Well you know how during the time change from daylight saving time to standard time, and back -- "they" are always telling you to change out your smoke detector batteries? While that is an excellent idea... there are some other batteries not to be neglected!! If you have one of those (programmable) thermostats... you might want to make a practice of changing those out every Autumn!! Why? Stay tuned. I'm about to tell you why!!!
As for me -- from now on, I'll have a check list to follow every Autumn, posted on my furnace! Winterizing the heating/cooling systems is a process for some of us in the desert. Some have converted to the centralized heating/refrigerated cooling systems, but I just can't afford that right now. My home is equiped with a regular forced-air gas furnace for heating. And for the Summer months, the evaporative cooler (also known as a "swamp-cooler") does just fine for the cooling. But it all has to be converted and switched over in the Spring and back again in the Autumn. This requires some tools & maintenance -- In the Spring, it's a reverse from the Autumn routine. In the Autumn, I climb up on the roof and I drain, clean, service, and shut (with a baffle in the ducting) the evaporative cooler. Then I come down & check the furnace, remove the baffle from that duct, replace filters with clean ones and... prepare the thermostat. But from now on, I'll double check my check-list!!! In the Autumn... CHECK all those batteries!!!
WHY? I'll tell you why...
Yesterday, Dec. 26th, I went straight home (from work). I fortunatley made it home in record time too... lack of traffic on what most people took off as a holiday. I pulled into my driveway and into my garage. I got out of my car. I heard the furnace running, but nothing terribly unusual about that on a Winter day. Although it had been a relatively warm day... got up to 62 degrees outdoors in Albuquerque that day. I unlocked and opened the door to my house. WHOOSH!!! ~~~A WAVE of hot air came rushing out of my house and into my face. My long hair wafted back in the heated breeze! I was temporarily baffled! I rushed over to my programmable thermostat to turn it down and see what the blazing temerature was. The display was blank! I quickly ran through a short mental list of possible issues that might be the trouble... and came up with, "Hummm... I think this thing has friggin' batteries! When did I last check them?" I went into my bedroom to put down my stuff and I looked at the atomic clock/thermometer on my dresser.
The temerature in my bedroom was... 106 degrees F.!!! At first, I thought that couldn't be right, but then I noticed a couple of taper-candles and pillar candles in my room were bending over & drooping over!!! I picked one of them up and it was soft and my fingers left indentations in the wax!! "Yes Virginia, It IS 106 degrees in my bedroom!!!" Holy Bat-droppings!! I wondered if the slide switch inside the thermostat would still work, or if perhaps a wire had come loose. I went to the thermostat and opened it. I moved the slide switch from "Heat" to "Off." Immediately, the sound of the forced heated air ceased. I was more than relieved! I had already looked at my two cats. They were ok, but rather sluggish! Poor babies!! They still had water in their dish and they were both hunkered down on the ceramic tile in front of my fireplace. I'm sure the tile was the coolest place they could find! I could not believe how hot it was!! I half expected to look back into my bedroom and see a mirage in there, complete with palm trees and and oasis!!
I rushed to the linen closet, where I thought the thermostat instruction booklet was... wrong! Oh Man! I asked my Angels to PLEASE show me what I had done with the stupid instructions! I heard in my head, "Laundry shelf" and I looked there. Sure enough, there they were. I looked in the troubleshooting section... no mention of: "Furnace stuck on/won't shut off/house hotter than the hinges of hell." I managed to remember how to take the thermostat apart (little phillips-head anchor screws in the bottom of the front). I took it apart and sure enough, there were three AA batteries in the back.
I had been out of batteries... until that day! I just happened to have brought home with me that evening, a 4 pack of AA batteries (for something else, but it would wait). I took out the old batteries and put in the new ones. I waited (and sweated). Nothing. No life to the thermostat. I pushed a button... nothing. I pushed another button... nothing. Thoughts of going out to Home Depot and spending $45 on another thermostat (on top of what would SURELY be an outragous gas bill for this month!) danced through my head. My heart sank. I started just pushing buttons (& praying)... it was just short of giving the darned thing CPR! Suddenly, "1:00" appeared in the dislay, along with a temerature of 99 degrees F (in the hallway). I breathed a hot sigh of relief!! I opened a couple of windows and the front door, turned on a ceiling fan. Then I went about reprogramming the silly thermostat. Once reprogrammed, I replaced the unit on it's spot on the wall. I held my breath a moment while I moved the slide switch back over to "Heat" and exhaled with relief when the forced air did NOT come on... which of course meant that the "thermostat" function was working again. With any luck, the darned thing wouldn't need to come on for a couple of days!!!
By 8pm that evening the hallway temperature was below 90 degrees... about 85 degrees and I decided to not waste the unintentionally accumulated energy and just live with the warmth & perhaps compensate the loss by not needing the furnace to come on for a long time. I closed the front door and all but one window. It was still 87 degrees in my room. I later closed the last window and tossed the blanket aside for the night and slept in a T-shirt. This morning at 6:15, the outside temperature was 35 degrees and inside the house had cooled off to 68 degrees. I doubt the heat will come on at all today... maybe later this evening, but hopefully not for a couple of days!
Christmas was terrific!
I recieved a number of great gifts. One being a weather station and another being a set of cordless phones (the base has an answering machine built-in and both handsets have digital phonebooks in them). But I love to watch everyone else open their gifts. That is more than half of the fun. My mom is a blast to watch open gifts. She gets so excited and giddy! One friend of mine I didn't get to watch him open his gift (from me or anyone), since he is out of town visiting family. I called him on Christmas day to wish him a merry one and find out if he like what I gave him. It sounded to me like he did. He'll be back in a couple of days... it's his snakes & gecko I'm pet-sitting in his absence.
Over the holidays, I found a cute site to check out:
http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2005/12/index.html
It's too cute for words!
Enjoy!
Enough from me for one day.
I should sign off for now.
Happy New year!!
~Paulena
