I woke at 4AM this morning, chilled despite being fully under my very thick bedspread. I've been spending more sleep time in bed lately instead of all night in a recliner, something I consider a major gain, but soon to be offset by the second shoulder replacement. Knowing I'm tolerating it better gives me hope that about 5 months after the next one I might actually be spending whole nights there again. Being a side-sleeper puts all kind of pressure on new shoulder joints, hence the switch to recliners which keep me still while asleep and painful pressure off the new joints.
But it wasn't shoulder pain waking me this morning. The furnace had quit. My usual first stop is normally the warmest spot in the house, as the floor register warming my bathroom is just a wall away from the furnace... my brand new replacement furnace! It was really cold in there! I had no hope of a sufficiently hot shower without getting even more chilled while drying off.
Next stop was the living room to check the thermostat. It's completely unreadable except in full daylight except for the large numbers, which still need the overhead room light to read. While it was still set at 73 degrees, a comfy enough temp for two Arizona-adapted inactive geezers, the actual temperature was just 64. I tapped it up a degree to see if that kicked the furnace on. Nope.
At 4AM there's not much to do aside from get mad, dress in multiple fuzzy layers, and burrow in as many blankets as one can find, at least until one recalls there is a gas stove a room away, which, upon checking, works just fine. We have both working electricity and gas, so neither of those is the problem. No need to call the utility company. We just need to wait for the stove becoming effective... in a few hours. I turned two burners on, and repaired to the family room to see what might have been recorded by the DVR overnight that might be worth watching until it's time to call into the recording in the office of the furnace company. The new one is barely a week old after all.
The well-recalled forecast is for a chilly week, and it's still raining outside, finishing what in daytime inspection shows as an accumulation of an inch and a half in the new rain gauge. Best estimate was a high in the low fifties or worse for most of the coming week with lows just over freezing.
I left voicemail with the furnace company, giving my name and town, the failure of home heating (aside from the stove top), and my firm expectation that I would not have to pay for the usual fee to have one person come over to check things out. I was as polite as I could manage but didn't even pretend to disguise the tone of anger for this failure on such a new and expensive piece of equipment.
By this time Steve was up and came out to join me, both of us now dressed for winter and under blankets, plus in Steve's case using his back heating pad. He'd cooked an early breakfast for himself but I can't eat so soon after one of my morning pills. The burners on the stove were set back to a safer level than was needed for cooking while we moved to another room waiting for heat to arrive. In the meantime, there were books, laptops, and some TV to keep us entertained. My cell phone had become hard to hear ringing, so he looked it up online and figured out not only how to fix that but what I'd done to make it nearly silent. I've been missing calls lately. Now they are almost deafening! It's an improvement. Really.
The furnace company finally called back half an hour after they officially opened, assuring me there was no charge to come fix the new furnace, and one of their staff would be out some time between ten and noon. OK, not ideal, but we knew help was coming. He only arrived about 40 minutes late, but went straight to work testing everything that could possibly be causing the failure.
When we finally heard the motor come on, for a change not as loud as it had been when first installed, he poked his head in and gave the explanation that a pair of exhaust pipes had been angled wrong, and the recent rain had come down into the pipe from the roof and flooded it, preventing proper air exchange. Better no heat than CO filling the house.
Oh yeah, and the floor was wet too. Did we happen to have a small pail he could borrow? Maybe an extra rag? He had a large pail but the furnace was already crammed into a very tiny space, so his wouldn't work. No problem. I handed him a steel bowl, which had gotten ruined during the first installation when "somebody" had decided when seeing it outside on the porch with some potting soil in it that it had been meant to be an ashtray and the metal had heated to brown in several places as the combustible parts of the potting soil had burned. I'd had to throw out the potting soil and ashes, now unfit for the designated garden spot they were intended for. I'd gotten sidetracked, that day it got set out, by the unexpected early arrival of the replacement furnace. Put a workman in my house and I stay inside with them. I'd had to leave for a medical appointment later, leaving Steve behind to mind the house, and returned to see a coating of white ashes on top of the soil.
The bowl should still be useful for, say, catching dripping water, or more potting soil projects, though not for food. I mentioned it to this workman. He may have thought I was going to complain to the company, and insisted it couldn't have been their people who'd done it because "nobody smokes here". There had been no other visitors that day aside from the two who installed the new furnace, and no other explanation for what had occurred, but I chose not to argue the point. We have another steel bowl that size as well as a couple of plastic ones, remnants of combining kitchen sets over the years. It's not like I ever plan to buy another one. I just needed my furnace functioning again.
At any rate, after about three hours, he announced both the cause and his fix for it, and collected his things to leave. His phone rang, and in close quarters we can hardly prevent eavesdropping, at least not enough to miss he was talking to the boss about what was taking up his time. Despite his starting to pack up, he came back in, this time saying he was still concerned he'd missed something, and went back into the innards of the furnace for about another half hour. This time he informed us that it wasn't the angle of the exhaust pipes that were the problem, but he'd found the "REAL" problem, fixed that, and returned the pipes which collected the rain water to their former position.
The furnace was now running, much quieter than before, thankfully. He never did say why the next rain wasn't going to collect the same way it had last night and stop the furnace again. Fingers crossed, I guess. I also don't know how long we can allow for a possible fail of the same kind in the next heavy rain, should it happen with those pipes angled "wrong" like before, and still get them to come out without a charge for a diagnostic visit. If it happens, they will hear from me.
Does Yelp offer a minus 50 score? One does want to be prepared, just in case.
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