Sheltering at Home Day 10. Thursday, March 26, 2020
It’s cold outside in the San Francisco Bay Area. And at our house it’s cold inside too.
We noticed it over breakfast. It was chilly in our construction-zone great room. My feet were cold.
A family conference at the thermostat reached a consensus: no furnace, no heat. The burner was heating up just fine, but the fan had quit working.
Last month our sewer line quit on us. Soggy toilet paper erupted from the clean-out under the deck where our contractor was working. A few days and a lot of noise later, a new sewer line was in place, and we could start putting toilet paper down the toilet again. Full disclosure: TP had been going in the trash.
Today it’s the furnace that’s quit.
The service people will be here tomorrow to take a look. “We’ll probably just replace the fan for now, and kick the can down the road,” said the man on the phone. I was surprised anyone was there to take my call. But there he was.
Another man at the shop called back later to warn us not to run the
furnace if the fan wasn’t working. The furnace could overheat with disastrous consequences. He offered to loan us a space heater. He’d use wipes on the box and set it out on the curb for us to pick up.
Another family conference ensued: Jon and I decided to tough it out and do without the space heater. We have other things to do today, like go on line in search of toilet paper.
If we run out of toilet paper, we’ll have to resort our plentiful supply of tissues, laid in weeks ago for coronavirus sniffles. But tissues will clog our brand-new sewer line, and we’d be putting things in the trash again.
Meanwhile, how old was our furnace anyway? I dug through my files. A 31-year-old receipt revealed that our hard-working, but probably seriously energy gobbling, furnace was a Day and Night 80,000 BTU upflow model.
Bought in 1989, our furnace survived the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, the Oakland Firestorm of 1991. And now, with a little help from a man who’s showing up for work during the current shut-down, our furnace stands a chance of surviving the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020, and so do we.
What else was happening at our house in 1989? Here are couple of stories from the archives: “When Your Kids Don’t Fight — Enough.” Also, “Am I Scotch* — Or Midwestern?”
Great news. A valiant repair guy came to our house and replaced the capacitor in the fan’s motor. It looked like the world was falling apart: it was getting pretty chilly at our house and our fleet of space heaters were not doing the trick. Apparently, our furnace will continue operating perfectly well — through the end of this pandemic, if not longer. Our thanks to the people at Harry Clark for being there for us. It meant a lot to us.