Two mornings ago I woke up cold. Or rather I was cold in the middle of the night. I turned up the temperature on the thermostat but it wasn’t heating to a temperature I should have been cold with. Then in the morning I was colder still, only the thermostat wasn’t set to anything other than normal. So I brought up my iPad and looked for details and got concerned.
The master bedroom temperature was set correctly, only it was fifty-nine degrees in the room. The basement temperature was a bit warmer, what with it being half underground, but it was still cold—and the heat was not in fact on. The main floor wasn’t responding at all, saying the thermostat was too low on power to report at all and the upstairs thermostat was happily heating, only it was on auxiliary heat. What was going on?
I went out to the living room and sure enough, the thermostat wasn’t even powered. So I woke up my husband and told him we had a problem. While he was in the basement I looked up the setting on the second floor heat pump system and found out the report I was getting was accurate and correct given the outside temperature was as low as it was. So at least we had one out of three systems working correctly.
My husband came upstairs about that time and said he’d figured out what happened in the basement. When we converted our mechanical room to a game and work room there was a switch that could look like a light switch off to the side, but was in fact the switch to turn off the heating system—and that’s what had happened. Without power to the system, even the thermostats had no power. The main floor system and thermostats were back online and my husband had plans to mark the switch for the future.
Now we had two systems online and working correctly, but the third system was stubbornly not working. He got into the crawl space and checked the condensate pump, that being a component we’d had troubles with in the past on one of the other systems. That was fine, switching the unit off and on was fine but there was a pesky light blinking saying there was a pressure switch failure (whatever that was). After about a half hour of tinkering in a land in which my husband has little experience he said to call the company.
They could come out later in the day and when the technician arrived in the afternoon it turned out there was power going into one of the circuit boards but not coming out of it. An expensive part was ordered and we were told it would be Tuesday until the part came in. So five days without heat to the two areas that unit heated: the master and the basement.
We got a fan and circulated some heat for the night and everyone was reasonably warm. It wasn’t too much of a problem with the other two systems taking up for the one that was down. And then this afternoon I noticed the heat on in the master. Back on. Working as expected.
We don’t know what the issue was, but we’ll find out more when the technician comes back out on Tuesday. For now, I don’t have to sleep with several blankets added on top of my sheets, and for that, I’m happy.
The Big Boy Update: My husband and son have decided to watch all the Star Wars movies in order over the holiday break. Tonight they watched Revenge of the Sith. My son was very engaged, mostly doing parkour around the basement while the movie played. At one point when Anakin walked into a room with children training to become Jedi my son did get upset and started chanting, “don’t kill the kids, don’t kill the kids”. At the end of the movie he handled Anakin becoming Darth Vader because he already knew it was going to happen. I thought the movie would have scared him a lot, but my seven-year-old son isn’t as easily scared as he would have been a year ago.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter laid down in a ball on the floor in a pile of blankets she made for herself and told my husband she wasn’t going to make it through Star Wars because she was tired. She wanted to know if he could carry her upstairs when the movie was over. I packed up Christmas decorations and missed her sleeping but he dutifully carried her to bed once the movie had finished.
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