Welcome back. As you can see the New House Blog is back from its winter hiatus, and new projects and updates are being planned and executed for your reading enjoyment. We start this Episode with our hood update, and then we throw in a couple more updates just for fun.
Hood Update: Demolition
Previously when I've used the word, "hood," in this blog it was usually in reference to our neighborhood, but in this Episode it mostly refers to a different kind of hood - not a 'hood made up of houses and people, but hood made of sheetmetal and electrical wiring. Behold the generic white stove hood that came with our New House.
As you can see, it's nothing special - just your ordinary, average, garden-variety hood.
And here's the view from below. It's a little dirty, but otherwise it's not really outstanding in any way. And up until recently it seemed to be working as designed. The fan made noise, the light came on, and the top of the hood collected dust. Every once in a while, however, even though the fan was running at its highest setting, the smoke alarm in the next room would sound and a thin cloud would form in the same next room - even when nothing was burning (for some reason, this only happened when I was cooking, and not when Becky was cooking). Clearly the hood was not successfully sucking up smoke and steam adequately, and we wondered if it was correctly connected to an exhaust duct, or if it was just blowing the smoke and steam back into the house.
The only way to know for sure how well the hood was connected to the exhaust duct would be to take the thing down and inspect it, and if we were going to go to that much trouble we might just as well replace the thing with something better. So that's what we did, as you can see in the pictures below.
Can you tell where the old hood used to be?
We were happy to discover an actual exhaust duct, but it seems that the pre-Bishopians who installed the old hood did not have it adequately connected to said duct. Instead of using the correct ends of ducting and fitting them together the way they're designed to fit together, the pre-Bishopians - well, it's kind of hard to describe without more pictures, so I'll just say that the old hood was kind of connected to the duct, but not correctly or completely. Our theory is that because of the pre-Bishopians poor ductworking skills the smoke and steam was not all going through the exhaust duct, but some (a lot, possibly) was leaking back into the house so that it could set off a smoke alarm in the next room.
A Quick Note
This project really illustrated something we had not fully considered up until now - the contrast between the pre-Bishopians and the people who actually built our New House - the Builders. The Builders were competent professionals who did good work, but the pre-Bishopians - the people who actually lived in the house in pre-Bishopian times - really knew how to mess things up. So we see in this project that all of the ducting was already in place for the hood (work done by the Builders), but the actual connecting of the old hood to the duct was shoddy and sloppy (work done by the pre-Bishopians). To sum up: our New House, as it was originally built by the Builders, has good bones and is solid; it's the pre-Bishopian house-dwellers who did all of the shoddy work that we've reviewed and corrected in the New House Blog.
'Hood Update
And now for a brief 'hood update (as in neighborhood). While driving recently I came upon the rat rod in the picture below. It's not exactly in our actual 'hood, but it is in the same city as our New House.
Hood Update - Install
This is the new hood, pre-installation. Look at that powerful new fan. At peak power the airflow is 220 cfm (220 cubic feet per minute). We don't know the rating of the old hood's fan, but it was far less than 220 cfm.
Conveniently, the Builders included a fully-functional outlet in the hood duct space. But you never know with the old outlets in our New House, so we decided to replace it.
As it turns out, however, the pre-Bishopians had not messed up this particular outlet, and it turned out to be in great shape when we opened it up and removed it. This is the new outlet. It's white.
This is the new hood installed, with the fan duct properly connected to the exhaust duct - no more smoke leaks for us. The hard part was trying to hold the hood in place, connect the ducting, and screw in the mounting screws all at the same time. This was truly a two-person job.
Here is the new hood installed, with both the fan and the lights working. You can almost see that air flowing at 220 cfm. In the bottom right of the picture you can see the work light we used on this project.
'Hood Update - Cactus Garden
Our cactus garden is definitely in our 'hood, and we got an early start on our spring planting by adding a new cactus to our cactus garden.
Say hello to our Eve's Needle Crest cactus (opuntia sublata cristata). Included in the soil amendment was a healthy heaping of our very own home-made compost.
We will continue to keep you
bIsh
