lol. Holy shit – it’s January 8th ! I’m a lazy sob. My lame excuse: the radiant heat system for the house and shop is NMC (not mission capable) which is a military aviation acronym for; broken. won’t start or run. not functional. It happened on December 22nd. Almost 3 weeks ago. I already said it was a lame excuse…
Back to Dec 22nd. I noticed the great room was a couple degrees cooler than the set point on the slab heat thermostat. The thermostat display indicated it was calling for heat, but the boiler was not answering the phone. Went to the mechanical room. On the panel for the switchable relay (small box with lots of low voltage wires and 120v wires) I should have observed a red light illuminated for zone 3; the heating zone for the great room. No red light illuminated, and the boiler was dormant. Went to the other 4 thermostats and raised the set points. All five thermostats indicated they made the call for hot water. Back to the mechanical room and confirmed: zero red lights illuminated for all five zones. I shut everything down and went to the brief (4 procedural steps) troubleshooting tree. Quickly completed step 4, and a fault tree dead end. My USAF maintainer friends would know the next step. Replace the MEC ! lol Called the 800 number for Azel, the manufacturer – no answer. Easy search produced their website. Clicked on “contact us”. Keystroked the story above and waited patiently.
When we constructed this place, I had the foresight to include a heat pump to the fully ducted air conditioning system designed for the house. We also have a free-standing wood stove in the great room. Both serve as a backup/reserve heat source if the slab radiant heat should ever become NMC. I activated the thermostat for the heat pump and it quickly brought the house up to the comfortable set point. Azel product support sent an mail the following day, requesting one additional troubleshooting step, not found in the instruction manual. Quickly accomplished that, reported the result via email reply, and got a reply almost immediately, asking for a copy of my purchase receipt. The switchable relay has a 3 year warranty. We purchased it 2 years ago as a line item with the entire heating system kit. Another reply followed, telling me a replacement relay had been shipped and included tracking information. I did not expect to see it until after Christmas and possibly not until after the new year. It arrived on Dec. 30th.
Swapped it out on January 2nd. No joy – same symptoms. Still NMC. While waiting for the relay to ship from Canada, I spoke to Lucas to tell him a new relay was on the way. Lucas is the HVAC guy who installed the entire radiant system above the concrete slab to include the boiler, various valves, copper tubing manifolds, etc. He let me know he was leaving town on a planned vacation to Key West, departing Dec. 29th, back home on January 5th. Currently waiting patiently on his list of people to see and things to do.
The only other news for December; I cut and split firewood from a large Ash tree that fell during construction. My brief effort, didn’t produce nearly enough firewood for the winter. Was hoping we wouldn’t need much firewood until the end of January.
Well… that didn’t work very well. Since it’s January 8th: I’ll report we got a foot of snow on Jan 5th, with bitterly cold temperatures until the end of this week. We are burning wood like crazy, because the heat pump can’t keep up with the extreme cold temps outside. I dug the truck out of the snow yesterday and will purchase firewood later today.
No worries here.
I’m finally keystroking this overdue monthly missive, sitting in a comfortable chair, watching the fire in the wood stove and the birds at the feeders on the deck, while sipping on hot coffee, jazzed up w/Baileys Irish Cream. It could be worse….
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