It does sound perfect, Donn! Dereks, your forecast is pretty much the same as mine, since I am not too far from the Western Slope. Tons of grasshoppers here too. My 3 year old has been outside catching them all day. Where are all of the praying mantis this year? They usually keep the grasshoppers in check. The good news today is that DH did all the edging and cut the grass, so I could just putter around the garden. Potted up some mail order plants that didn't get in the ground before the heat arrived. Sowed some more bush beans, and herbs to extend the harvest time. Watered all of the containers on the porch, and cleaned up the pot ghetto from winter sowing, dumping anything that didn't have at least one sprout in it. The pumpkins, cucumbers, and beans seem to love this heat, even the swiss chard is holding up, but surprisingly the pepper plants look horrible. Not sure if I am watering them too much, or not enough. Anyway, I think a bad day in the garden, beats a good day doing anything else!

Lets go back to the old days. When I was growing up our water heater could be set to over 160F. We had ours set to 160F. Nowadays many heaters have a preset limit of 120F or less so that the little kiddies and us clueless adults don't scald ourselves. In the old days the DW had a HEATING element. The wattage was high enough for it to actually do something. Nowadays the wattage has been lowered so the power is no longer there. Also with today's Energy efficiency standards some manufacturer's just set the heater to run for a while and then if the water doesn't get hot enough well to bad..it's gonna shut off anyway but that's OK because at least the manufacturer made their energy star status. Many DW say that you should have the water running into it a 120F. Dadoes makes a very good point. With some of today's DW taking about 1 gallon per fill(mine takes a little less) if your DW is not close to the hot water heater you will not get really hot water. In my case my WH is on the other side of the house and the pipes(insulated) run through unheated parts of the basement - my DW is connected to hot water but the water it gets during the winter months ain't very hot and you have to run more than 1 gallon of water to even get hot water up to the first floor. If distance is a factor your best bet is to look for DWs that can heat the water rather than just maintain it.

So yesterday buddy comes over to look over things with the a/c system and I think we've got things nailed down properly now. The superheat for the given ambient temperature and heat loading from the indoor coil was way off (5F) vs. the 14-15F that it was supposed to be so he had to remove some of the refrigerant (I was quite surprised how little he had to remove to get the superheat up) and we even went as far as measuring the furnace's CFM flow rating using a differential manometer. I'm pushing roughly 1000CFM across a 2 ton coil so which is a tad bit on the high side but my colleauge says it's a margin of safety for the a/c to not freeze over as we have relatively little humidity in the air would means that on the cooler days we wouldn't be heat loading the coil enough which could lead to freeze up. I personally would like to try running my furnace on the lowest speed to get the 855 CFM but I'm not sure how that will affect the superheat. Presumably I would imagine that if a system is charged properly using the superheat method for fixed orifice systems that blower speed shouldn't dramatically impact the superheat values to the point where they're completely out of whack. I would guess that superheat would rise but isn't that sort of a given? I mean hotter days for example would increase loading so therefore superheat should rise no? For the record the pressure reading on the manometer with the furnace on medium low with a 3M 1500 series filter installed has a -0.44 in wg static pressure difference. With no filter the static pressure diff changes to -0.55. Humidity was still somewhat of an issue yesterday night when it was raining but it was quite cool outside. I had to drop the tstat to 21C to force start the a/c on but after just 20 minutes the house was nice and dry and less stuffy. Just for the sake of my understanding does TXV technically do any better or worse job of temperature/humidity control over a fixed orifice system IF both systems were installed properly and charged to near perfection? I have a friend that is looking to install a/c and his contractor insists on having TXV and says that fixed orifice is evil and should never be used. I find that rather extreme to make a claim like that. I've tried to do my own research online and although it's a given that TXV is the way to go I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it will better protect the compressor from liquid flooding + it's more forgiving for techs that do an incorrect charge on the system - critical charge isn't nearly as important on a TXV system vs. fixed orifice. Thanks,

I think you are assuming that the calibration was correct to begin with. If this is a newer system it may have never been calibrated properly to begin w/.. I would calibrate the easytouch to read the same temperature as the heater. I don't know if it's illegal or not to build a device that goes above 104 degrees, but I wish Pentair would make it so my phone didn't ring every time the spa stopped at 104. In many cases with a gas heater you may notice the temperature drift above 104 degrees because all of the residual heat in the piping, and heater. Since the heater doesn't work proportionally it shuts off when the spa hits 104, but the water will still pick up the residual heat coming off the exchanger and return lines.