speedblogness

I thought I'd share a story about my furnace with you. Something I'm sure others have had happen to them, and that is that when it fails, it always fails at the worst time.

So it is January and it was -5 degrees and our furnace which had been acting up finally quit during the night. We woke up to fifty degrees and getting out of bed was not pleasant.

Of course you can't get around your daily life and so Karoline headed off to work and I headed off to school. When I returned home I called Consumers Power as we have an appliance contract with them. I figured they would come out and repair it.

From that point on things got interesting.

Far be it for any employee of the power company whom sold you the supposed appliance agreement, the same people who are supposed to be the experts in getting your furnace working to be able to do that without turning it into a major ordeal. The reality is that they want to do as little as possible. And so he immediately claimed our furnace was to old to fix (20 years) and proceeded to pull out his new fangled video tool with a light to snake the heat exchanger to show me why.

Cracks in the heat exchanger can cause deadly carbon monoxide to travel throughout the house, being odorless it basically kills you and you don't even know it. He seems to think he is telling me something I don't know. At the same time I'm thinking that unless you were born under a rock and don't know this fact that you just stupid and maybe dying will convince you to learn something about those things that are dangerous within your house.

I am also thinking about the six carbon monoxide detectors I have throughout the house and I have yet to hear one go off. Besides that, it was impossible to make out anything, especially a crack or cracks with his new fangled tool. It's to damm blurry. At any rate, he kept screwing around and deems the furnace un-repairable.

He proceeds to tell me that today is my lucky day and that because he works for Consumers Power he is going to do something only someone from the company can do and how lucky I am that they did not send a contractor out for the repair because they can't do the same. He claims he does this deal all the time on old furnaces.

He then proceeds to contact his boss at Consumers Power and conjure up a deal w to give us a $400.00 credit if we bagged any repairs to the furnace and buy a new furnace from anyone we chose. Another words, replace ours with a new one. And that he would put it all in writing. Of course there was a catch. If we were to go that route he could not do any repairs. The credit came from the cost saved from him not repairing it. NICE EH!

It's like -5 degrees with a massive wind and the house is sitting around 49 degrees, it's Friday and the house is getting colder and this guy leaves me with a paper deal to replace the furnace. More on the deal later.

Of course my main concern was that the pipes might freeze and burst. I was a little ruffled to say the least.

Knowing that the furnace was 20 years old and taking into account the multiple carbon monoxide detectors I have around the house, which again have never gone off lead me to believe we had no current issues with the heat exchanger, but that the furnace was old and should be replaced. I agreed to the deal to buy a new furnace and suffer for a few days if need be.

Naturally finding anyone on a Friday afternoon to either buy one or fix the current one was next to impossible. So I decided to have a look at the problem myself. I knew before he came out that the controller box that controls everything that happens to make your furnace work had a short of some sort based on what was happening. So I shut down the power to the furnace and removed the controller box. I figured twenty years of heating and cooling on the printed circuit board might be part of the problem. I grabbed my soldering Iron and re-soldered all of the connections, re-assembled the box, re-installed it and what do you know HEAT!

Now I'm not telling you to repair your own stuff. My point is that I needed to buy some time, get some heat and I can't tell you how great full, how thankful I am for what my father passed on to me in his lifetime. He learned from his dad, who learned from his dad and so on down the generations. They almost always made an attempt to repair things before they discarded them. The problem today at least here in America is that we are so "Instant Gratification". Throw it away, get a new one that todays kids wouldn't think twice about a problem like this, let alone understand anything about what caused it. There are a lot of kids today who don't seem to be getting the kind of learning experience I got from my parent, from their parents, instead parents think playing soccer, or video games or sitting on a computer all day is ok. The sad reality of progress I suppose.

I accomplished the whole repair by thinking outside the box a little. By taking the time to think out the problem and then a reasonable solution, I was able to solve my dilemma. I know some folks just don't have the capacity to do their own work so if you fit that type of person I'm not writing this for you.

First off I'll admit that I was a little frustrated and that the cold had a direct bearing on my motivation. There is so much information out there that I just had to see for myself if this problem was something I could solve. The Internet and Google got me a head start in finding a skematic of the controller box. Now I'll admit that the reality is that anyone can write anything on the web. That being the case, I suggest that anything you might read on the web needs to be double checked, if you are not 100% positive that what you have read is going to solve your problem without destroying something.

Long of the short is that we had heat and that bought me a few days to get several estimates, to study up on what we needed so that I could make a decision based on the best deal and not the fact or the pressure that we had no heat. We ended up purchasing a combo deal from Randazzo's Heating and Cooling and I have to say that they were TOP NOTCH! I am totally satisfied with the work and the awesome price we got on a new Lennox Furnace and Air Conditioning unit. The air conditioner was the same age as the furnace and the pricing for both was so good that we decided to have them both done at the same time.

Getting back to the repair issue. Any thoughts of doing a repair like this assumes that you have some mechanical skills, that maybe your dad gave you something more than a soccer ball to learn from. If not, this kind of thing is not for you and you could get your self into serious trouble. Remember that you are dealing with a device that produces, well heat of course, but death as well. Better to freeze your ass off for a few days that to be dead, forever.

I am also a firm NON believer in service contracts. We has it based on Karoline's job at the Energy company. The fine print negates ever considering one of these contracts. And at the moment Consumers is denying that they owe us the $400.00 from the deal their technician made with me while here. That surprises me since we have the whole deal in writing. I can see a court case and lawyers sorting this matter out already.The are useless! for most anyone under 50. It has been canceled.

PLEASE NOTE that if you are elderly, disabled or otherwise unable to deal with something of this sort, as is the case with my 70+ year old mother who lives out of state and has no one to help her, a full replacement service contract is the only way to go. And yes full replacement contracts are more expensive. They do however cover repairing, up to replacing the item in question at no charge. Remember the words "FULL REPLACEMENT" which is very different than a standard service agreement.

Anyways, I'm enjoying the heat.