Michael woke me up at two in the morning last night saying, "Is the heater on?" It was, and it had heated the house to a warm 73 degrees.
We never set the thermostat that high. At most, we turn it up to 66-68 on a really cold night, and usually prefer to sleep with it down around 61. And it certainly never got that cold yesterday.
So we got up, and turned it off.
Nothing. It kept going. Now it was 75 degrees.
And getting warmer by the minute.
Michael took the batteries out of it, waited until the control panel screen went blank, and put them back in. The heater shut off.
"Now can we go back to bed?" he asked. "It's
turned off now."
I went into the bathroom. While I was there, I heard the familiar sound of the furnace humming, as it was getting ready to turn the vents back on.
"It's about to turn back on!" I yelled.
"What?"
"The furnace is on again. It's going to start blowing hot air again in a minute!"
And so it did. Now it was approaching the high 70s.
Michael
suggested I find the owner's manuals, and I did. They provided a
complicated-looking set of instructions for how to turn off the
furnace. There's a gas connection to shut off, a switch to flip, and a
door to remove. The diagrams (there were two of them) showed arrows
pointing every which way.
I found a flashlight and went to investigate the bowels of our house. We don't have a basement, just a crawlspace with a dirt floor. The heater is on the far side of the space, requiring the visitor to wriggle across the dirt on hands and knees. Oh, and there are spiderwebs, of course.
I got about halfway and panicked. I couldn't figure out where the switch was or how to turn off the gas without turning it off to the whole house (bye-bye cooking or showering). I'm not good at opening doors on things like this. I tried looking at the circuit breakers in the front of the house and none of them said "heater". Not surprising, since the heater had been installed since I moved in.
At 2:30 in the morning, we decided to make phone calls.
First, Michael tried the service number listed on the inside of the control panel.
He got an answering machine.
Then I
decided it was time to share our pain with our friends.
I got two answering machines. I left panicky messages on both of them. Two minutes later, Lesley called me back, sounding (understandably) sleepy. "Steve's on his way over."
The temperature
in the house was now 81 degrees.
Steve showed up and I escorted him to the side of the house. He wriggled into the crawlspace, then made his way across to the heater.
The door would not come off.
He asked for the manuals. Apparently screwdrivers were needed.
He came back towards the front, reached up...
...and flicked a switch. The furnace immediately shut down.
"Well, that was the switch. The furnace cuts off the gas automatically when it loses power," he said.
Michael
came running out. "Something happened! The heater stopped!" We
enthusiastically thanked Steve, and are going to have to do something
really nice for him to make up for the lost sleep.
We went back in and sat around for half an hour until the temperature dropped to the mid-70s, and then were able to go back to sleep.
So it appears that our heater is possessed. Or perhaps our house is. Is it something we said? Did we hurt its feelings because we're moving?
Does anyone have an old priest and a young priest we could borrow?
