the house was cold this morning, and i wouldn't have been surprised at all if i saw my breath. despite the cool temperature, i heard only the furnace kicking in just once. i knew what the culprit was, that new nest thermostat with the 2-3 degrees higher temperature reading. i checked the thermostat's condition with the app on my phone and of course it said it was keeping it nice and 60° like, but i knew the actual temperature was much colder. in fact, the rest of the day, the furnace never kicked in until i had enough and played around with the thermostat, forcing it to power up the furnace.

an easy solution would be to just take into consideration the higher thermostat reading and set the lower temperature a few degrees higher (so in my case, 62° instead of 60°). but it's the principle that's at stake: i expect a thermostat that sells for $250 to have an accurate temperature reading. that it can't even do the most primary function of a thermostat is kind of disappointing.

my father dropped by in the afternoon bringing with him leftover turkey from last night. i showed him the nest and explain the higher temperature reading problem. his solution was easy: just set the temperature a few degrees higher then. i asked him to call xiaowu to inquire when he'd come back to my place and fix my washer; he only got his voicemail. my father was going to market basket so i tagged along to pick up a few grocery items. i didn't need too much because with so much turkey on hand, i'll be eating turkey the rest of the week.

when i got back i went to the dollar store to return the magnetic dry erase board i bought last week. it's so heavy it won't even stick to my fridge without falling off. back at home again, i stowed my bike in the basement (raining this evening), but not before reattaching the rear light bracket. i replaced the washers on the screws with some larger ones, but i ended up not being able to use the split washers, so i'll have to keep my ones on them to make sure the nuts don't vibrate off over time. afterwards i raked some leaves in the backyard and put them outside for the garden refuse collectors tomorrow morning.

i pushed my father to call xiaowu again. my mother called me back and told me that my father instructed me to buy the broken washer part myself instead of waiting for xiaowu. it's been 11 days already, i could've easily fixed it myself, but as a professional courtesy, i was waiting for him to get back to me. but if he's too busy to come, i'm more than happy to fix it myself.

i sort of knew the part i wanted, but i opened up the washer anyway just to double check. the problem is inside the lid switch assembly. there are actually two switched inside: one to stop the water when the lid is open, the other is to activate the motor once the lid is closed. that latter switch was the one that's broken. i pulled it out of the assembly to check the model and to also make sure the switch itself is actually broken. xiaowu called it a cherry switch, and already tested it last time to determine it was indeed bad, but i ran it with a multimeter myself, and after following the instructions on the youtube video, i verified that there's no continuity when the switch is in the on position (so basically it's always off). i then went onto ebay and bought a new 207166 switch for $14 including free shipping. it said it'd arrive next monday, but i'm hoping maybe it'll get here saturday (shipping out of mechanicsburg, pennsylvania) so i can do some laundry over the weekend (it's been over a month since i last did laundry).

i couldn't wait until 6:00 in the evening, which is when i usually turn up my heat. it'd give me a chance to see the nest in full action. i couldn't do it yesterday because it simply wasn't cold enough inside the house to turn on the furnace. i set the temperature to 68° and waited for the house to warm up. everything seemed fine at first, but the hot air stopped at just 64° actual temperature, even though the thermostat read 68°. it was still cold in the house. a 4 degrees difference! so i cranked up the thermostat to 72°, which brought it up to 68° finally. a 4 degres difference is totally unacceptable! but later i discovered it was only a 2 degrees difference, as the actual temperature inside the house was a 70° (so naturally i brought the thermostat temperature down to 70°).

i did some more research and i think one thing i'd like to try is to repull some thermostat wires so i can have common C wire to provide constant power to the nest thermostat, instead of it having to trickle draw power from the main furnace cable. maybe that way the thermostat wouldn't have to work so hard to recharge its battery, with the hopes that it'd lower the internal electronics temperature by a degree or two. my father and i have done a little home wiring work before, so hopefully this won't be too hard (especially since i live on the first floor with easy access to my basement).

my father also dropped off some vegetables to be pickled as sichuan paocai when he was here this afternoon. earlier i washed the cabbage and quartered them. by now they were dried so it was time to put them into the paocai jar. i filled the one empty jar, and decided to remove some paocai from the second fermenting jar so i could add some raw ingredients. i made a mistake adding the new ingredients to the top because now i can't get to the old paocai at the bottom. the old paocai from the second jar wasn't that good though, tasted too sweet and the cabbage leaves were soft instead of crispy. maybe they needed more time to ferment, like the jar i had for thanksgiving, which had been fermenting for 17 days.

for dinner i made some turkey rollups. after midnight i turned the heat back down, to 62° to compensate for the 2 degrees difference.