The Cellar: a friendly neighborhood coffee shop, with no coffee and no shop. Established 1990.
1 of 1- xoxoxoBruce
- The Future is Unwritten
Offline - Registered: 10/15/2020
- Posts: 4,340
My Personal Current Event
Well last weekend, that's current isn't it?
Anyway, the weather turned a little colder and I noticed Saturday it was getting chilly in my bedroom which is the warmest room due to heat from electronics, lights, and a fart now and then. So I check the boiler emergency switch at the top of the cellar stairs and turned the thermostat up a couple degrees.
Sunday morning is was 64° inside and I flashed on all the articles about how healthy a cooler bedroom is for sleeping. Of course no mention of how much harder to get out of bed.
So I go down and the boiler isn't running, hit the reset and it tries but won't go. Gage (I never had much faith in) says empty tank. Crap.
Since it wasn't real cold weather I sent the supplier an email telling him it looks like I'm out of oil.
First thing Monday morning 239 gallons in the tank, but it still won't start.
Pretty sure it has to be bled and primed. Messy job so I'll let them do it since they hadn't done the yearly service I had paid for yet.
He took off the stack(chimney pipe) and unbolted the top of the outer jacket.
Inside is the cast iron vessel with the water, the firebox below, and paths for the flu gasses around the water chamber to the chimney. This cast iron vessel is closed off at the top by a heavy steel plate bolted on with a flange in the middle for the stack. The plate has a flange on each side to keep it stiff.
Now inside this top plate are 7 nuts... tree nuts. I only got a picture of 6 because one got stepped on.
No idea how they got there. Coming down the chimney they would have gone to the firebox.
They aren't burned so it must have been this summer.
After finding a way inside the jacket, climbing to the top, they'd have to push them through the fiberglass insulation between the top plate and the top outer jacket.
Damifino?
Freedom is just another word for nothin' left to lose.
- griff
- A Magical Woodland Creature
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- Posts: 2,942
Re: My Personal Current Event
With the bumper crop of nuts this year, I guess the squirrels are getting more creative. Warch would not be pleased.
If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you. - Louis Brandeis
- glatt
- TM
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- From: Arlington VA
- Registered: 10/13/2020
- Posts: 1,120
Re: My Personal Current Event
I'm sorry. What a pain.
Are those walnuts? They look very white. Walnuts are usually green when fresh, and dark brown as they decay. Maybe if you stuff them in a boiler they get white before they decay. Maybe the flue gasses are hot enough to cook them but not so hot they would get scorched. I dunno though. Our flue gasses get pretty hot. You hurt your hand if you touch the stove pipe above the furnace.
A year or two ago, I opened the storage hatch to our eaves to get a couple extra pillows because we were having company in the weekend.Opened the contractor garbage back that keep the dust off them, and found several hundred tree nuts.all around the pillows.
I had captured a flying squirrel a few months prior, and sealed a hole under the valley flashing that I found. And I guess these were the stash it had left behind. At least the whole mess was already in a trash bag. The guests got brand new pillows.
- Happy Monkey
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- From: DC
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- Posts: 494
Re: My Personal Current Event
They look like hickory nuts to me.
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- Big Sarge
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Re: My Personal Current Event
I think they are hickory nuts too. I love to eat them, but it is such hard work for the little bit of meat you receive. We had three large hickory nut trees in the front yard of our farm years ago. As a get, we used them for slingshot ammunition
- tw
- Member
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Re: My Personal Current Event
Hickory nuts roasting on a boiler's fire
Gray squirrel singing round the flue.
Repair man making out his next big bill.
And family dressed like Eskimos.
Everybody knows this winter need not start this way
Hired help to make the showers warm.
Tiny tots with noses running wild.
Well find it hard to sleep tonight.
... A Christmas song with 63 more days till Christmas. Bad songs have started already.
Last edited by tw (10/23/2023 8:37 pm)
- xoxoxoBruce
- The Future is Unwritten
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- Registered: 10/15/2020
- Posts: 4,340
Re: My Personal Current Event
Definitely not Walnuts, they are much larger and under the green skin is a pulp more than 1/8th inch thick around the actual nut shell. I've got tons of those damn things of the Black Walnut variety.
On Monkey and Sarges suggestion I Googled Hickory nuts (/Euell Gibbons) and I agree that looks like them. These are a little smoother but may be premature.
If the boiler had run they would have been very brown and possibly black because that plate is over the fire and super hot. It would have to be a small mouse or very tiny squirrel to get in there also there was no teeth marks on the nuts. If it's head was big enough to hold one in a cheek it's head wouldn't fit... plus 7 of them.
Curiouser and curiouser... maybe it was Hamas.
Last time I was up to my house in MA I found a stash acorns under the pillow.
Freedom is just another word for nothin' left to lose.
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