It was an ordinary day. That is until the sun went down and the air stated to chill. Not only outside, but inside the house. "Are you cold?" I asked my wife. She has a large orange cat strung across her lap so she doesn't feel the cold as I do. Seems that the thermostat was set to 70 degrees, but it was much colder inside the house than that. So, I started to mess around with the settings on the thermostat thinking it may be set wrong. Temperature was 64 degrees inside so something was wrong. I tried everything I could think of to make the gas furnace start, but nothing worked. A trip to the basement was necessary to see what may be the problem. I opened the full-panel wooden hinged doors to reveal the gas furnace and looked at it as if I could will it to work. I actually had no idea what I was doing and since there is gas involved, I didn't try to do anything except walk over to the electrical board to see if the breaker may be off. Yep, that was the problem! So I flipped the breaker, headed back upstairs and tried again. Nothing happened so I headed back down the basement and checked the breaker again. Breaker off again. It was supposed to get down into the lower 30s that tonight so I started to panic. By now it was 10:30 PM so I can't call my cousin Susan's husband who works at the heating place that installed my gas furnace. May be in bed and I hate it when someone calls me with a problem late at night. Ruins my entire next day, so it does. So I dug out the phone book and found the number of the heating place and placed a call. Jeff answered and asked me for some information as to what I may have already tried. After reviewing what I did he asked me to remove the front of the thermostat and replace the batteries. Did that, but still was cold. Then he had me turn the fan onto the "On" setting rather than the "Auto" setting, go back down the stairs and flip the breaker and come back upstairs and turn the temperature higher. Did that and the unit came on for 30 seconds and shut down. He told me it may be the fan unit. Could I wait until tomorrow or would I rather him come tonight. I asked him how cold he thought it may get by tomorrow morning and he responded with, "Maybe 50 degrees." He told me it would cost $200 an hour for him to come right then, but if I could wait until working hours it would be considerably less. Asked Carol and she said she would throw another blanket on the bed. Next morning at 6:30 Carol woke me and told me that something was beeping. Time to get up anyway I thought. We have two CO2 detectors, but both were functioning correctly. I checked the smoke detector in the garage. Now I should tell you at this time that I can't hear the high pitched squeal of any detector unless I am next to it. As I headed back in from garage the phone rang. Security company called to tell me that the second floor glass break detector battery was low. Wow, it just amazes me that they can tell that a battery on a wireless item on my second floor which is over 5 miles from their place is low. That is what Carol heard. Luckily I had purchased extra batteries the last time that happened so I replaced them and recalled the company to report what I had done. OK, by noon today Jeff arrived. Really pleasant and personable guy who tried to explain everything to me as he was working. I know workers hate when someone looks over their shoulder, but I was interested to see what he was doing in case it happened again. Well, we found that my breaker in the power panel was to blame so within half an hour he was back on the road again. For me, I guess the moral of this story is never try to mess with anything that is connected to natural gas and if service is needed, try to wait until working hours. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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