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As you may know, we (meaning the Wife and I) moved into a new home earlier this year. (Aside: The old home is still available for purchase, should anyone with extra cash sitting around and willing to help out a struggling blogger. End Aside.)
With any new experience, there is a learning curve that goes along with the new dwelling. For example, we lose a ton of heat through the lack of insulation in the walls and attic. We are working on resolving that problem. Until then, our furnace is working to make up for the difference.
Speaking of new experiences and furnaces, our current heating fuel of obligated choice is oil. Oil furnaces are dirty, smelly contraptions. We are not really excited about the future of the world's oil reserves and therefore have purchased a nice, new, high efficiency natural gas burner. It gets installed next week Wednesday.
I think the old furnace is a little bit grumpy that it will soon be retired. On Monday of this week, it stopped working. This might have been the reason.
Okay, that's not my furnace, but only what I was expecting to see when I wove my way through the spider webs in my crawl space (another new adventure). As it turns out, there was absolutely no gunk in the tank. Which was, of course, the root of the problem. We were out of oil.
We contacted the local oil company that delivers sludge to our tank. The conundrum: We only need about 6 total gallons. Like 46 million others, we are traveling for Turkey (the poultry is better 550 miles away from my current home and tastes extra scrumptious after a nice long drive). Heat is not needed for most of the week. In fact, it's only needed for Sunday- Tuesday of next week. Then, the glorious new carbon dioxide producer will provide us with a nice tankless heating system that we don't need to fill.
Can you believe that the oil company would not sell us 6 gallons? Nooooooo, they needed to sell us 50 gallons. It's apparently not worth their time to pay a driver to deliver such meager portions. As the Wife was on the phone negotiating oil deliveries, I got on the internet and started researching alternative sources of heat for the next few days. I just learned that it's a bad idea to run your oven with the door open for extended periods of time. Who knew?
Since the Wife refused to allow me to drive one of the vehicles into the house and run the defrost on hi, I found a work around.
She didn't go for that idea either. I did find a solution that involved hooking my bike up to a steam-powered generator. The steam was created by pedal power. We were a little concerned about added stank (provided by me of course), which was one of the reasons we wanted a new furnace in the first place.
I do still have my old lawnmower from the other house. It produces an ungodly amount of heat as evidenced everytime a touch the device. I could harness that energy with the following set-up. We were actually considering this option until the Wife noticed that the dogs were scared to go into the living room.
In the end, we bought the oil. It's quite toasty in the house right now and our feelings of conservation are drastically reduced with the prospect of a new furnace next week.
By the way, if anyone is searching for any good deals for Christmas gifts, I will soon be selling about 44 gallons of furnace oil. Let me know if you are interested.
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