Hearts in Hawai'i
Bad Things Do Happen in Threes!
2/3/2015
The best part of February 3 was being able to return to work. The worst part was arriving home and realizing our furnace had quit working again. Something had happened to that piece of shit Aire-Flo furnace every winter since our second winter here, so I was kind of used to it. Other than being pissed off at the Gilbert brothers (who built the townhouses) for going cheap on something this important, especially in northern Minnesota, I was starting to wonder if we should just scrap this crap and buy something good. Like a Lennox or a Trane.
This decision would be pretty much taken out of my hands—a technician from Brent’s came by our house and checked things out. After a long phone conversation with a cohort trying to piece together what the trouble was, he said that a computer board in the furnace had shit the bed. It was a $1,600 fix and he had no idea how long it would take to get a replacement part. These shitty furnaces were built in Mexico and sold through Canada! It was also underpowered by about 20,000 BTU’s according to the Brent’s tech. Patty and I talked it over and decided to get a Trane. Brent’s was an authorized Trane dealer, so it made sense. In the meantime he left us with two electric heaters since they didn’t have a timeslot open to install the new furnace until the following week. The house had lost eight degrees of warmth during the day. Those two heaters (he would later bring a third which we put in the bedroom) would bring the temp back up four degrees overnight.
The furnace arrived much quicker than initially thought, and the techs were back at our house two days later to install it. It was a long, four-hour job made tougher by the fact that they had to work in tight corners—the original furnace was basically shoe-horned into our furnace closet next to the hot water heater. It was even more time-consuming because the inflow and outflow pipes were reversed on the Trane vs. the Aire-Flo. But these guys were pros and very skilled—it wasn’t impossible; it just took a while to get the thing installed and tested.
The Trane was a two-stage furnace rated at 60,000 BTU’s. When the furnace kicked in, the first stage would be at a lower BTU level, and if the desired temp (as dictated by the programmable thermostat) wasn’t reached in a certain time, then the second stage would kick in and finish the job. I spoke with one of the installers and he said that the energy savings came about by not having the second stage kick in, as that was where most of the gas would be expended. He thought it was better to not let the house get too cool during the day or overnight, so this furnace wouldn’t have to work as hard to get the temperature back to the prescribed level when it kicked on. I thought this good advice so changed the lower temperature from 62 to 67 degrees.
For $3,400, we had purchased peace of mind for the foreseeable future in knowing that we would have heat in the house on those below zero days. It was money very well spent and we were glad to be rid of this sub-standard Aire-Flo furnace.
Previous: 2/2/2015--Pancreatic Recovery & Computer Woes
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