Not AGAIN!!!!!

After our little heating episode Thursday morning, which was resolved by turning it off for ten minutes and then re-starting it, it ran all day. About 10: 00 PM I noticed that it was getting a bit chilly. If the weather outside gets cold it can feel cooler in the house so I checked the indoor/outdoor thermometer on the wall. The top is outdoor and that isn't 94, it's 9.4 F which is bloomin' cold. See the lower number? That's our indoor temperature of 71.7 which isn't too bad....
Except that the thermostat is actually set for 74 and it shows an indoor temp of 72. You know what that means? It means that late at night on the coldest night of the year so far, our lovely new furnace has quit again.

OK, so we know what to do. Cut power to the furnace for 10 minutes and then start it again and we have heat once more. Or at least we have heat for an hour when it shuts off again. So we make another call to let the furnace company know that their lovely piece of crap has quit again.

Of course since this is, the coldest night of the year, they are being inundated with emergency calls and people with furnaces that won't come on at all, especially those with small children, elderly or infirm family members take priority, and that's as it should be. Unfortunately, that means that we are at the bottom of the list and no one is going to run right over and fix our problem but the technician does stay online with hubby long enough to walk him through a check of some of the more critical issues.

First thing is to check for flashing lights in the sight window. Lights? Sight window? Do you see a window?

There is a tiny window but all that you can see through it is the pilot flame and while it flickers like a flame, it certainly doesn't flash.

So my honey tells the guy that there's no flashing light at all.

Then he gets down on the floor in the tiny foot wide space in front of the furnace to undo the front of the furnace and look inside. Guess what? See that big yellow sticker? Know what's hidden underneath it? The sight window. Inside, the red light is giving 2 flashes. Know what that means? No? Neither did I until I read the troubleshooting guide. It means there is something faulty in the furnace. NO! Really? I never would have guessed it.

Our helpful techie guy goes through re-wiring the furnace to by-pass the thermostat and the furnace runs non-stop until we turn it off. At 1:00 AM Friday morning his instructions were to leave it running until it gets too hot, then turn it off until it gets too cold.

Gee thanks. Doesn't seem like a good idea to me, does it to you? You can either fall asleep with the furnace running and burn the house down, or fall asleep with it off and wake up to frozen water pipes. OR as another alternative, set your alarm clock to go off every hour all night long turning the furnace on and off, OR, my personal favourite, just stay up all night.

We ran the furnace until the house got too hot and then shut it off. After about half an hour it started getting chilly again and hubby could see that shutting the furnace on and off wasn't going to be an option if we wanted to get any sleep. Fortunately, he had taken pictures of the wiring before any of this happened so he wired it all up properly again and thankfully it ran all night.

This morning the technician called to see how things were going and when he found out that hubby had already re-wired it, he said they'd look at it when they had a little more time. (translation, never, unless we call to complain again).

Since I thought I might be sitting up all night turning the furnace on and off, I took the opportunity to test out some of the ebay thread. Several people suggested that the thread may not be usable due to it's age and the possibility that it had been improperly stored, so since the thread at the top of the pile was green, I thought I'd tat a shamrock or two. The extra kink in the thread caused by the little dip in the dimpled ring is sure to cause it to break if the thread is weak. It looks like it's OK, or at least this batch is. I expect that it will all be usable. I don't have to retro tat that much and when I switch from size 20 to size 80 or sewing thread, I normally relax my tension a lot.

This ball, like most of it in this batch is vintage Coats and Clark size 70.