The thread has arrived, the heat hasn't

My thread shipment came today. See what I mean? Nothing in yellow/orange colour. What's stupid about this is that I know the colours I gravitate to and I know that I always need a little of those fall colours, but I somehow, it always ends up like this. The furnace guys came yesterday afternoon and replaced the thermostat because they were sure that would fix the problem. See the lovely new thermostat. It looks a lot like the one they removed but it's programmable, which doesn't matter to us since we're here all the time. When you work at home you don't need to program it. Even if we aren't home, the parrot is, so there's no time during the winter when we don't need heat.

After waiting all day for the guys to show up we had to get out after supper and run a few errands. One of the things on the shopping list was laundry soap. rolling around on the floor under the furnace trying to read a flashing light that's about 6 inches off the floor, results in a lot of dirty shirts and jeans. So when we got home the first priority was doing some laundry. The clothes came out of the washer and into the dryer. A quick turn of the knob and nothing.

The dryer started but only kept running if you held the button in. There's nothing worse than having a load of soaking wet clothes and a dryer on the fritz. I'm so glad I married and handy man. Disclaimer: No appliances were injured during the filming of this event.

I left him working on the switch and went to bed. This morning the dryer is working. Of course the furnace isn't. It quit again during the night. We have another call in to have them come back and look at it. Apparently they can't fix it unless it breaks down again, so we need to wait for it to quit, turn it back on immediately and then read the colour and number of flashes. I love hearing "when it quits the next time...." There shouldn't have been a first time!

The troubleshooting guide that comes with the furnaces states that green flashing is normal operation, amber flashing is normal operation red flashing means there is something wrong. Initially it flashed red. One of the several times it has quit it was amber.

They suspected that the problem was either a faulty thermostat, which they have now replaced, or possibly a nick in the covering of one of the wires causing it to short out. When they walked Rob through doing the bypass of the thermostat the first night, he cut off the ends, stripped and re-wired the thermostat connection. They were hoping that if it was a short because the wire got nicked that it would have been corrected by the rewire. No such luck. They've just called to say that they are sending a different furnace guy over. He'll be here in a couple of hours. Stay tuned for more of the on-going furnace adventure.

Further update - Two new furnace guys have just come and gone. Apparently, in this 2 stage furnace, the guys that installed it had a jumper, so that it was only running on the second stage. I think they said that it was what you needed to do with some of the furnaces, but not this one. The unit is a York furnace which is a generally reliable unit. Maybe, and here's what we're hoping, the fact that it was only running on the second stage, caused it to overheat and shut off. If so, everything should stay toasty warm until spring.