In our kitchen, that is. We are dawning on week #3 without a furnace, and it’s frosty outside. We’ve been surviving with space heaters and sequestering ourselves in certain rooms. We don’t dare step into the downstairs bedrooms!
As you may or may not know, when our plumber/heating guy came out a couple of weeks ago to do the routine furnace maintenance, he informed us that we had two cracked exchangers and that we had better not use the heat lest we release carbon monoxide into the house! Shawna quickly went out and bought a CO detector, which thankfully came back negative. We should have had one all along, just like the smoke detectors and fire extinguishers.
She’s spent the subsequent weeks interviewing and obtaining quotes from various heating contractors, all peddling Trane, Carrier or Gibson. We’d never heard of Gibson, so we dismissed those. Our last quote was from Sears, who I was most skeptical about, given what I’d read online about poor customer service, unavailability, etc.–the usual expectations from national corporate behemoths.
I spent the better part of travel to and from our OB appointment reviewing costs and installation details with the Sears sales rep. I had initially thought that the best alternative for heating the upstairs was to create a second zone–it seemed like the climate differential between our two stories was tremendous, and it only made sense. Not one rep who came to our house could find the ductwork that isolates our upstairs, so they all deemed it impossible. Finally, frustrated at not understanding why they all pooh-poohed zoning, I talked to the Sears guy. I told him where the ductwork was for the upstairs, and he was dumbfounded–partially at the fact that he couldn’t find it, perhaps more that I could.
Anyway, we talked through it and he convinced me that zoning was not the best alternative–it would be expensive, and the main problem with the ductwork upstairs was that it is undersized (as most of it is in our house). He wanted to get a new line up to the second floor, but had no idea how. I told him that we could mirror the ductwork from the back side of the house: we have a 4″ line that runs vertically inside our bathroom closet, up into the upstairs crawlspace, and out through two vents into our bedroom and hallway respectively. Over the phone, I walked him through measuring the lateral distance of the ductwork from the exterior bathroom wall, and transferring that measurement to the front of the house, and into the front living room closet. We found that it would work, and decided that we would do that rather than zoning.
While we were in our OB appointment, he reworked the numbers. One thing we both didn’t like was the pressure he put on us to agree to the work that day, in spite of the fact that we had 3 days to cancel. Shawna and I fought over it for a little while–Sears was the cheapest estimate, but I wanted to go with someone local and responsive. Well, she won and so far we’ve saved about $900. We’ll see how it all turns out, and give an update. The final bill: $5400 for a Carrier 96 Infinity, upgrading of all our 4″ ducts to 6″, a humidifier, and one new duct upstairs.
