Cool and clear, warming throughout the day. I hope.
Monday was partly cloudy and warm, with a hint of cool in the breeze once I got out of town. My client is about 30 miles outside of Houston, all freeway or country road, and the weather out there is always cooler than in town. They got through the freeze without much trouble. He’s got a big whole house generator, that FAILED to start, but they were only dark for 3 hours. The company that maintains and services the gennie, specifically so it starts when needed, sent out a guy right away and solved the issue, but they never needed the gennie again. Some switch was left in the wrong position. Anything can fail. Standby generators with automatic switches seem to be especially prone to failure, maybe for the same reason that “emergency food” universally tastes horrible- no one really expects to use it. In this case, they lose power frequently. The gennie gets used. It gets ‘exercised’ every week automatically. A service guy comes by regularly and maintains it. And it still failed to start automatically.
They had one outside plumbing line break during the three dark, windy, and very cold hours (no power, no well pump, no trickle for the faucet). There are a couple of lessons in this whole tale, including one that isn’t very obvious. His plumbing is all pex homeruns from a manifold in the attic. He could have simply closed the valves on the lines leading to outside faucets, and then opened the faucets to drain, without affecting the rest of the house. His plumber had him do that afterwards to stop the leaking at the faucet until he could come by and fix it. Simple right? But if you don’t know how your systems work, or what their capabilities are, even very smart people can miss straightforward preventative measures, and simple fixes.
So how did my actual work go? The problem was two pieces of gear got out of sync, probably during the power outage, and a reboot cleared the issue. While I was there anyway, I cleaned the outdoor TVs and cleaned all the camera domes. We talked about the rip and replace, and that will be going forward now. Just have to work out the design, get all the gear ordered, and find the time for an install, and we’ll be good to go.
Today I’m hoping for a dropoff at my ‘industrial’ auction house, but IDK if that will happen or not. I’m sure I can find more to do. Like paperwork for taxes- I spent the first part of my day yesterday doing Jan-June. Plenty more in that pile that needs doing.
In fact, plenty of stuff to do. I should really get started.
If you don’t have a list of what you need to do before CWII or the economic collapse really get going, you might want to make one. Just sayin’. Then you’ll have a better idea what to stack. And you KNOW you need to get stacking.
nick