Lewies Blog

We ran out of heating oil this past week. The delivery man arrived today and refueled our tank with one hundred, fifty gallons for the low price of about four hundred dollars. That is almost twice the amount we had to pay last year. A technician came out later to relight the furnace. He pulled the cover off and we saw rust everywhere.

He got the system running. Angel and I watched as he banged on the pump just to get it working. Then he started draining a lot of light brown water into a tin can. He was done and started looking around. He immediately shut off the switch and said we would die if we run the furnace. In the back, our exhaust pipe had a huge rusted hole in it. We would have died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

It appears that we have plenty of water damage to the heating system. It may be that the chimney vent doesn’t have a cap on it. That would explain how all the water got down there. He also mentioned something about some water not being blasted out of a long plastic pipe that leads to a drain in the middle of the floor.

I am just confused when it comes to the operation and maintenance of this heater. I don’t know what needs to be done or how to maintain it. My dad could probably figure it out in no time at all since he works on that kind of stuff.

My parents had a heat pump and all you had to do was keep the power on. There weren’t any deliveries or technicians to restart the system when it ran out. Weather damage was minimal since the pump was built to sit outside in the environment. There were no chimneys that could cause water damage.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 29th, 2005 at 11:44 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.