First Heat!!

It was perhaps the most significant day of the new century: today we obtained hot water for our stock tank soaking tub.

We started the day by attaching the excellent drain that we had bought with the Chofu heater from The Island Hot Tub Company.

Then we attached support 1x6s to make sure the plastic tub wont bend too much when sat in

Next, we drilled ports for connection to the hot water heater with our newly acquired hole saw, and added self-adhesive foil/foam insulation to the tub

And connected up the ports to the heater

We hooked up the water pump, crossed our fingers and ate lunch


Unfortunately, we soon had water leaking out of most of the connections that we had just hooked up; our fancy new drain was dripping slowly and the lower cold water intake was leaking at two places. We moved the heater closer to the bath to allow us to slide the port assembly further onto the pipes, re-clamped everything and started filling again. It required one more iteration of tightening, but we soon had the tub quite full with no (okay maybe a little) leaking. After a heroic effort by Chloe, we (well, she mostly) assembled the eight foot tall chimney, drilled holes with a cobalt bit, and sunk screws into the heater collar and the pipe sections. Finally, we clamped the chimney cap, put some oak (The same oak that I had cleared from the roof the previous weekend!) into the stove and waited, biting our nails as we dipped our hands into the water


(Notice the bucket of water nearby in case of problems)
I calmed myself by continuing on with the upper deck



It started heating slowly at first: we would dip our hands in occasionally and exclaim "hey, that feels warm!". We were all a little doubtful that it would work, so the first assertions of warmth were met with a little dubiousness. Soon however, the stream of hot water coming out of the upper port was undeniable. Indeed, it got extremely hot and was painful even to stir. The design of the heater, since it has no pump, causes an accumulation of hot water near the top of the tub, which needs to be mixed in with the colder water below. A normal person would use a paddle, but since I am not normal and didn't have a paddle, eventually resorted to using a shovel to stir it, but only after cooking my arms. After a relatively short while, the water was really, really hot and I decided that it was time to inaugurate the tub.

When I was little, my dad took me to various hot spas in Japan, and I remember the water seeming unbelievably, almost painfully hot. Since then, I haven't really experienced that same level of heat. I should say "hadn't" because that water in our tub was excruciatingly hot, and it was only getting hotter! The instructions state that the heating rate will decrease when you close the door to the stove. This is true, but because of the tremendous rate at which the water was being heated, it still was cranking out almost boiling water. In fact, I screamed a little when I got in, but gritted my teeth and subjected myself to the crab cooker. Soon after getting in I asked Chloe to start up the generator to pump cold water into the tub. After a period of pumping cold water in and letting the hot water drain out we were able to withstand the heat and soaked for a while

My face was red for about a half an hour afterwards from the heat. Gail and Kenji also took baths. Heres Kenji doing his best mountain monkey impersonation:

After hammering a few plywood boards on the top and sides we called it a day and headed to Auburn to try out a restaurant that we must have passed a few hundred times: "Lou La Bontes". The food was fine but nothing special, and a bit overpriced. On the way back we hit very bad traffic. We arrived in SF around 11:00 pm, roughly four hours after leaving Alta.