COLUMN: Heat Out

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through my dwelling, it was so freaking cold that it merits tale-telling.

How were YOUR holidays? Mine proved a little more interesting than expected. Having recently recovered from the flu (note: do NOT recommend), I was all set to make up for lost holiday merriment in the run-up to Christmas. Then Winter Storm Elliott came along with predictions of anywhere from 1-30 inches of snow followed promptly by blood-freezing wind chills unfit for human life. Fa la la la la.

So instead of firing up the yule log with friends, I spent the holiday week making sure I was well stocked on pantry provisions and knew where the flashlights were. Truly, it's the most wonderful time of the year.

The good news was that our frozen friend Elliott only ended up dropping a dusting of snow in my neck of the woods. Unfortunately, though, the forecasts were spot-on when it came to the cold... I think. I wouldn't know for sure, because I spent much that time snug under a blanket with no intentions of stepping outside until possibly spring.

That lasted until the night before Christmas Eve, when I woke to find my furnace completely off and my house rapidly losing heat. I know a thing about HVAC maintenance and repair. Specifically, I know how to turn the furnace off and back on -- to no avail. Having thus exhausted my vast HVAC expertise, I started calling service technicians, who were certainly eager to hear from customers in the middle of night on Christmas weekend in -40 wind chills. I called twelve places and got through to two. Both were booked solid and couldn't work me in for days, but a third outfit called me back and their overworked service tech said that since I was without heat, he could probably get to me sometime the next day. 

I bundled up and went to bed, but woke up a couple hours later sweltering. At some point, the furnace had kicked back on and my house was toasty. I did a quick happy dance and went back to bed, only to wake up freezing again at 5 a.m. Maybe having heat was a dream? I was planning on spending Christmas Eve drinking cocoa and watching bad holiday movies. Instead, I found myself hopping in the shower and bundling up to be at Wal-Mart when they opened at 6 a.m. on an emergency mission for space heaters.

By the time I got out of the shower, the heat was back on and the house was warming up. I wasn't excited to keep playing this fun game, so I layered up until I was comprised of 80% coat and waddled my way to the garage. I'm always worried about my poor Hyundai in the winter because I don't think Korea experiences -50 wind chills too often. But she sprang to life with little difficulty and I made decent time through the arctic tundra to Wal-Mart.

Not decent enough time, though, to get a space heater. They'd been sold out for days. A similar story awaited me at a couple other stores before I gave up and headed home. The heat was out again when I got home, so I posted an open plea on Facebook for any friends with space heaters to spare. 

When you post on Christmas Eve that your heat's out in the middle of a blizzard, LOTS of people step up. Within an hour, I had over a dozen offers for space heaters, a couple invites for Christmas dinner, and one person who thought they'd seen a space heater at Lowe's the day before. I called over there, and sure enough, they had a few left. You know, at the Lowe's that shares a parking lot with the Wal-Mart I was JUST at. So I bundled up again and made my second lap around the Quad City Iditarod -- but this time, I came home with two gigantic space heaters.

Minutes later, a friend showed up with two MORE. And just as we had all four up and running full blast, the furnace kicked back on. Minutes after THAT, the HVAC repair guy I'd talked to the night before showed up at my front door. When we had spoken, I had (accurately at the time) told him that my heat was completely out. It was probably not the best look, then, when he arrived to find a functioning furnace, four space heaters on full blast, and a thermostat reading 82 degrees. Let's just say I caught some disapproving glares. 

In the end, it turned out my furnace was shutting itself off because of overheating, which seems a ridiculous problem for a furnace to have. Shouldn't a furnace be COMMENDED for doing it's job TOO well? You never hear things like, "I'm sorry, sir, you can't come in to Olive Garden today. I'm afraid the food here is overdelicious." But overheat it did, due to overuse and a half-frozen air intake line we had to thaw out.

I haven't lost heat since, but maybe it doesn't matter. It's now two weeks later and I'm wearing short sleeves because it feels like spring out. I kinda want a holiday do-over, which I guess I'll get in roughly 50 weeks or so. Of course, by then I'm guessing we'll all be underwater and possibly quarantining from toxic lobsterpox, but at least I'll be nice and toasty.