Essay: Chilled!

If you live in an old and drafty house, it may take you awhile to realize the furnace isn’t working.

I was feeling a bit chilled at around 9:30 on a recent Wednesday morning, but that wasn’t unusual. It’s winter in Maine. But I checked the thermostat to see if I was justified in cranking it up. I was surprised to see that although it was set at 70 it was only registering 64 degrees.

I reported this fact to my husband, Paul. “The two don’t always match,” he said.

“Six degrees?”

He came to take a look. “Hmmm.”

What was happening? The furnace was on. We went over to the nearest vent. Bent over. It was blowing, all right—cold air.

Paul called our fuel provider. They put us on a list.

I went off to exercise on the indoor cycle, which, I figured, would keep me warm. Paul went out with the dog. As I finished up my ride, I heard a knock at the door. It was two people from the fuel company. Wow, that was fast, I thought.

“We just filled your tank,” one said. “It was empty. Is your furnace off?”

I stared at him. What? In the 30-plus years we’ve lived  in the house, we’ve never run out of oil. The company just comes and fills it up before it’s depleted. I told the delivery guy we had a service call in, but he said he could take a look at the furnace and reset it.

Oh, joy! I couldn’t believe our problem was going to be resolved this easily.

I was miffed that we were having a problem at all. In Late last year, we’d had an extended “checkup” of the furnace that resulted in the addition of a “draft induction” unit. (Don’t ask.) Both operations took hours on separate days and cost quite a chunk of change.

After all that, I figured the furnace should be trouble-free for a few years.

But if the fuel had run out…well, that was another matter to address.

The duo went downstairs and came back a few minutes later. The reset hadn’t worked.

Back to square one.

While we waited for the technician to arrive, Paul set up a space heater in between the living and dining rooms. It was a sunny day, so our tall, south facing windows were keeping things relatively comfortable. We ate our lunch. I was remaining calm and practicing non-resistance. I was letting the universe do its work.

Finally a cheerful young man arrived, confident he was going to get us up and going within minutes.

He was wrong.

We could hear him making several calls to HQ. He went out to his truck several times. I was feeling less Zen by the minute. Then he gave us the somber news that he had tried to replace a part in the furnace twice, and had blown both replacements. But he was not giving up!

By now it was time for Paul to take Will on another walk. This was fortuitous, because I had kept sending Paul to the cellar to check on the tech’s progress. Now, on his own, the tech had time to ponder the situation and he figured out what the problem was. It had something to do with the empty oil tank failing to set off an alarm, shorting a circuit.

The solution, however, was back at HQ.

He set off to get the needed part. I decided I needed coffee, so I fired up the Keurig. This shorted the circuit that the space heater was on. Paul reset it. I made my coffee. Then I noticed that the WiFi router—also on the heater/Keurig circuit—was off. I looked at the Bose radio. The clock numbers were blinking. I said, “We did it again!”

The whole house is falling apart, a voice inside my head shrieked.

I wasn’t even trying to be calm at this point.

Back to the cellar Paul went, but the heater/Keurig/router circuit was fine. One of us had dislodged a power strip while unplugging the space heater. And I had not reset the Bose after the actual outage. Of course, if we had blown a circuit again, there would have been no numbers blinking.

The house was not falling apart. The Internet was restored. After resetting the clock, I went back to sitting in my chair with a blanket and my hard-earned coffee.

The tech returned quickly with the part he needed and got the furnace going again. He was quite proud of himself. I could see he took pride in his work, and that made me happy—although not as pleased as I was about the heat being back on.

The furnace hummed merrily along, and soon we were up to a comfortable 70 degrees. Then Paul lit a fire in the woodstove, so we turned the thermostat down to 66. It wouldn’t go on again until we were in bed for the night, around 8:45 p.m. Yup, the furnace goes on at the same time every night, after the woodstove cools down.

Of course, on this night we were on tenterhooks. Would the furnace go on as usual? I lay awake, waiting, thinking of all the times I’d cursed its roar in the night as it woke me from a sound sleep. Never again, I vowed.

The furnace came on. Paul and I cheered. But wait—I hopped out of bed and stood over the hot-air vent to make sure.

Ah, yes, heat. Wonderful heat. If you live in an old and drafty house, you don’t want to live without it. 

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 I welcome email at lizzie621@icloud.com