We have a curse. Whenever we spend money frivolously, something happens shortly afterwards that requires us to spend money as a necessity. The last instance of this happening was this past week.
Monday night, I went up to Pocomoke to pick Sarah up from dance class. I was less than ten minutes away from the house when my phone rang in the car. I answered the call from the house thinking Adrianne forgot to tell me to pick up milk or some other sundry while I was out.
“Yes dear?” I answered.
“The house is on fire!” she replied.
“I hope I’m not your first phone call! What is going on? Are you safe?” I asked.
“The house is filled with smoke, we’re okay, but the thermostat upstairs was spewing smoke!” she said.
“Okay, calm down and tell me what’s going on exactly.” I said, trying to keep my own voice as calm as possible.
“Austin was upstairs playing his guitar, he heard a noise from the thermostat in his room, he looked over and smoke was coming out of it. I ran to the garage and turned off the breaker to the upstairs air handler.” she explained.
“Good girl, okay, so there’s smoke in the house, but nothing is on fire now?” I asked.
“Not that I can tell.” she answerd.
“Okay, stay calm, open the windows, turn on all the fans and try to get the smoke out.” I replied. “I’ll check it out as soon as I get Sarah and get home.”
At this point, we were both a little frazzled, so I stayed on the line with her to try to keep her calm while I pushed down the accelerator to get to the dance studio a bit faster. I got her calmed down and told her that if she saw any more smoke or fire, to get out of the house and call 911. About ten minutes later, I had Sarah in the car and we were speeding through the night back to the house so I could see what was going on with the thermostat.
I got home and could smell an acrid odor through the house like something electrical had burnt, but there was not as much smoke as I had expected. Checking in with Adrianne, she seemed okay on the surface, but 21 years of marriage and I knew she was anxious about what happened. I immediately went upstairs and I pulled the thermostat off the wall to look at it, there was a bit of black soot on the outside of the plastic case. I looked at the plate behind the thermostat, it seemed okay, but I wanted to check the wires coming from out of the wall. I pulled the plate off the wall with a screwdriver and used a flashlight to check the hole in the wall that the wires came out of. Everything seemed okay, not even the faintest whiff of smoke from that area, so I turned my attention to the thermostat. Opening up the thermostat, I found more black soot in the plastic case and after pulling apart the circuitboard from the plastic case, I found black scorch marks in the case. A quick topography of where the scorch marks were led me to find the burnt circuits on the card; it would have to be replaced. Being after 9:30 at night, I decided it could wait until tomorrow. I had planned on teleworking that day anyway, I would just have to use my lunch break to run to the home improvement store and pick up a replacement.
The next day, I was at the home improvement store and what a surprise, they don’t make the thermostat we had anymore, so I’d have to upgrade. To be honest, I wasn’t too upset about this anyway, I’d been ogling the new Nest thermostats from Google, so I decided to spend a bit of extra money to get the nicer product.
New technology in hand, I checked out, grabbed a bite to eat since I was already out and about, and headed home. I checked back into work, ate my lunch while I read the instructions on how to install the new thermostat.
A couple of sandwiches and a diet coke later, I felt confident in my ability to install the device and set out to accomplish that very goal. I went upstairs with the device in hand, a screwdriver and instruction manual in my pocket. I took a picture before I removed the old plate, labelled all the wires that were already there, installed the new plate, attached all the wires, screwed the plate to the wall, and the big moment arrived. I attached the device to the plate and nothing happened. I double checked all the wires were seated properly, reattached the device and…still nothing. I started looking at the troubleshooting section of the installation manual and moved a few wires around…nothing. I crawled in the attic, checked the breakers several times, moved more wires…nothing. I must have spent about two hours trying to get this thing to work and couldn’t get a heartbeat from it. I called technical support and went through everything with them a second time as well as a few additional things and nada. At this point, both the lady from technical support and I decided it was time to pull out the big guns. I got my multi-meter out of the garage and tested the live wires and found they were only pulling down less than a volt DC. They were supposed to have 24 volts, that pretty much cinched it. I knew at that point it was time to call in a pro. I thanked the lady from tech support and called a local HVAC guy. The earliest they could come in was Wednesday, so I set the appointment and waited.
Wednesday afternoon, the HVAC dude arrived and I told him my story. We went upstairs to Austin’s room which has the access to the attic in it. He climbed up the ladder I’d set up ahead of time and unbolted the plate on the air hander. “Woah!” he exclaimed. It was at that point I knew it was going to be expensive. This is what he saw:
Yep. That ladies and gentlemen is the source of all the smoke that was in the house. I knew something wasn’t adding up. The way Adrianne explained it, the whole house was filled with smoke. Somewhere in the back of my brain, the little circuit board in the thermostat couldn’t have made that much smoke, but somewhere along the way, I thought, burning electronics smells really bad, that must be what she meant.
The control board in the air handler burnt itself up along with the wiring harness it was connected to. The technician said it would probably be a good idea to replace the transformer, the blower, the board, and the wiring harness to be safe. I agree with him. After a day of waiting for the bad news, it came in this afternoon. $1,500 to do all that work. The parts won’t be here until the middle of next week sometime and I don’t know when they’re going to be available to install them.
We’d just paid $1,700 to have the driveway paved, $600 to have the gutters cleaned, repaired, and capped, and this penny drops. Confirmation bias never fails. Just when you think things are going good, something bad comes along to screw your plans up and every time that happens, you get that confirmation, yep, it happened again.
Well, at least we have the money right now to do the repairs we need. The weather has been decent up until today. Today is the first day it’s dropped below 60 degrees, so we should be fine until the parts come in, they’re installed, and we get the upstairs hvac unit running again. Nothing is ever easy.
One side-note, this really scared the crap out of all of us when we saw the photo. October is fire safety month and I had just replaced the smoke detector batteries. As the weather turns colder, don’t forget to check everything out, replace those batteries in your smoke detectors, put in some clean filters if needed, or have your friendly neighborhood technician come check everything out before you switch over to heat. They’ll be happy to take your money and you can rest a bit easier. If a fire does happen, don’t try to figure it out or fight it yourselves, get out, call the fire department. Houses are replaceable, you are not. I’ll keep you posted as we get this repaired and we’re back up and running.
Post Script: I bought two Nest thermostats for the house since we have an upstairs and a downstairs unit. I did install the downstairs unit once I gave up on the upstairs one working. Three days in and I love the thing. It keeps track of when you’re home and shuts down the heating and cooling when you’re not there. It also lets you know how long your heat or a/c runs on a daily basis, helps you save energy with reminders to change filters, runs the fan before the a/c shuts off completely to spread the cool air around, and learns form your habits to turn the heat or a/c on before you get home. We live in such amazing times!
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