Happy Accidents – Counterrotation Edition

This summer has seen a frenzied pace on the homestead, with summer lawn and garden activities, family comings and goings, working on the book manuscript and photography, and now, the final sessions for recording the Gragg Chair video.  Chris my videographer has been even more occupied than I given that last year he started a new, full-time job, he and his bride bought a new (to them) house with all the attendant time sunk into that as required, and just recently a brand new baby.  All that to say it has been almost a year since we were able to get an intersection between our two calendars, and that intersection occurs tomorrow.

Combining my preparations for that with my ongoing Gragg Chair Challenge I’ve been spending a lot of time up in the attic studio workshop, just as we have been experiencing our summer heat wave with many consecutive days up in the mid 80s.  The locals are griping about the heat whenever they get together to chat about anything.  One implication of the warm sunny weather is that the attic workshop is crowned by almost 3000 square feet of uninsulated roof, the material of which is heavy corrugated asphalt panels.  So, if the sun is shining the overhead ceiling becomes a high temperature radiating panel.  My thermometer indicates that the static room temperature is often well over 100 degrees.

To mitigate this effect and make the space useable I have a three-foot low speed exhaust fan.  When it is running and sucking cooler air from lower volumes of the barn, the space is a congenial working environment.  Then, last week the motor burned out for the fan.  Since that motor was one of a group of motors I rescued from a dumpster 25 years ago I was not overly distraught that I only got a dozen years of service from it.  I immediately grabbed another, identical motor off the shelf and installed it.   Only when I threw the switch did I discover that I had failed to confirm the motor’s rotation before the installation, and the fan was blowing outside in rather than sucking inside air out, the way an exhaust fan is supposed to be set up.

The happy ending to the story is that the fan running “backwards” renders the space even more comfortable than running properly!  The robust flow of cooler, outside air flowing over me while working makes my time there even more joyful than I was expecting.  I just might leave it that way.