Furnace follies

It’s snowing, a gentle drifting, on a bitterly cold day.  My mind, as it often does, meanders to other times, to our foremothers who also looked out on flurries amid very cold temperatures.   How did these predecessors manage to stay warm?   Did they huddle by a fireplace where the heat reaches out only a few feet beyond the flames?  Were they the owners of a Franklin stove that gave radiant heat further than the fireplace?

I sometimes place myself in these daydreams and wonder how I would have fared.   No running water, cutting and chopping wood, cooking on a woodburning stove or at the front of a fireplace?   I don’t see myself as particularly successful.  Good Lord, if I didn’t burn the house down…

No, I am a child of my times.  I am used to fuel piped in from somewhere else safely inside a furnace, burning itself to boil the water that makes the steam that fills the radiators and keeps me warm.   This is even easier than my mother had it when she had to shovel coal into the furnace, discard the resulting ash and bleed the radiators.  Today, I simply pay the natural gas bill.

So, what happens, say on a Saturday night when you notice that the thermostat is set for 69 but the temperature is 60?  First, you stare at the thermostat and think things like – Is it broken?  Does it need batteries?    I figured that the thermostat would tell the furnace what to do once it had new batteries.

No so.  Fed new batteries, the temperature on the thermostat continued to drop.  According to the weather report, the temperature in Marcellus was heading to the single digits that night.

The spouse and I stared at each other, wondering what to do.  I might hike down into the basement or call on my spouse to hike down and look at the furnace.  Why I would do this is a mystery since I know less about the furnace than I would about chopping wood.  So, of course, we went down into the cellar to look at the furnace and did discover that the little glass cylinder that shows how much water is in the feed was full to the top. Even the really uninitiated would know that this is not good. Too much water and the boiler can’t make steam. So, the spouse began to empty the water until we could see the little line that marked where it should be.

Four buckets out, we stared at the furnace.  Nothing.

Should we call someone?  Who?  I used to have, a zillion years ago, the phone number of a heating company that offered 24-hour service but that went out during one of my cleaning sprees.  Would the phone book help?  Are you kidding?  So, I resorted to Google and found four companies that offered 24-hour services.  I must have misunderstood the meaning of 24 hours, because the gals at the answering services, although very sympathetic, told me – and this was around 2 a.m. – that either there was no one on at night or that someone would call us in the morning.  The fourth service said that their guy would be there in a half hour to 45 minutes.

In the meantime, I began to bake.  An oven adds warmth.  I baked a coconut custard pie and two batches of biscuits.  I boiled water on top of the stove because, somewhere, I read that humidity makes cold air more comfortable.  I made hot cocoa.

Thinking things like frozen pipes and dead plants, I began to run around looking for alternative sources of heat.  I filled two empty milk bottles with hot water and placed them in the middle of my plant shelf and then turned to the only heater we had, a little Dyson personal heater to add warmth to the entire area where I keep my assorted attempts at botany.

We have a small but perfectly good fireplace in the living room, but no grate and, of course, no wood.  But we do have a gas fireplace in the family room, a room that was becoming glacial at this point.  So, I turned on the gas fireplace to reap the rewards of putting off having it cleaned of dust  ….you just have to smell what dust does when it burns.  Unique doesn’t come close.

We put on more clothes.

Bud from the heating company arrived around 4 a.m.   The spouse went downstairs to assist, or more specially, to kibbitz.  I could hear clunking and other fix-it sounds as my spouse yelled upstairs to turn up or turn down the thermostat.  The furnace would turn on and then stop.   It was like a sick person attempting to get out of bed.  Poor thing!   Finally, finally it stayed on and the temperature on the thermostat began to rise.  At 5 a.m. we bid Bud adieu as he promised to come back on Monday with a replacement for the part that wasn’t working.  In the meantime, we had to monitor the water flow into the furnace.

I crawled into bed at 5 a.m. or so thinking that the women who chopped wood and tended her cooking fire didn’t have Alexa, who could be programmed to tell me to check the water in the furnace every two hours.