Well, we're in the middle of a major cold snap. Right now my thermometer reads -27. I've had to redo the support in the middle of the sagging beam, and the door is again pretty hard to open and close. I'm going to get a couple of wedges cut to deal with the problem. That way, the two wedges, which are basically 2x4s that are cut on a long sloping angle, are wedged against each other from opposite sides. Hammering them in toward each other horizontally raises the building incrementally. This way, I won't have to repeatedly try to jack the building up, but will be able to keep raising the center support as the support base sinks into the ground and finds its level. I may not get this done for a few months though, because it is COLD!!!!
I've also had the problem that my drain is freezing. I haven't yet determined the full nature of the problem, but I'm hopeful it is not too serious yet. The long flexible tube that comes out of my silver recovery chamber and then goes down my floor drain is what is freezing. What I find surprising is that it is holding fluid. The tube goes down the drain, which goes down through a bunch of rocks into a five gallon bucket full of rocks, which has holes in the bottom and sits on sand about 6 feet below the surface. I'm wondering from the feel of it whether the tube is down far enough that it is resting on a rock in the bucket, and surface tension is keeping some fluid in the tube. I'm going to try to have it a little less far down and see if it freezes up.
But I fear it may be a bit more than that. The reason...there's a cold wind blowing up through the floor drain. Just noticed a week ago. The floor drain should not have any air passage from outside, so this is a bit disconcerting. The pipe that goes down from the drain is completely packed around with fiberglass between the floor joists and foam below that, so there shouldn't be air sneaking up along the edges. I wonder whether the glue joint partly down the drain has broken and gapped...not sure what else could account for the air movement. Or maybe my expectation of the foam/fiberglass arrangement impeding airflow is not so accurate as it should be, in which case I really need to put in a lot more floor insulation. Also a job for next spring.
One of my fears, with the kind of cold we've been getting, is that the ground will freeze so far down that my drain doesn't drain. As in the sand will freeze. As long as I keep working out there and running water down, it will probably keep it from freezing too hard. But we put rocks instead of dirt on top of the drain because we didn't want dirt falling down in and filling in the rocks below the drain, or the sand, or the rocks in the bucket (though that is capped). We put a plastic tarp on top of the rocks, and then dirt on top of the tarp. So there is a lot of open air space above the drain below ground surface. Not sure exactly what that does, but it seems like it would allow cold to penetrate faster.
So that's the present situation on two fronts: drain and level.
The third front is the heating. I originally started with a plan to use propane because handling propane is much cleaner than handling fuel oil, and I didn't want to have to worry so much about the fuel storage area. I then decided to use an infrared propane heater because I found a good one on sale, it didn't require venting which amounts to lost energy, and I expected to need to run the vent a bunch anyway. In fact, one of the things I really wanted in this darkroom was a good ventilation system because I have had trouble with insufficient ventilation before and I get pretty good reactions to darkroom chemicals.
I had a question earlier in the thread about whether the condensation from the infrared heater would be a problem. I didn't know, and was interested to find out. Well, the experience so far is that it isn't a big problem for working. In fact, it really knocks the dust down, and can be a major help in that regard. Much quicker negative cleaning and preparation when the infrared heat has been on a while.
On the other hand, with insufficient ventilation, the infrared heat starts to get my eyes pretty upset. Not sure if it is some byproduct from the combustion or what, but I have to vent pretty heavily while the heater is running. And if I leave the infrared heater on without the vent running overnight, it sets off the CO detector on the unit and the heater turns off. Apparently the drainhole air leak isn't enough to keep that balanced. I also have two in-line ventilation fans. One, on the outgoing air line, stopped working a couple months ago. I'm curious whether that had to do with the amount of vapor passing through it causing trouble. Or maybe the dumb thing still works but the blades are frozen in place? Meanwhile, I've had to go out and clear condensation off of the incoming vent, which must mean that after pumping air in, air is escaping back out after the fan is turned off. It was almost completely blocked by ice crystals and the ventilation was becoming a problem, which prompted me going to look.
The irony of all this is that, I now have to use a little electric space heater inside the building to keep from having the place freeze up. The other alternative, running the vent and the propane heater, sucks propane out like nobody's business, and just isn't sustainable. Meanwhile, we don't want to talk about my electric bill the past couple months...
So it looks like I'll be shopping for a vented propane heater, which I probably should have done in the first place. My to-do list at present now reads:
1. Vented propane heater.
2. Check drain pipe for joint breaks.
3. Insulate drain pipe. For this I'm going to put fiberglass in plastic hefty bags and seal them shut, then wrap them around the pipe under the building and tape the bag to itself to hold it in place. But not until I get a sense of the leakiness of the pipe.
4. Install permanent mid-span support pads with leveling wedges.
5. Blow-in insulation above foam floor insulation (if I can find somebody that does this here).
6. Insulated skirting.
Most of this is optional at present, as I'm already working away and doing well, but it would help if I could get these done before next winter!
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