Fall is in the air, and a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of getting his furnace fixed.
It all started last January, which, I hope everyone would agree, is a lousy time for a furnace to break. In this case, not only was it -15 C outside most days, but we had also just got back from Africa. Cold, cash-strapped and unused to weather, we tried to get the furnace fixed.
We got a recommendation to use Competent Plumbing and Heating, but they were busy -- except for emergency calls, which this wasn't. We have two furnaces in our house, and the one that failed heats the upstairs. If you're going to have one furnace fail, have it be the upstairs one, as the upstairs rooms are heated by waste heat from the downstairs furnace.
They said maybe they could send someone in February. We asked for a recommendation, they told us about Other Heating Company, which also turned out to be unavailable. But they gave us a recommendation to Notably Incompetent Furnace Repair.
So we called up Notably Incompetent, and they sent out a guy the same day. In retrospect, I now know this was a bad sign. Like when an HMO physician can see you right away. He looked at the furnace, fiddled with his multimeter for a while, and came up with this: "Your transformer is blown. You must have had a power surge. Anyway, I can replace the transformer -- that's a $60 part. But if the transformer blew, the gas valve might have blown too. That's a $300 part -- if I can find one for a furnace this old -- and it'll go again next time you have a surge. Would you like me to get you a quote on a new furnace?"
Sure, why not? I mean, if the new furnace is $1000, then we'll have more efficient heating and less likelihood of failure, for the cost getting this old thing repaired twice.
So the sales guy came. And he made a big show of measuring our floor space, even though we had all the measurements already. And the whole process took about an hour. This was annoying, because we'd hoped to have been working some of the time, as we planned to go visit with a client later that morning. We wound up rushing him out the door, but we did get a couple of quotes out of him. Not in the realm of $1000. More like $5000, or $8000.
So we told him we'd call him if we were interested.
This was still in middle January, and the temperatures had climbed back up into the -5 C range, so we decided to put off the whole furnace thing until summer. I mean, how cold could it get? March saw two weeks straight of -30 weather with occasional dips down to -40. Oh.
In July we tried calling Competent Plumbing and Heating again, and they told us to call back in September. In September, we tried one last time and got The Guy, and he said he'd be out to see us Monday. That's last Monday, for those of you keeping score at home.
And he did come out, actually. He came out and fiddled around with his multimeter for a while and confirmed that the transformer was broken. "I don't have a plate-mount one in the truck, but we can try swapping one in to see if that's all the problem was," he says, and zips out to the truck. He comes back with the new transformer, hooks it up. It doesn't work. So he takes our transformer and tests it in an electrical outlet. It works.
Fiddles around with the multimeter for another five minutes. "It's your switch," he says. "That's a $6 part. I don't have a three-position switch in my truck, but I'll order one and come back and install it."
He looked over our furnaces. "Have you had the heat-exchangers inspected?" I allowed as I had, a year ago, when we bought the house. "These things are like Sherman tanks," he said. He rapped on the cover plate with his knuckle. "Inefficient, but they'll last forever."
Part of me wants to dance with glee and mock Notably Incompetent for trying to sell me a replacement furnace for my broken switch. The rest of me wonders when -- if? -- Guy from Competent Plumbing and Heating will ever call back. It's starting to get cold, you see...
Luckily, my neighbor has a multimeter.
We're working through it and are back up as of today. As I deal with both companies, it feels more and more like I am a child caught in the middle of a divorce. Conniver is unable to provide us with DSL service, so they had to give up temporary custody of us to Ipsco for the meantime until the courts finish their ruling. If the court finds in favor of Connectant, we go back to live with them. Otherwise, we're with Ipsco.
This reminds me of our DSL bankruptcy/acquisition story. We were with PacificNet, but because they couldn't provide service in our area code, they subcontracted us to another company. That company went out of business and sold all our accounts to Moon Global. Except that our account -- being a PacificNet account -- got transferred wrong, or wasn't transferred. Anyway, we had a month-long outage while we tried to get someone to release our line. "We can't do that because of the bankruptcy proceedings," -- our old provider. "We can't do that because the provider has to approve it," -- the phone company. Busy signal -- Moon Unit Global.
We got a lawyer to write them a letter.
When I was finally able to raise someone from Moon Global about a month later, they said, "Oh? Your DSL isn't up? <type type>." And our DSL was up. Two days later they shut us down, at the (previously long-ignored) request of our lawyer.
After another month, we had another provider. They didn't suck, but we moved. Now we have both DSL and Cable.