Melissa's Place

My husband - My hero - and the Furnace Adventure

It's getting a bit cold and we stuck it out as long as we could but finally, on Sunday, we thought we ought to turn on the furnace...if not for just a few degrees of heat for an hour or so. Nothing too crazy.

So we flicked the switch of the thermostat from AC to Heat and waited. The big monster began to wake up and breathe life through the ducts.

It only occurred to me three hours later that the house didn't feel warmer. I finally put my hand on a vent and felt only cool air. Hmmmmm.

Mark and I went downstairs with a flashlight and looked for knobs and switches on the furnace. "It's probably something very simple," Mark remarked. I agreed. Too bad we weren't sure what that simple something was.

We discussed how we could have the same dude that came to fix our condensate tube of the air conditioner in the summer come and do a "tune up" on the furnace and then we could non-chalantly say, "Oh, and while you're here, would you mind just...you know...turning that bad boy on."

Remembering our dryer fiasco, Mark checked the fuses.

Carolyn said it might be the pilot light. She said she had to get down on her belly and look through a vent to see the one in her house. "I'm not gettin' down on my belly," I informed Mark.

Then Mark did some research on-line. He came up to my study and said, "It's the pilot light. It's out."

"Oh?" I replied, "How do we start it again?"

"Well, it could just be a switch that's off," he began, "or it could be the thermo-flux-capacitor." We both smiled.

"Uh huh."

He disappeared back downstairs.

I went to the store. I bought a green pepper, a frozen lemon meringue pie and a $2.99 pumpkin. I also rented Run Fatboy Run.

When I returned, I announced proudly as I entered, "I BOUGHT A PUMPKIN!"

"I fixed the furnace!" he called back.

"WHAT????!!!" I ran downstairs....well, I walked very quickly downstairs. We went into the furnace area. He squeezed in behind the water heater to where he'd removed the back panel of the furnace. I was just a few inches too round to make the same maneuver, so I just peered in the direction of his flashlight beam. Sure enough, now there was a blue flame where before there had been none.

"How did you know what to light?" I asked.

He dismissed it as all about the home repair website. He mentioned how he just figured these three tubes were gas input, which made this a shut-off valve and he figured these were wires so there wouldn't be a fire there and then that left these two tubes and he figured this one was far more substantial and it led to this spot, so he'd figured it must be the pilot light. Then he'd just held down the pilot valve thingy for 10 seconds and used the lighter and that hadn't worked, so he'd just figured to hold it down for longer and.....the rest is history.

I stared at him dumbfounded. When he came out from behind the furnace I gave him a huge, happy hug of relief and called him my hero and peppered his face with kisses.

"You're fantastic," I said, "I can't BELIEVE you fixed the furnace."

He grinned sheepishly but he said, "You don't have to be quite so surprised."