I am back to heating with (recently) dead trees instead of long dead dinosaurs.

Amazon delivered the cheapie Chinese motor a day early….

And it was all I expected:

Cheaply made, poor fit and finish, mounting holes large and out of spec, fasteners that were non standard, screws that seem to be neither metric or english in size….

Having said that, it was cheap, arrived early, runs well and true, and works.

It is, I think, a (really cheaply made) copy of an AO Smith motor….optimized for cost rather than quality and longevity.

When the real motor arrives, I will keep it as a spare.  Probably put it behind the woodstove this time so it will be there when I need it.

As for the old motor:

The motor shop could have fixed it, but the cost would have been prohibitive. Assuming it was just the start switch (which I think was the problem) the cost for a new switch and replacement bushings and a varnish dip to renew the old insulation (in other words, the minimum “Rebuild” ) the cost would have been within a few dollars of a brand new motor. If there were other issues found after teardown (like a bad start winding) it would have been more…They strongly discouraged me from choosing the rebuild option. They did take the time to find and show me the available motors that they felt would be good quality replacements that should last as long as the original motor. Good people that turned down a job because they felt it was the better option for me.

The original motor, BTW, a Westinghouse (no longer made) date codes to 1978….so that motor is more than 40 years old. It ran a long time.

I almost took the rebuild option but common sense prevailed. Kind of a shame to trash it, really.

Joe has a good point

You might disagree but then you’d be wrong.

So I have this woodstove…a great way to heat the house. Wood is cheap when Ma Nature provides it in the form of deadfalls and storm damaged wood and all you have to do is cut it and split it and I generally need the exercise I get from cutting it and making it into firewood and stacking it and moving it….

The stove has a heat exchanger and a fan and is tied into the forced air (gas) heating system, and it makes it pretty easy to keep the house warm. Very efficient: the fan cycles on and off as the firebox temps go up and down. EGT has to be beyond 250F or so and then the fan blows air through the heat exchanger until everything cools off….so you control the house temps with the fresh air damper. Pretty simple and you can get a load of wood in the firebox to last about 7 hours and keep the house nice and warm on a cold night….and keep the chimney hot enough to not creosote up.

So the other night, the outdoor tamps were near zero F….I filled the stove up with wood, set the damper to a really low burn rate,  and then I went to bed about 11:30 (yeah, I know, what happened to the party animal that was once me on a Saturday night?) and fell asleep shortly thereafter…..and something woke me up about 12:45…I wasn’t sure that it was that woke me. But I was wide awake.  I got up, looked around the house, could find nothing amiss, and went back to bed about 5 minutes later.

just as I started to drift off….Bzzzzerrtttt!…. then silence.

“Odd”, I said to myself: “That sounded like a stalled electric motor”…and the other voices in my head agreed that that is what it sounded like…I waited a few minutes, and there it was again….Bzzzrrtt!

I got up and checked the kitchen fridge,  then the garage heater (turned on ’cause the elderly abandoned and abused cat that lives outdoors was inside due to the forecast below zero temps)…then the garage fridge, then the downstairs chest freezer….and found nothing, all seemed to be good….then, as I was fixing to go back upstairs, I heard it again. For sure a stalled electric motor.

Yep, it was the stove fan. It is a belt drive setup that turns a squirrel cage blower. I turned the switch off (I put isolation switches on nearly everything like that…..Good practice for such events… There is one for the gas furnace too) and tried to turn the motor….nothing seemed seized. I rolled the drive belt off the pulley, and both the blower and the motor seemed to spin freely.

About that time, I heard the “click” as the thermal cutout reset itself. I turned the isolation switch back on on and sure enough, the motor just sat there and buzzed, loudly…no rotation, even with no load.  I turned the switch off, spun the motor pulley by hand and turned the switch back on,,,,and the motor spun. I let it run for a few, and then turned it off. It spun down slowly, not a bearing issue….as it slowed, I flicked the switch back on and it spun up again back to speed….let it spin down to a stop (which it did smoothly, so, again, probably not a bearing/bushing issue…I heard the centrifugal start switch click as it spun down….when it came to a stop I tried to restart it, it didn’t spin…..just buzzed .

So I dunno, a bad start switch? A start winding? It is an old Westinghouse 1/3 HP 1725rpm  48 frame motor….It was old and used and of unknown history (but good condition) when I put it on about 15 years ago to replace the totally trashed Emerson that was there before. I had oiled it and cleaned it but nothing else over it’s life on my woodstove…

I fully closed the damper on the woodstove to starve the fire of air and turned up the gas heat and went back to bed.

