I remember way back in the days of yore (2005) when we first turned on the AC in the house we had this strange problem with water in the basement. The laundry room would be constantly damp and horrible. We called Lauren and she came out with a shop vac to vacuum up the water, she left it for us, I think that was her way of fixing it. So I think she eventually called her friend Brett’s dad (who is actually an AC guy) or so he seemed. I think that he told us that we needed a new pan. I say think because I could be making that part up. I kind of remember Jesse saying that he thought it needed a new pan too. So flash forward to the same time this year. We turn our AC on for the first time and… wow… looks like we never got that fixed. Because it took Lauren (our landlord) about… say 6 months to get the fan replaced in the AC unit outside we decided that we would tackle this problem ourselves.

Surprisingly Jesse was up for it. He usually squashes my ideas of “ghetto rigging” something. I think it’s due to the fact that his room is hotter than a nutsack. Though I just chalk that up to the fact that his dad is a carpenter and my dad has a basement full of crap. We do things the Schumaker way around here. But fixing things around the Vienna Sausage Factory takes recycling to a new level.

Taking apart the AC was a chore enough; I wanted to quit halfway through it. I swear to god that all the screws were coming from the inside, like they shrunk down the workers and had some kind of incredible voyage to put this thing together. And since we didn’t have all the right tools it took about 2 hours of banging, sliding, talking about it, screwing, and finally using the Dremel cut-off wheel to get the thing open. Oh what treasure did we find? Only that the drip pan, or rusty doughnut as I’ll refer to it, Had A hole the size of my finger in it right where it was supposed to drain out. Which BTW makes all those times I spent in the basement with Lauren while she tried to figure out why the pipe wasn’t draining really sad and hilarious.

So we go the damn thing peeled open, now what do we do? Well I had to reach into the bowels of hell to unscrew the pan from the “A-coil” (I leaned terms!) I took it outside to clean it off while Jesse went on a Home Depot run to get the supplies. There was literally a dixie-cupfull of horrid rusty paste in the pan. It had almost gone back to mud. Ashes to ashes, AC to dust. I Think parts of this was from the coils themselves actually rusting, which can’t be good. So after I scraped all of that up and washed out the bottom I realized that on one side there were probably 7 smaller holes, not just the big one. We decided that it would be futile to just patch the holes, the metal was so gone that another one would just show up to take it’s place. So we needed to re-enforce the bottom of the pan. I knew just what to use! The sheet metal from the front of the Pregerator! I knew I didn’t just keep that because I was too lazy to cut it up to fit in the trash. So Jesse comes home with some assorted glues and adhesives and we get to work. We covered the bottom of the drip pan with something that smelled suspiciously like model airplane glue. “Building model airplanes he says, crazy glue sniffer” then while that dries Jesse uses the plumber’s epoxy to fill in the bigger holes. There’s no way this can’t be awesome. Jesse had the bright Idea the next day to coat the pan with Fiberglass resin to make it more waterproof, we’ll see tonight if that was a good idea. It sounds good, right?

I’ll update tomorrow with some pictures too!

Later!