each radiator. So far so good! When the boiler reached its operating temperature the circulation pump kicked-in and sent hot water through the system - pisssssshhhhh oh! Water sprayed out of several joints in the laundry - sh#* - part of the pipework that I had modified that day (because the original routing created a potential air trap) had not taken the solder properly - this is what happens when you move/reuse joints; you have to be especially careful to re-join everything with plenty of solder. So the clean-up pretty much killed the rest of the evening.

The next day, the system had to be drained of fluid in order to repair the leaking joints. This took a couple of hours and yet another trip to Villarrica to purchase more anti-freeze. That's one of the downsides to living in the 'campo', you don't have a DIY store around the corner to buy parts. So once again the system was filled, purged of air and brought up to temperature. Success! no visible leaks, but not all the radiators were getting hot. To remedy this, radiators that were hot were closed to increase the flow to those that were cool; after a second round of purging air this did this trick - all 10 radiators were now hot  - fantastic my central heating project is finally complete!

Central Heating Project

This is probably one of the more ambitious projects I've undertaken, especial since I'm not a plumber by trade. Anyway .... the story begins as far back as 2001 when I began to design and install the pipe-work for the heating system. Over the years the house has been slowly finished, but up until now no radiators had been installed since we have mainly occupied the house during the summer months and so the pipework remained unused for many years. But planning ahead, I knew that someday would would live in Pucon on a full-time basis and thus would require central heating.

Originally I expected to use a standard Gas combo boiler (10 years ago when the price of gas was half reasonable); but gas has probably tripled or more in cost today and so I looked around for alternatives. In the end I settled for a pellet boiler due to the very low emissions and cost per KW/hr which works out at about $35 pesos (~$7 cents) at today's prices. I also love the fact that biomass pellets is basically renewable fuel which can even be produced at home from grass and leaves with the purchase of a small pellet mill; and of-course pellets are completely safe and easy to store and handle unlike other heating fuels.

We took delivery of our new 29KW boiler last week. We decided to transport it ourself from Temuco to Pucon to save some cash - but I kind of under-estimated the size and weight of this thing! When the fork-lift dumped the boiler in the back of the truck - which sank considerably (240kg), I soon had a moment of panic thinking how the f$%k am I going to unload this thing back at the house!

Fortunately, we have some good neighbors whom were eager to help. Since no one had a forklift or any way to even use a simple winch, we had to think of some other way to get this beast out of my truck and into the house. Last year we had our entrance/drive way leveled out which just happened to create a level change which matched the height of the rear of my truck which allowed us to slide the boiler out. We (five men) then rolled the boiler over to the house using 3 circular fence posts. It was comical to watch, but effective ... like transporting a tremendous Moai from the stone quarry to its final resting place.

In part 2 I'll describe the installation of the radiators and the Pellet boiler.

Picking Blackberries

Autumn is approaching here in Chile and the blackberries are beginning to ripen. We had a heavy down pour of rain on Friday, so the next day we took advantage of the sunny day to pick blackberries with our son Ethan. It reminded me of when I was a kid picking wild fruit :-)

Our dogs love blackberries!