Wednesday, February 22, 2006

The Pain That Never Ends

The house is finally warm. Sort of.

My man Kris (he’s my new best friend!) from Action Plumbing and Heating fixed our furnance problem on Saturday. Some sort of sensor went ka-blooey. And we are still having some problems with heating the house to a toasty 66 degrees F. The fan blows constantly, the flame jets come on and off and the house gets warm, but we can’t get above 65-ish.

As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, I’m an idiot. All of our problems stem from the fact that when I began the remodel, I failed to A) shut down the furnace while tearing down dusty sheetrock and B) changing the filters daily if I was going to leave the furnace on during the remodel extravaganza. I did neither of those two things. So the furnace got totally clogged with dirt, dust and a couple weeks ago, a small child. The kid was no big deal, minor jaws of life extration, but the dust, ah the dust, that’s a HUGE problem.

The first thing that happened was that a flame sensor went out. That was a couple of hundred dollars. Then because the blower assembly was caked in dust and crap and not moving air well, we had a guy come out and basically take the thing apart and clean it out. More “couple hundred dollars” for that little adventure.

Then last Friday night we had the “blowing COLD air constantly” trick. That was fun and we got down to the low 40s F in every room. And for some reason, I couldn’t get the fan to stay off. I did the old trick of turning on a hot, hot shower, generating a huge cloud of steam, which gently floated through the house. But then it hit the really cold kitchen and when the two fronts met, a small tornado formed by the fridge. Then it began to hail and finally snow. But we all got to practice our skating there on our vinyl flooring. I think I have a chance at gold, if I can just nail the triple Lutz in my free program on Thursday. Anyway, it turns out another sensor had gone south. One more “couple hundred dollars” for that part and service. But I got to know Kris really well, so that’s nice.

And the best thing? We aren’t done yet! Remember how I said the blower was all gunky? Turns out the coil for the A/C is also clogged in much the same way. Though it makes sense to me now, I didn’t even know we had an A/C coil in the heater. Here’s how a furnace with A/C bolted on goes: Big ol’ Blower at the bottom to Flame Jets to Heating Chamber in the middle and finally A/C Coil above everything in the main path of the duct work. The coil gets really cold when the A/C is on and the blower does its thing pushing cold air through the house in summer. (duh!) Apparently cleaning the blower assembly didn’t include cleaning the A/C coil when we had that done a couple weeks ago.

My new best friend Kris from Action Plumbing and Heating told me that many of our problems could be solved with a new furnace. My man Kris is a sharp one! He also says that our current heater is too large for our house. He’s actually not the first to say this, but I gotta say, I’m not in the mood to drop a couple of grand on a new Trane. He also pointed out that the clogged coil is funky, too. It’s oversized as well, which causes it’s own set of problems in the summer. It tends to generate too much condensation and occasionally causes flooding in the basement. Cool, huh? Want to buy our house? Cheap!

So either tomorrow or Friday, depending on his schedule, Kris is going to replace the A/C coil.

For a couple hundred dollars.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/22/06 at 06:46 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

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