![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Now I feel like a man
Jan. 25th, 2005 09:35 pmSpeaking of heating efficiency, our house is heated via a heat pump, which might seem woefully inadequate for New England but is actually not so bad since we are in the middle of a block of townhouses and only exposed on two sides.
At some point last spring or summer, the heat pump blew a fuse for some still-undetermined reason. All we knew was that it was broken. After suffering without air conditioning for a while, we brought in a repair guy who topped off the coolant, replaced the blown fuse, and resurrected our AC, for which we were mightily thankful, as it can get pretty hot upstairs in the summer.
At some point in the fall or winter, it stopped working again. It was some time before we realized that something was wrong, because there's an auxiliary heating coil that can keep the house from freezing. But the resulting heat is kind of feeble when it gets down into the single digits Fahrenheit, and it's also damned expensive to heat the house that way.
I figured it was possibly another blown fuse, and this time actually looked in the fuse box. After much fumbling about, writing down information, and looking at the boxes of fuses at Lowe's, I determined that the repair guy had put in what was likely a ridiculously low-rated fuse that would blow under perfectly ordinary conditions.
Addendum: (Figuring this out was partly a function of my own stupidity. Sam and I wrote down all sorts of things in preparation for my trip to the hardware store just before the big blizzard. She happened to note the recommended fuse current written on the device, but I neglected to note what was actually on the fuse that was in the box. Realizing my mistake at the store, I got my best-guess fuse based on what she'd written down, then realized after I got home and compared it to the installed fuse that mine was probably right and the existing one wrong.)
Tonight, I replaced the fuse with a proper one and resurrected the heat pump. Within minutes, the house was so toasty that I had to turn down the thermostat.
That is all.
At some point last spring or summer, the heat pump blew a fuse for some still-undetermined reason. All we knew was that it was broken. After suffering without air conditioning for a while, we brought in a repair guy who topped off the coolant, replaced the blown fuse, and resurrected our AC, for which we were mightily thankful, as it can get pretty hot upstairs in the summer.
At some point in the fall or winter, it stopped working again. It was some time before we realized that something was wrong, because there's an auxiliary heating coil that can keep the house from freezing. But the resulting heat is kind of feeble when it gets down into the single digits Fahrenheit, and it's also damned expensive to heat the house that way.
I figured it was possibly another blown fuse, and this time actually looked in the fuse box. After much fumbling about, writing down information, and looking at the boxes of fuses at Lowe's, I determined that the repair guy had put in what was likely a ridiculously low-rated fuse that would blow under perfectly ordinary conditions.
Addendum: (Figuring this out was partly a function of my own stupidity. Sam and I wrote down all sorts of things in preparation for my trip to the hardware store just before the big blizzard. She happened to note the recommended fuse current written on the device, but I neglected to note what was actually on the fuse that was in the box. Realizing my mistake at the store, I got my best-guess fuse based on what she'd written down, then realized after I got home and compared it to the installed fuse that mine was probably right and the existing one wrong.)
Tonight, I replaced the fuse with a proper one and resurrected the heat pump. Within minutes, the house was so toasty that I had to turn down the thermostat.
That is all.