1.04.2013

Yesterday I Blew A Fuse ...

No seriously ... yesterday I LITERALLY blew a fuse.

In our furnace.  While trying to change our thermostat.  Because the directions on the box clearly stated that it would take 15 minutes or less.  That is, if the dufus installing the system actually read the one page of directions that would have saved the next 18 hours of stress.  Not that I'm admitting guilt or anything. *ahem*.

Of course, you know what happens when you LITERALLY blow a fuse in your furnace mere minutes before you have to run out to a PTA meeting?

Well if you guessed that your husband fixes it during the two hours you were gone, you'd be WRONG.  However, if your second guess is that he finally fed the kids a dinner of frozen waffles with Nutella and blueberries, you'd be SPOT on.  Though this post isn't about my sweet husband's culinary skills or lack thereof ... so let's get back to the issue at hand. 

Unaware until this morning (thanks to our neighborhood Facebook page) that I actually DID blow a fuse in the furnace, we spent endless hours trying to wire and re-wire the OLD thermostat.  Turning on and turning off the circuit breakers.  Wondering what on 'gawds green earth' I did that somehow stopped sending electricity to the new, and then switched-out-again, old thermostat.

I won't bother to go into gory detail about what exactly I did wrong.  Let's just sum it up by saying that I now know a HELL of a lot about re-wiring thermostats.  And the bottom line is that extra wires are OKAY.   Note to self ... the blue 'C' wire doesn't go into the terminal marked 'B' just because it's blue.  That is ... unless you want to blow a fuse in your furnace that will take you hours upon hours to discover.

To compound matters, last night was poetically the coldest night of the year.  A grand time to be without heat.  AND hot water.   Because as we later discovered, the gas for the hot water heater is tied to the furnace.  SO, no heat = no hot water.

Despite tinkering until almost 2 am, there was no heat to be had.  And when we woke up this morning we could see our breath and hang meat in our bedroom.  It.  Was.  COLD.

Setting aside my DIY pride we called in a team of experts (our on-call electrician and our Home Depot frequenting friends) to as Matt puts it, "un-f*ck" my previous days handiwork.

Fortunately by noon, our ordeal was over.  Having taken seventy-two times longer than the instructions said it should.   Ending up right back where we started.  Though with a clearer understanding of a heating and air conditioning wiring system.

But ... with the same old thermostat. 


5 comments:

Christy said...

Oh my goodness.....

Betsy said...

I am sometimes good at DIY, but when I am bad, I am really bad! It stinks that you have the same old thermostat. I hope that it is at least a programmable one.

anymommy said...

Oh god. This reminds me of the night we went without heat because our furnace was broken and would not turn on and Matt refused to call a weekend emergency furnace guy. Monday morning he arrived ... and charged us $200 to tell us one of the kids had turned the furnace OFF!!! Glad you're warm again.

Unknown said...

in our home we like to call that a "Tressa" lol
Glad you got it fixed & y'all aren't going to freeze afterall. :-)

Anna Whiston-Donaldson said...

oopsie! remindes me of when our thermostat broke and the house got up to 105 when we were out of town. melty-fun when we got back. plus the kids had strep, so it was toasty all around.

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