A Memo to our Furnace

To:  Household Furnace

From:  Rob & Karen

Date:  December 11, 2009

Re: Vacation Time

It has come to our attention that you took an unauthorized vacation day today.  This is not appreciated, and will not be tolerated.  Even the cat, with her luxurious fur coat, found it to be a little chilly in the house, as temperatures dipped to below 13 degrees Celsius.  In the future, please ensure that you schedule all your vacation time for the months of June, July, and August, and obtain approval for said vacation days.

Please consider this your first written notice.
Thank you.

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I came home today at about 1:30, and knowing that the thermostat is programmed to have the house rather chilly at that time of day, I went straight over to it, to turn it up.  When I saw that the current temperature was 14 degrees, I was a little startled.  I quickly looked over at our clock/thermometer to see what temperature it thought the house was, and when it concurred with the 14 degrees, I was rather alarmed.  Clearly, the furnace was not working.  A low-battery light was flashing on the thermomstat, so I thought I would try the easy things first.  Replace the batteries, check the breakers.  All to no avail.  Then, like any good wife, I called my husband.  His advice was to call in the experts, so I did.  Grand River Mechanical to the rescue!  Pete & Ian came around 4:30.  By then, this is what the thermometers were reading:

BBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

The real truth of the matter?  It is our own fault the furnace went on vacation today!   (Maybe we'll have to retract that memo...) We waited just a little too long to replace the furnace filter, and things got a little too toasty in there, so as a safety mechanism, the furnace shut down. It was actually doing a good job of protecting the system.  I knew the filter hadn't been replaced in quite awhile, so while waiting for Pete & Ian to arrive, I did visit CTC and bought some new ones.   However, the safety switch was also stuck on "off", so that had to be fixed too.  Even if Rob and I had thought to change the furnace filter, that alone would not have enabled the furnace to restart, and Pete & Ian's work was necessary.  As silly as we now feel, for not regularly replacing the filter, I'm glad it was so easily fixed/fixable, that the house is warm again, and we're not suddenly shopping for a new furnace!  I was quite excited and relieved when Pete & Ian uncovered a little red flashing light in the bowels of the furnace - that to me meant that whatever the problem was, it was fixable.  And thankfully it was.  We will definitely be more diligent in the future about changing our furnace filters!

Our church held its annual Christmas program tonight, and by the time I left for that, our house was warming up nicely.  While there, I went to talk to a fellow church member, Andrew, and he asked me if we had heat.  I was a little surprised that he knew our furnace had taken an unexpected and unapproved vacation day shutdown to prevent the house from burning down.  However, it turns out that Pete & Ian had been working on replacing his (still functioning) furnace when I called.  Pete's words to him were something along these lines, "Well, you might not have heat tomorrow, but Rob & Karen don't have heat today, so I'm going there."   So Andrew warned us to prepare for an invasion from him and his family in the next day or two if they start feeling a little chilly! :)

(Rob and I are also having some 100th post giveaway fun on this post...check it out if you haven't already!)