Fighting fire

It began inauspiciously... a 20+ year old fire pit which hadn't worked in 10+ years or so, maybe it's time for repairs.

What could possibly go wrong?

So, we called the retailer, they sent a guy, he looked it over, and said it was "too old", couldn't be repaired. A hundred bucks, please. 

That can't be right. They just want to sell me a new one... and sure enough, soon came the "offer" to buy a new one, at a mere $4,400. 

My thought pattern was, OK, so with cars, the transmission goes. Do you just buy a new car? It depends... how is the rest of the car? Motor, tires, body, AC, brakes, and so on? There's gotta be a repair possible on this thing.

Hence the call to a heating/cooling company, a referral from another retailer of LP fire pits (and grills, and such).

Guy two comes out, checks it over, says it needs a thermocouple. Which I happen to have! (shocking, I know). But mine is the wrong size, and the right size turns out to be unavailable (Whaat? How can that be? Oh, never mind.) So, there goes another $120.

What then would a guy in 2024 do next?

Dial up Amazon, of course.

Ding ding! They have all the parts!! Hooray!! Stainless steel pan, burner, and gas hookup (sold separately for some reason). Since I knew my old hookup was, well, old, I thought, why not, and bought the whole shebang. $210 total.

All I have to do is disassemble the old, zip in the new, and voila, fire!

So, job one, how many tools does it take to remove the old pan?

Well, all of the above, plus one more, the actual winner of the contest, the wonderbar, which is a foot-long prybar. When rusted-in hex head sheet metal screws resist nut drivers, pliers, vicegrips (standard and needlenose), 1/4" sockets, and so on... even filing the hex back on to the heads failed.

But that trusty wonderbar (not pictured) saved the day.

So here's the new pan, and hookup hoses, and yes, even a new propane tank. $19 to fill the old one, or $24 to swap it for a new one... I'm not an accounting professor, but it seemed prudent to dump the aged tank. This stuff does have the potential to explode, right?
 

 

 

 

 And I thought the disassembly took time... little did I know about the cleaning of the pit glass. To wit:

On the left, the original glass plus volcano-bits sludge left over from the pre-glass era (when the pit had actual fake logs). Second from left, a Calphalon colander I used to rinse and separate the good (glass) from the bad. Naturally, it wasn't a perfect sorting mechanism, so I had to do the separating literally piece by frickin' little piece (frustration intended).

The large rectangular pan is the the mostly-cleaned glass, and the bucket on the right is the capture vessel for the flush process. I hand-picked the colander, glass bits to the pan, volcano bits to the bucket, for hours on end.

The Zen of the Art of the Chicken in the Breadpan Pickin' Out Dough...

So now we're down to hooking up the gas supply to the pan, and to the tank, and flipping the new pan over (look Ma, no screws to rust!). I needed one more stop at the hardware store to get two 90-degree elbows for hose routing, and here's the finished assembly:

 

And, the grand finale, to load up the glass shards (which don't quite cover the burner tubes), turn on the fuel supply, and spark the fire. Here we are at about half-throttle:

And the accountant does the tally: pan and hoses, $210, new LP tank, $24, two elbows $14, total $248. Oh and we'll pick up an Amazon 10-lb. bag of glass shards at $24, so DIY parts total is $272.

Let's see, new pit, $4400, minus repair costs of $272 and "house call" costs of $220, leaves us in the neighborhood of $3908 we didn't have to spend. 

 Of course, that's Linda's money...