Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Thankful

 Our 21 year old furnace quit working one of those super chilly nights a couple weeks ago. We woke up and the house was 54degrees. Brrrr....groan. Great. A broken furnace. Cha-ching! was all I could think about. I called my dad, our furnace expert, and he gave me the sage advice to call someone else. Ha! So, we called Bell Brothers to make an appt for them to come take a peek.

We were planning on having our garage door replaced by a friend and we knew we couldn't afford to do both so Chad e-mailed our friend and told him what was going on. Our friend said he would come look at our furnace to see if he could figure out what was wrong with it. Sweet! Seriously, this guy is like the Jack-of-all-trades. He came over. Dinked around with the furnace for a bit. Put a call into his furnace guy for advice. Came back two days later to see if his furnace guy's suggestions would work. Nope. We got nothin'.

BellBrothers came the next morning. Apparently it wasn't running because the flame sensor was dirty. He cleaned it up and immediately the furnace kicked on and warm air was filtering through the vents...but wait. He wanted to show me something. Here we go. It is like at the oil change place when the guy shows you how dastardly dirty your air filter is and it must be changed except that the filter isn't THAT dirty and it can wait another 6 months. Jerks. Anyway, he ran a snakey looking camera up into the  furnace and there it was....a big ol' crack in the heat exchanger. Bad news, for sure. Apparently that crack can lead to a fire or the silent killer, carbon monoxide poisoning. The furnace will need to be replaced. Ugh. The salesman came out a couple days later and we bought a furnace. It will be installed in 2 days.

Despite having to shell out 3 grand for a new furnace I am extremely thankful. I am thankful for the tax credit and the energy company rebates that are available right now, cutting the total cost in half. I am thankful for a handy friend that is always willing to help. I am thankful that our friend couldn't figure out how to fix it. If he had we would not have known about the ginormous crack and we would have been in serious danger. I am thankful that the weather has been so nice that even if our furnace did work we wouldn't have needed to run it. I am thankful that we will have one more great reason for a buyer to buy this house when we want to sell it next summer.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Funny how things work out sometimes, isn't it?