When I talked to Steve from Village Landscape Development (VLD) yesterday he explained that they had not been out to work on our project because one of his employees had not shown up on Monday or Tuesday and late Tuesday informed him that he was done for the season for personal reasons.  Unfortunately for us, that employee was the crew chief for our project.  Steve said he spent Wednesday rearranging his crew assignments and assured me there would be people and materials at the house today.  When I left at 10 AM there was no sign of either, and no phone call letting us know when we might expect to see them.

I stopped at AAA Appliance to pick up the HVAC filters I ordered yesterday and then went to Lowe’s and bought the Square D Homeline electrical panel value pack.  It’s a 100 Amp main breaker panel with 20 slots and came with five 20 Amp single pole breakers.  I bought two ground bar kits, as well as a 20 Amp and 30 Amp 2-pole breaker (for 240 VAC devices).

As I was getting in the car to come home Linda called to see if I remembered to buy the weatherproof outlet covers for the outside outlets by the deck.  I had not, so I went back in to get them.  Apparently I forgot to buy some other electrical things I needed because I ended up with a non-contact voltage sensor, an outlet tester that works with GFCI outlets, and a system for determining which breaker supplies an outlet with having to turn breakers off and on until you find the right one.

When I finally got back to the house we installed one of the new filters behind the large return air grill in the living room.  We had to trim pieces of foam weather seal and pack it in to the small gap around the filter to force air to flow through the filter rather than around it.  We turned on the A-C to check the airflow and decided to check all of the registers.  There turned out to be return air ducts in all three bedrooms, which actually makes more sense than a single return in the living room.

The return air duct in the master bedroom had fiberglass insulation stuffed in it, presumably to cut down on winter heat loss, but there was no filter material.  Of the two supply ducts only the one farthest from the air-handler seemed to have airflow.  We removed the return air grill and cut a piece of the old living room filter material to fit and screwed the grill back on with the filter material behind it.

The return duct from the small bedroom had a thin piece of filter material behind the grill and adequate airflow from the supply duct.  We removed the return air grill, cleaned the filter material and re-attached the grill with the filter material behind it.  The middle bedroom had good air flow from the supply register but nothing to filter the air going into the return air duct.  We cut another piece of the old living room return air filter and installed it behind the return air grill.

I think we now have filter material on all of the cold air returns.  It strikes me as very odd that all of these air return ducts do not come together and then feed through a single filter.  We turned the A-C on and let it run while we had a quick lunch.  Except for the poor airflow to the one of the two supply registers in our bedroom, everything seemed to be working so we turned our collective attention to our next task.

The Coleman compressor/condenser unit was noticeably out of level.  Linda weeded around the base and trimmed back the rhododendron as the leaves of the closet ones were being sucked up against the heat transfer panels (radiator fins).  Once we had a little space around the base of the compressor we lifted the low side with a 3′ crowbar and slide a couple of bricks under that edge to hold it.  We had an old, unopened, bag of paver base so we used that to fill the large gap under the compressor base.  I scooped and placed it with a garden trowel and packed it with the end of a 1 x 2. We raised the unit a little and pulled the bricks out.  A minor tweak and we had it level.

We used the circuit tester to finish checking all of the outlets in the garage and the library and map what each circuit breaker supplied.  We discovered that the switch to the left of the sub-panel controlled an outside outlet mounted very high on the wall just under the soffit.  We have no idea why that outlet is installed where it is; perhaps it powered deicer cables or some other roof/gutter-related system at one time.  I was getting some very strange voltage measurements at the switch and at the outlet so I replaced both of them, but that did not change the readings.  I put a weatherproof cover plate on the outlet while I was at it.

Steve showed up mid-late afternoon with the excavator, his nephew Spencer, and a large role of plastic drain tile.  He used the excavator to move a couple of large boulders around back and then dig trenches for the drain tile.  He assured me there would be a crew here all day tomorrow, and he would be here to supervise them.

I needed to trim a stud in order to install the new electrical panel in my desired location but was unable to cut it with any of my existing tools.  What I needed was an oscillating cutter, so I headed back to Lowe’s and got one.  I was about to use it to trim out a section of a stud when I double checked a measurement and realized it was supporting the drywall that formed the northwest corner of the library.  Removing it was definitely not a good idea and that forced me to rethink the installation of the new panel box.  I do my best thinking when I’m asleep, so that was the end of my work for the day.