Time to deal with the furnace again
- Laura Moore: Housebroken
- November 14, 2023
- 413
When the nights grow cooler, many homeowners begin to suffer furnace anxiety. This is a condition arising from the fear that the long-dormant furnace isn’t dormant but dead.
One year Taller Half couldn’t take the suspense, so he called in the furnace physician to give our furnace a complete physical. Happily, the prognosis was good — the furnace was declared fit for another year’s warming duty.
The first really cold night, we turned the furnace on and — you guessed it — nothing happened. An emergency call was made to our furnace physician, resulting in instructions to put extra blankets on our beds and that he would be over first thing in the morning.
After a cold, miserable night, the furnace fella arrived and diagnosed a minor-part problem. However, as we homeowners know, a minor problem involving a major appliance is an oxymoron. The needed part, though relatively inexpensive, was not available locally.
It took us two days, many phone calls and a frantic desire to be warm before we finally located the needed part. Once installed, the new part did its magic, bringing our furnace to life and filling our house with warmth. We were ecstatic and so relieved.
Furnaces are a diverse breed of appliances. When I was a child, our house had a prehistoric-looking dinosaur of a furnace that lived on coal. Even though it was a filthy
old monster, it gave us plenty of heat and was totally reliable.
The first house Taller Half and I bought had a floor furnace that lurked under a grate in the hall. It was an oil-guzzling, old troll who would heat up the grate to foot-burning temperatures. It was an irritating, inefficient piece of equipment with only two settings, off and on. We spent five uncomfortable years with it before we escaped.
We currently live with a power-hungry electric furnace. It has an insatiable appetite for electricity and is dependable unless the power goes out. One very cold night last winter, the power did go out while we were sleeping. As a result our little dog now spends all winter
nights sleeping tucked under the covers in our bed.