My heating/cooling saga

Now that I'm in the blogging mood, I might as well tell this story...

My A/C is currently not functional. Well, that's not really true. The A/C is working just fine. In fact, so is the actually heating unit in the furnace. The problem is that the furnace blower won't run, which means that the wonderful cool (or warm, depending on the situation) won't leave the furance and head into the rest of the house. This happened a week from last Friday. My A/C takes a long time to get the temperature down if it gets behind, but does a great job of maintaining once it gets to the right temperature, so I usually try to anticipate with the forecast when I turn it on. Friday was not that warm, but it was to get pretty hot on Saturday, so I threw the A/C on when I got home on Friday night. It ran for a while, and then cut off. I thought that it had been a rather short cycle, but didn't think much of it until I went outside a bit later and realized that the A/C unit itself was still running. Oops. After some quick self-diagnostics confirmed the issue was that the blower wasn't working, I called the repair company and they came out on Saturday, confirmed what I already knew, sort of, and ordered the part. Fortunately, Saturday was a single hot day, rather than the beginning of a wave, and it cooled off very nicely overnight so I was able to keep the house very comfortable.

On Wednesday, they came back out with the part. Unfortunately, it turns out that there are 3 different parts involved in making the blower run, and the part they replaced was not the one that was causing the problem, at least, not all by itself. So, we're playing this game again at some point this week once the other 2 parts come in. Anyhow, not a huge deal, it wasn't that warm during the week. There were, however, several pretty warm days toward the end of the week, and by Saturday night, it had gotten to right about the point in my bedroom where I start to be uncomfortable sleeping. Fortunately, again, it was a pretty cool evening already, so I was able to open up the house and cool things down a bit before bedtime, and then by Sunday morning, it was perfectly comfortable in the house.

This, however, is where I should have checked the forecast. I'm figuring it's going to warm up later in the day, so I'll leave the house open for a while and then close things up in the afternoon so it doesn't get too warm in the house. So, I went downstairs to the basement (which is easily the most stable part of the house temperature-wise) for a few hours. Little did I know that we were looking at a high of about 60 for yesterday, so when I came back upstairs, it was about 58 in my kitchen (it was still about 55 outside), 62 in my living room, and not much warmer in my bedroom, with no real hope of help from the weather for warming things up, and no functional heating.

So, I did what any resourceful person would do in this situation: I put the oven on the cleaning cycle. This was actually quite fortuitious, because it needed done, and I always have a hard time figuring out when to do it, because if I'm running the heat or the A/C, it winds up making the temperature in the house really uneven, because it's maybe 10 feet from the thermostat. In this case, it was just the ticket to make the house quasi-comfortable again.

Now, if only they would actually get the parts and get out here to fix the thing so I don't have to be creative again in the future, it would be great!