Sunday  morning I went to the place where I had the spare (used) motor and found nothing. just space…. I may have put that motor in a different blower for a friend last year when his went out during particularly cold week or maybe I used it on the electric concrete mixer or….who knows?……..but I never replaced it. Not sure. All I know is I have no spare. (Which is unusual for me)

Shit.

Amazon has a cheap chinese replacement for $99 on two day shipping, so I bought one. I have no idea  of the quality of a cheap chinese made Amazon $99 clone of an Emerson motor. It might be great, it might not last a month. ….And I don’t know it the Westinghouse motor is worth repairing, but I will take it to the motor repair shop today and see. The Emerson or Marathon replacement is $350 or so.  The Dayton from Grainger is over $500. I might have a replacement stashed in the pole barn, but I don’t think it is the right mounting/frame type…and I might not even still have it either. Have to go look for it and dig it out and see…But right now it is -2F so that might wait a day.

We shall see.

In the meantime I burn natural gas like a normal person.

Today is National Screwdriver Day.

Act (and drink) accordingly.

You have all afternoon and evening.

(Disclaimer: Be rational, Moderation is the key, don’t drink and drive…)

You are your own First Responder:

Bondi Beach Australia.

Jewish Festival of Lights celebration (Hanukkah).

2 gunmen. 11 dead

Stopped by a bystander (not the cops) who tackled one of the shooters and turned his gun on him.

Cops show up and take charge….too late. 11 bystanders dead, (and one gunman thanks the the courageous bystander).  Bystander is lucky he wasn’t shot by the police though.

Cops got there too late to do anything but take notes and detain everyone for a while. apparently it was the other bystanders providing first aid that prevented more victims from bleeding out. Ambulances were, just like the cops, way late.

They knew these guys were trouble though.  “On our radar”  they said. Funny how that always happens, innit?

It isn’t Whites, it isn’t Orientals, it isn’t Indians, it isn’t South or Central American people…. it is blacks and Arabs (muslims) that commit terror tactics.

We should import more into our country just to keep things lively….

I mean, all three had a thing today of the burials, funerals. graveyards and memorial services of the Ukrainian soldiers being put to rest due to the War With Russia. Grieving parents and all that. Families destroyed, that sort of thing. All solemn and dignified.

I mean, I can see one of them, a single “news” show…., but all three? On the same day (and Sunday morning at that) ? Someone is coordinating.

Interesting:  One wonders….do they have blackmail info on the executives, or have they purchased them outright with monies donated as “Foreign Aid” cash by Europe and the United States?

Someone is running a propaganda Public Relations game here.

I wonder what the end game is?

This time from the Oklahoma City chapter.

Are all the black leaders of Black Lives Matter thieves? Sure seems so

All those Liberal White Women giving donations. All those companies trying to expiate their “guilt” for their success when black people failed to step up and then complained about the result. And those funds were more or less unaccountable….

Did BLM actually help anyone a single black person, , or was it just an opportunity for the “leaders” to loot the treasuries of the organizations (and send money to the DNC, of course)

And just like the reason Africa is a shithole, so runs BLM. Take what you can get and spend it while you can: Something about that culture, those people….

To all of my Jewish readers.

THis time on the west coast…

I gotta ask, do people not bother to look at flood maps? Never pay attention to river flood plains?

I mean, these floods in Washington are not even record river levels….

I would bet lots of real greenbacks that none of these places that are flooding are flooding for the first time. I can almost guarantee that they have flooded more than once in my lifetime…

Are people that stupid that they build (or buy) a house in areas that flood every decade or so?

So everyone in the DNC side of the aisle and the media (but I repeat myself) are decrying the fact that “Unless the ACA (Obamacare) subsidies are renewed, then the pricing for healthcare for a whole bunch of people that have been getting free or greatly reduced cost healthcare will increase “by as much as 5 times”..”

Guess what? That’s what BarryCare did for the rest of us about 14 years ago, about 1 cycle after the act was signed into law….then about 5 years ago, we got it even harder…and not even dinner first……..

Socialized Medicine is great until as the lady once said: you “run out of other people’s money”…

The rest of us have been paying your way and now you shits that have been getting free healthcare get to make the same choice we do every year: pay more or reduce your coverage level.