Stupid Thermostat

After a year and a half of stalling I finally got the gas fireplace in the basement repaired. I hope to relate that excruciating tale sometime soon. Meanwhile the fireplace is working and I have heat in the basement and I can dispense with the tiny electric heater I have employed in my office.

Well, it worked for a day, and then it quit. Works if you turn it on using the switch in the base though, so there must be something wrong with the thermostat. But what could go wrong with the thermostat? I mean there's not much there, just a bi-metallic strip and a mercury switch. Maybe the wire broke, not because anything happened, but maybe during construction it got hit and it's just been hanging on by a thread. No, that's not it, put the meter on the wires and they're fine. It's got to be the thermostat, so I take it down and take it apart and check all the various contacts for connection and find nothing wrong. Put it back together and put it back on the wall and now it works. Grrr! Stupid thermostat.

I think the problem is the same one I had upstairs: very light corrosion, tarnish really, on contact points. In this case I think it was the screw connections for the wire. I suspect simply loosening them and then retightening them would have been enough to fix it.

This used to happen with old Multibus I computers when I worked at Intel. Okay, it happened once. Computer that had been running fine for a long time just up and quit. Took the boards out, polished the gold plated board edge contacts with a pencil eraser and put them back in and that fixed it.

I suppose the reason I haven't had any similar trouble with my PC is that there aren't any additional cards in use, except for the memory sticks, and those get swapped out every couple of years or so. Or maybe they have some kind of new anti-corrosion technology.