The sun is out and it's 33...but there is no snow and no rain. It's wonderful!
Waiting on a repairman.
Our floor heat system and hot water system are all tied in together and are natural gas heated. We also have a gas heat system on the first floor and an electric heat pump for the upstairs. It is
supposed to be very efficient and reduce costs...or so the prior owner told us....
2 weeks ago...a house about 3 - 4 miles up the road....a $1.4 million - 5 yr old home ...blew up in the middle of the night. I'm not talking just having an blow and catching on fire. It was totally obliterated. Windows on neighboring houses were blown out, even the garage doors on the house to one side and across the street. It rumbled so loud that we could hear it and shook our house enough to wake up the other half and my son who thought we were had a small earthquake.
The parents were blown out of the upstairs of the home and found severely injured, but not burned, behind the house. The 18 yo son was in the basement, and it took DNA to determine it was parts of him, and the college daughter had just gone back to the dorm with her best friend a few hours earlier. This has been really tragic...even more so, because they had just had a repairman out a few days before because they smelled gas in the house. He found a very small leak in the fireplace with the gas log system....nothing else. Obviously there was something else.
In my infinite wisdom...
...I thought we should have ours checked out, as there has always been a natural gas smell when it does it's little exhaust thing every couple of hours. We had been told by a previous repairman that it was "normal". After this tragedy....I wanted to make sure.
The other half calls a company that specializes in boilers and furnaces, but also does regular heat pumps.
The guy got here Friday morning a bit after 9....he was here until about 7...except when he went twice to get parts.
Both of us asked him if he was sure he knew how to work on a system like ours. He said yes, but if he had any questions he had someone he could call.
He did replace a valve and cleaned the systems.
I wrote him an extremely large check when he left.
Our floors won't heat, we have no hot water....it occasionally gets lukewarm. The red light that shows the system is heating has not gone off since Friday evening which is not a good thing.
We called on Saturday...there was to be a "specialist" here first thing this morning.
It's now 11....no repairman...
but there is no smell of gas!!!
Given the circumstances....I'd rather be out of hot water...than have the gas smell.
Please....please....if you have the least bit of smell of natural gas around your home....please call a repairman...have it checked out. It's better to spend a bit of money - even at this time of year....than to have something horrrendously tragic happen.
