I came home from work yesterday and found my husband, 2 stepsons and mother-in-law sitting in the living room. I walked around the house looking for the open door or window that was making it so cold in the house. There was no open door or window. But, it was freezing in the house.
Apparently, the pilot light was lit, but the furnace wasn’t kicking on. Nice. 6:00 on a Friday night in December and I’ve got no heat.
Who do you call? An electrician? *shrug* So, I go to the computer and browse to maps.google.com, type in “furnace repair near my zip code” and click the various links that return, looking for one with a website. Its kind of a rule of mine – find a service center with a website where I can get at least a small amount of information before I call. When I went to Great Dane’s website, the first thing I saw was “24 hour emergency service”. Good enough for me.
It was ~56 degrees in the when Karak from Great Dane showed up at 8:00. Brr.
By 9:00 our furnace was once again blazing. The fuse on the furnace itself was blown, but since we have a circuit breaker, Karak was able to just bypass the fuse and get us back in business. He also used a very cool camera snakey thingy to look into the furnace and verify that, yes, its very old and probably on its last legs. This is not news. Our plumber tells me the same thing about our pipes whenever I call for service. Its an old house. With old pipes, old furnace, old windows.
So today the house is nice and toasty. And soon we’ll be looking at new furnaces. We figure, we might as well also go with a cooling system too. It might be the first house in America to have central air but no dishwasher. Heh.
🙂 I love this post. I went through this through December and January. My boiler kept going out. It had electric and gas going to it, but the burner wouldn’t kick on. Or, it would come on, but not stay on. My house was FREEZING and I was running out of wood for the wood stove. I was also really sick. I finally have a new boiler. My house is warm. It really make you appreciate it, doesn’t it?