{"id":29638,"date":"2020-03-27T00:01:29","date_gmt":"2020-03-27T07:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=29638"},"modified":"2020-03-27T00:01:29","modified_gmt":"2020-03-27T07:01:29","slug":"no-furnace-no-heat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/no-furnace-no-heat\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 10 Sheltering at Home — No Furnace, No Heat"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"No<\/a>
No furnace, no heat: Our 31-year-old Day and Night 80,000 btu upflow furnace finally gave up the ghost — in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. We paid $2,300 for it in 1989. Photos by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Sheltering at Home Day 10. Thursday, March 26, 2020<\/strong><\/h5>\n

It’s cold outside in the San Francisco Bay Area. And at our house it’s cold inside too.<\/p>\n

We noticed it over breakfast. It was chilly in our construction-zone great room. My feet were cold.<\/p>\n

A family conference at the thermostat reached a consensus: no furnace, no heat. The burner was heating up just fine, but the fan had quit working.<\/p>\n

Last month our sewer line quit on us. Soggy toilet paper erupted from the clean-out under the deck where our contractor was working. A few days and a lot of noise later, a new sewer line was in place, and we could start putting toilet paper down the toilet again. Full disclosure: TP had been going in the trash.<\/p>\n

Today it’s the furnace that’s quit.<\/p>\n

The service people will be here tomorrow to take a look. “We’ll probably just replace the fan for now, and kick the can down the road,” said the man on the phone.\u00a0 I was surprised anyone was there to take my call. But there he was.<\/p>\n

Another man at the shop called back later to warn us not to run the<\/p>\n

\"no<\/a>
The space heater in my office will come in handy between now and tomorrow, when our furnace gets repaired — we hope.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

furnace if the fan wasn’t working. The furnace could overheat with disastrous consequences. He offered to loan us a space heater. He’d use wipes on the box and set it out on the curb for us to pick up.<\/p>\n

Another family conference ensued: Jon and I decided to tough it out and do without the space heater. We have other things to do today, like go on line in search of toilet paper.<\/p>\n

If we run out of toilet paper, we’ll have to resort our plentiful supply of tissues, laid in weeks ago for coronavirus sniffles. But tissues will clog our brand-new sewer line, and we’d be putting things in the trash again.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, how old was our furnace anyway? I dug through my files. A 31-year-old receipt revealed that our hard-working, but probably seriously energy gobbling, furnace was a Day and Night 80,000 BTU upflow model.<\/p>\n

Bought in 1989, our furnace survived the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, the Oakland Firestorm of 1991. And now, with a little help from a man who’s showing up for work during the current shut-down, our furnace stands a chance of surviving the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020, and so do we.<\/p>\n

What else was happening at our house in 1989? Here are couple of stories from the archives: “When Your Kids Don’t Fight — Enough.”<\/a>\u00a0 Also, “Am I Scotch* — Or Midwestern?”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\"no<\/a>
Workers dug through our brick walk-way to expose a sewer clean-out last month. Bad news: we needed a new sewer line.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"no<\/a><\/p>\n

No furnace, no heat. Last month as COVID-19 bore down on California, our 70-year-old sewer line gave out. Today, our 31-year-old furnace followed suit. Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29646,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,41],"tags":[2179,2215,2216,2217,2184,2185,2218],"class_list":["post-29638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-case-of-the-human-condition","category-sheltering-at-home-chronicles","tag-coronavirus","tag-furnace-repair","tag-no-furnace-no-heat","tag-sewer-line","tag-sheltering-at-home","tag-social-distancing","tag-toilet-paper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29638\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}