January 11, 2018
Plugs and Beeps
I successfully tested my snowblower when I filled its gas tank the week after Thanksgiving. Then, when it started snowing in December, the darn thing wouldn't turn over for love or money.
I didn't spend much time working on it, because the first substantial snowfall happened right when my sister and her family came to visit, and who wants to be doing small engine repair when you've got company? And then when they left we were hit with weeks of Artic chill, and even with a garage to keep me out of the wind, I was in no mood to work in 3°F conditions. Plus it was so cold that the snow was only falling in an inch or two at a time, and little snowfalls like that are not troubling to just shovel.
Today, though, the weather was a glorious 55°F, and tomorrow there's a foot of snow forecast in the afternoon. Schools have already announced early closures. My wife's office is basically shutting down at 1 PM. So if I was going to get the snowblower fixed, today was the day.
Long story short, it needed a new spark plug. The old one looked fine and still had a good gap, but it just wasn't firing. I got a new plug from Wal-Mart, put it in, and the snowblower fired up on the first pull. Victory!
I figured I should let it run for a few minutes just to make sure, and also to let it get up to operating temperature, so I opened the garage door and let it run. As I came back upstairs from putting my tools away in the basement, I realized I could hear a loud beeping over the noise of the blower. The garage door wasn't sufficient ventilation to keep the garage's smoke detector from going off! I went back outside to turn the snowblower off and reset the alarm, and discovered that the neighbor from across the street was already walking up my driveway to make sure our house wasn't actually on fire. It's a good neighborhood, people here look out for each other.
Anyway, long story short, removing the snow tomorrow shouldn't be too challenging.
I didn't spend much time working on it, because the first substantial snowfall happened right when my sister and her family came to visit, and who wants to be doing small engine repair when you've got company? And then when they left we were hit with weeks of Artic chill, and even with a garage to keep me out of the wind, I was in no mood to work in 3°F conditions. Plus it was so cold that the snow was only falling in an inch or two at a time, and little snowfalls like that are not troubling to just shovel.
Today, though, the weather was a glorious 55°F, and tomorrow there's a foot of snow forecast in the afternoon. Schools have already announced early closures. My wife's office is basically shutting down at 1 PM. So if I was going to get the snowblower fixed, today was the day.
Long story short, it needed a new spark plug. The old one looked fine and still had a good gap, but it just wasn't firing. I got a new plug from Wal-Mart, put it in, and the snowblower fired up on the first pull. Victory!
I figured I should let it run for a few minutes just to make sure, and also to let it get up to operating temperature, so I opened the garage door and let it run. As I came back upstairs from putting my tools away in the basement, I realized I could hear a loud beeping over the noise of the blower. The garage door wasn't sufficient ventilation to keep the garage's smoke detector from going off! I went back outside to turn the snowblower off and reset the alarm, and discovered that the neighbor from across the street was already walking up my driveway to make sure our house wasn't actually on fire. It's a good neighborhood, people here look out for each other.
Anyway, long story short, removing the snow tomorrow shouldn't be too challenging.
Posted by: Boviate at
09:26 PM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 368 words, total size 2 kb.
19kb generated in CPU 0.0106, elapsed 0.0485 seconds.
41 queries taking 0.0402 seconds, 186 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
41 queries taking 0.0402 seconds, 186 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
