... and speaking of "hot."
...
It has been quite chilly lately, by Oakland standards. Our old house is, not surprisingly, rather drafty. Our historic heating system works quite well, given its age.
Which is to say that we have heat in the living room, and a couple of space heaters in the bedroom.
Heating systems that involve duct-work came into being after our house was built, and none of the previous owners ever upgraded. We have a single heating register in the living room, that sits on top of our furnace. When Robb was ripping out the dirty shag carpet in the hallway that runs outside the bedrooms and bathroom, he discovered a heating register grate that had been covered over for who-knows-how-many-years. He subsequently crawled under our house, and discovered that the furnace that would had heated that part of the house had been totally disabled. The gas line that once ran to the furnace has been removed.
Robb says that there's an eighty-five year old sticker on that furnace, from the company that did the installation. We imagine that the five-digit phone number on the label works about as well as the furnace.
Robb was sitting in the living room, just now and started started wondering if he was on fire. The place smelled like burning hair.
It turns out that one of the sticky felt pads that Robb had put on the bottom of our chair legs had fallen off, and dropped through the grating and fallen on top of the hot furnace plate thingamajigger. By the time Robb had fished it out, more than half of the wool felt pad had charred away to nothing.
Our house stinks.
Thank goodness for our drafty windows, right?
It has been quite chilly lately, by Oakland standards. Our old house is, not surprisingly, rather drafty. Our historic heating system works quite well, given its age.
Which is to say that we have heat in the living room, and a couple of space heaters in the bedroom.
Heating systems that involve duct-work came into being after our house was built, and none of the previous owners ever upgraded. We have a single heating register in the living room, that sits on top of our furnace. When Robb was ripping out the dirty shag carpet in the hallway that runs outside the bedrooms and bathroom, he discovered a heating register grate that had been covered over for who-knows-how-many-years. He subsequently crawled under our house, and discovered that the furnace that would had heated that part of the house had been totally disabled. The gas line that once ran to the furnace has been removed.
Robb says that there's an eighty-five year old sticker on that furnace, from the company that did the installation. We imagine that the five-digit phone number on the label works about as well as the furnace.
Robb was sitting in the living room, just now and started started wondering if he was on fire. The place smelled like burning hair.
It turns out that one of the sticky felt pads that Robb had put on the bottom of our chair legs had fallen off, and dropped through the grating and fallen on top of the hot furnace plate thingamajigger. By the time Robb had fished it out, more than half of the wool felt pad had charred away to nothing.
Our house stinks.
Thank goodness for our drafty windows, right?
Comments
Grumpy Grinch
~~Doublesaj~~
~~Doublesaj~~
LB
Annalisa
Good idea!
Annalisa
We're going to be more careful about this in the future. Hopefully, nothing else will fall in.
(Good thing we don't have small children, huh?)
A and G
Dbare
There were two small gas floor heaters that I had removed, one that had venting problems and was immediately in front of the refrigerator and one in the narrow hallway that ran between the two bedrooms, right in front of a bedroom door. I only left the large one in the living room and used portable space heaters elsewhere.
I think the grate over them was too fine for most things to fall through. I used to worry about the cats potentially burning their feet on the grate, but they always avoided it.
I meant to take the two small no longer used grates with me when I moved, but in the moving commotion I forgot :-(