Happy 2018!
We wish all of you excellent health, joy, and peace this coming year.
Well, we may have gone on hiatus but their was no interval to the excitement around here. When we left you last, Bert and his sons we’re finishing up connecting our new furnace.
When they re-attached the original furnace to just the third-floor and water, it decided to go kaput. So as the Thursday afternoon before Christmas wore on, the one room that has remained warm started to chill down. When the room temperature dropped to 67 degrees, I ran downstairs to ask Scott what was happening. He went to the basement to check the switches. The tubing to the hot water was warm, but the tubing to our one preciously warm room was cool. We watched the thermostat… a major storm was approaching. With Happy being older, having no idea if we would have warmth in the foreseeable future… living without heat was not a viable option.
Apparently, Patrick St. Pierre of Efficient Heating and Cooling Services (our original contractor) installed inexpensive tubing connectors not designed for the radiant flooring. We had learned he used a lower grade tubing, but we didn’t know about the connectors. Connectors for radiant heating need to be brass… so they won’t rust. Ours weren’t!
When Burt and his sons disconnected everything they rust poured out of every tube… Rust running through the furnace… rust running through the whole system. And, when Bert flushed it as good as he could and reconnected it, it blew out the furnace that Patrick had installed (April 2017) just eight months earlier.
There we were on the verge of a snowstorm… A significant snowstorm at that and we had no heat. The temperature on the third floor kept dropping. Scott would go to the basement and attempt to reset the furnace, but the temperature just kept dropping.
When the temperature dropped to 62° we decided it was time to head to the Holiday Inn in Johnstown. We had not been able to reach Bert. Of course, it was the evening three days before Christmas and he had left believing the furnace was working as well as it could.
We called Bert… We called Glenn… everyone was out. After all it’s the holidays! Finally, about 9 o’clock that night Bert and his family arrived home only to find messages from us and messages from Glenn.
Poor Bert! He came running over to the house that very night to see what was wrong. That’s when he found out that the furnace had not been able to take all the rust that had accumulated in it. When he reattached it, it ran a bit then just quit! Enough was enough. He had to find new parts… New parts not available until the next day… if they were in stock. We were safe at the Holiday Inn as the snow fell and temperatures dropped.
The next day Bert did find replacement parts for our furnace and installed them. Radiant heating is not like turning on a warm blower… it takes time for the coils to warm the floor. But, our furnace was working! We were safe!
A second night spent at the Holiday Inn while our cottage warmed. Well, not our whole cottage, but the room on the third floor we call home.
The next day we were able to take our puppies home to that nice cozy room on the third floor of our cottage…
