November is proving to be the month that never ended; HVAC company still cant find their butt with both hands so I’m still on portable AC units in the server room.
The tally so far is 6 HDs and an old 1950 that have died from heat stroke. And one of my backup 1-ton Tripplite units failed yesterday, so I replaced it with this cheap LG home unit we had laying around… I give it a week, tops, before it melts down from the 24/7 duty cycle.
Basically I’m on my backup backup AC at this point, and still no firm date from the HVAC company on fixing the 5-ton CRAC unit.
Anyway…
Winter has taken a break this week and it’s supposed to be dry and in the low 60’s in the afternoons – so I drove the Hellcat to the office today, which was a hoot. It was 38 degrees when I pulled out of the garage, and at any temperature under 50 degrees any gas pedal at all results in wheel spin, so I basically drifted the whole way to the office.
The car had been sitting for a couple of weeks, so that meant doing the full pre-ignition checklist:
- tire pressure check (I run them high when I’m parking it for a while to prevent flat spotting, so I need to bleed out a little pressure for driving)
- pre-start oil level check
- pull the battery tender
- dry-start (hold the gas pedal down to turn off the injectors so the engine just cranks for 20 seconds – make sure the oil pressure needle moves
- check the oil level again to make sure some is in the upper engine
- Finally, start the car and wake up the neighborhood
After it has sat for a while it takes a bit over a minute to come off of cold idle, and even with the garage door down to contain it a bit it’s still extremely loud – especially at 07:00 in the morning.
I hate being “that guy”, but it’s just a function of the car. It’s loud. It came from the factory loud. Loud is one half of its entire “Fast and Loud” identity…
I do make concessions for the neighborhood though. Like – if it’s an option I’ll leave for work at 05:30 – with the Hellcat I don’t leave until 07:00. I also never start the car on the weekends before 10:00. And I always have the garage door down when I start it to attenuate it a bit.
So far, so good. No one has left a nastygram on my door. The neighbor lady did mention in passing “I love your car! Though it did scare me one morning…”
She had apparently started her Mini in her garage at the same time I started the ‘cat, and she thought something was wrong with her car because it never sounds like that. 🙂
So, that’s the update. I plan to take some vacation this month – but with me being the only ‘technical person’ on staff anymore and everyone else taking vacation, said time off might just be a couple of Fridays…
Leave a Reply