Brrrrrrrr III…in Brrrrrrrr3-D

Here’s the verdict after an HVAC service call.

1. The heat and air units are as old as the house is. At least as old. The units are so old that they may have arisen from the primordial ooze and the house may have simply been built around them.
2. There are three “heat strips” in the unit. Two are burned out. One is good, and it’s never been used anyway, because the electrical wiring for the furnace was never completed to support the voltage for all three. That good one has been swapped out for one of the others, so we’re at about 50% heating capacity.
3. After about 2 1/2 hours of being on again, the house is now as warm as it normally is in the winter. Which likely means that one of the burned-out heat strips was burned out when we first got here. Which might explain the electric bills we get in the winter.
4. We still don’t know the answers to “how soon” and how much”, but in the meantime…we’re back to status quo.
5. We should really look at replacing the whole thing, but at least no one’s trying to sell us on a $10K dongle for the upgrade.

So, yet another piece of bizarre wiring/plumbing, the latest in a long line of such, rears its head in our home. The former owner, God bless him, gave us a steal on the place, largely because he didn’t want his ex-wife to get any more out of the deal than necessary. But he wasn’t a DYI guy – not a handyman. I’m not either. The difference is that I’m willing to admit that I need to have someone else come and do it, because I just don’t know how to do some of this stuff. The guy who used to own the place…well…he left us many puzzling bits of wiring and plumbing to unravel over the past three years. I’m sure with the best of intentions, but some of these wiring jobs were pretty ghetto, almost dangerously so.
This is kinda like that.
PS. It got down to 22 degrees last night.