Talk About A Chilly Christmas!

I woke up at 5:30am on Christmas morning.. Not because I was excited to see what Santa brought me, but because it was FREEZING cold in our house! I stumbled out of bed, walked over to the thermostat, and I freaked out when I saw the digital display – 63 degrees.

Our thermostat drops to 69 degrees at night, so I knew something was wrong. We didn’t lose power, and the gas was working (I checked the stove). So I pulled open up the furnace cover to see if I could figure out what was going on. A red LED indicator was lit up, which wasn’t a good sign..

Since our heater is covered under a service contract, I called them to see when someone could come out to repair the heater. Of course, being Christmas Day, no one could come out until the following day between 8am-12pm. Staying at home wasn’t an option, as it was 20 degrees outside. So we packed up our stuff and stayed with family until the following day.

I was concerned about the pipes possibly freezing, but I left a few faucets open on a slow drop to relieve pressure, and I opened up all the window shades to let in as much sunlight as possible. In the evening, I went back to pull down the shades, and saw that it had only dropped 1 degree, so I felt a little better about things. Had it gotten any colder, I would have borrowed my father-in-law’s space heater to warm up the house.

Of course, a service window of 8am-12pm means that they’ll come out at 11:30am, and that’s exactly what happened. Turns out the circuit board on the heater went, and the tech didn’t have a spare on hand, so he had to go back to his office to get one. “I’ll be back in an hour, don’t go anywhere.” Just my luck!

In order to stay warm while waiting for the repair guy to get here, I bundled up like Ralphie from A Christmas Story. It was quite a sight.. In retrospect, I should have borrowed that space heater from my father-in-law, as it had dropped to 60 degrees in the house by this point, and it was freaking COLD!

But in the end, the repair guy came back and was able to fix the heater. In total, we were without heat for 36 hours. Luckily, thanks to our service contract, there was no cost for the repair. I shudder to think what the bill would have been like had I called out an HVAC guy on Christmas Day.

Needless to say, it was a memorable Christmas..