Stupid heat pumps

So our boat is in refit right now, and even though the workload seems to be reduced in theory, it’s been more stressful than ever. I can at least be thankful that I’m no longer in Engineering Department, since it still seems like Engineering division officers are forced to spend long hours at work all the time due to some new and exciting broken part.

One thing I’ve noticed though is that pretty much every job I’ve had that’s supposed to be “easy” (especially being the Tactical Systems Officer) is a lot harder in practice, since I actually attempt to perform all the duties/responsibilities instead of just leaving things to rot. It’s fine, as I know I’m accomplishing a lot but then I worry about what the guy who relieves me is going to do. :)

Anyways, as you may have inferred from the subject the heat pump in our house seems to have broken. The refrigerant line on the outdoor coil was completely iced up (which is unfortunate given that this is only supposed to ever happen in wintertime, and it’s quickly approaching summer here).

I’ve looked it up a bit online and it seems the scenario is either dirty coils (although the ones I can see look fine), clogged coils, low refrigerant (which implies a leak), or something other semi-minor issue. It’s times like this when I really value the Navy-style fashion of having gauges and pressure switches everywhere, at least I’d have a chance at figuring out what is going on. This system has no user-visible status of the refrigeration cycle other than when the lines freeze up. :-(

Although my time has been sharply reduced between Emma, Ian, and refit I’m still working on my programs. I’ve recently committed the purge log feature I recently blogged about. It doesn’t run by default however. I’ll try to make a release tonight but I also want to make a kdemultimedia introspective for JuK so we’ll see.