We heat the main part of our cabin with a propane floor heater (when we don’t light a fire) that is original to the house. When we were out of town the pilot light went out. We had our dog sitter just turn it off and we would fix it when we got home.br /br /So we got home and re-lit the pilot but it kept going out. A friend told us to replace the thermostat before taking anything apart in the floor. If the thermostat (which was 40 years old) was bad then there would be no spark to run the heater which somehow caused the pilot to go out. The thermostat unscrewed from the wall and had only two wires, red and white. A new thermostat cost $17 at Home Depot (we went strikecheap/strike simple) and told us where to connect the existing red and white wires with R for red and W for white labeled right on the new thermostat. The entire thing took six minutes and yes the heater still works.br /br /Seeking out a solution in the actual unit would have required taking things (what’s a thermocouple?) apart in a tiny crawl space in the dirt which would have taken more than six minutes and in this case not fixed the problem.br /br /I think there are several ways to apply this (span style=”font-style: italic;”this /spanbeing simple and cheap) to investing in terms of strategy, products chosen, method of analysis and anything else you can come up with. Just keep it simple relative to the time you want to put in and stick to cheap, easy to understand products. Like many things, investing doesn’t have to be span style=”font-style: italic;”that /spandifficult.br /br /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZckZ-8naz0/SUWGxryqBcI/AAAAAAAACPo/fYDD6eDV9Q4/s1600-h/bernanke.jpg”img style=”margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 172px;” src=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZckZ-8naz0/SUWGxryqBcI/AAAAAAAACPo/fYDD6eDV9Q4/s400/bernanke.jpg” alt=”" id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5279774326288680386″ border=”0″ //aI found this image on a post from a href=”http://www.investmentpostcards.com/”Prieur du Plessis/a. Hopefully we won’t end up needing two or three of these to go to the grocery store.

Last 5 posts by Roger Nusbaum

• Process Drilldown - October 23rd, 2009
• Sunday Morning Coffee 10-18-09 - October 18th, 2009
• A Little Followup From This Morning - October 8th, 2009
• Wednesday Roundup - October 7th, 2009
• The Big Picture for the Week of October 4, 2009 - October 3rd, 2009