Things have been pretty busy around here, as usual, but I managed to squeeze a little 914 time in this weekend.
I was going to start mounting up the used heat exchangers I bought years ago, so I pulled them out of the shelves to get started. However, once I got a good look at them, I decided I had to spend at least a little time trying to clean them up.
Here's how the first one looked:
I tried a few cleaning chemicals lying around in the garage, but none of them made a noticeable dent in the baked-on crud. So I stopped, stepped back and thought a bit (yeah, I almost set the smoke alarm off with those thoughts
) -- what gets used for cleaning baked-on oily gunk? Oven Cleaner! So I went up stairs, and managed to dig out a can from under the sink. I still had to use quite a bit of elbow grease while I was at it, but it did a reasonably nice job.
I did top and bottom of both heat exchangers, wiped them off and then took them outside and hosed them off. I think they turned out pretty good:
It ended up taking a couple of hours, but they look sooo much better than before.