More on Heat

January 8, 2007

I thought I would give you a little more info on our heating situation. Of course to tell the story I really need to start at the beginning. Greg has been worried about a noise our furnace has been making lately so we called a repair company to send someone out to look at it. Last Friday a repairman showed up and gave us the all clear. While he was here Greg talked to him about adding more vents to the house. You know how obsessive Dad is about having a hot shower, well that is how obsessed Greg is about having an evenly heated and cooled house. The repairman set us up with one of their sales people to come discuss exactly what we would need. The nice salesman showed up yesterday and was going through everything when all of the sudden our furnace motor seized up. It was pretty funny in a very sad kind of way. Once the sales guy left Greg called the company again to get someone out to fix. The girl in the office sounded really vague on whether or not they could fix. Since they wouldn't be able to come out until 5:00 pm Greg decided to take a crack at it. Greg pulled out the motor and headed over to a local supply store to see what they thought. While he was gone the repair company called us back and said they could send someone right now if that was okay. Of course Greg forgot his cell phone, but I had them come anyway. Greg was able to get home before the repairman showed up, unfortunately he had left the motor at the repair shop. Greg had to turn right around and headed back for the motor. The repairman showed up a couple of minutes later. Luckily we live really close to the repair shop, because Greg showed up about 10 minutes after the repair guy. The repair guy got right down to business. It took him about 2 hours to tear apart the motor and then put it back together. As he was getting ready to put the whole furnace back together he noticed a 3 inch crack in the heat exchanger. Once he saw the crack he had to tell us the bad news that we need a new furnace. Since we had just had someone out on Friday he turned the heater back on. He felt that it had probably been like that for awhile so we probably weren't in to much danger of dying. The repairman had the sales guy come back out to sale us a new heater. The good news is we were not charged for anything we had done yesterday, we are getting some new vents for free and they are going to use our furnace as a teaching tool. The bad news is they turned the furnace back on for us, but only after we signed a waiver saying we won't hold them responsible if we all die from carbon monoxide poisoning. Hopefully the new furnace will be installed by Thursday. Until then I am going to keep checking our CO detector to make sure it is working.