Category: House

Vicki asked me to stay home this morning because the furnace guy was coming to do one of the inspections on the hideously expensive maintenance contract we signed up for due to a hard sell sales pitch. She wanted me to stay because she says the furnace guy gives her a real hard sell every time for something that we absolutely must replace or we’re killing babies and torturing puppies. I’m not sure where she’s been for the last 11 years, but by now you’d think she’d realize that I’m no better at resisting those sorts of sales pitches either. But hey, this spreads the blame around for the stupid stuff we get talked into and takes the pressure off her, so I’m willing to do it for her sake.

The guy came, did the usual poking around in the basement, and came up and said “Your ignitor unit is testing at 99 ohms and we recommend replacing it any time it gets to 100 ohms, so you’re due”. I asked for a price, and he showed me it woud be $160 now, or $280 if it was an off-hours call. So I thought I’d outsmart him and ask if he had one in stock, and he said no, he’d checked the truck and he didn’t have one. I figured that would mean that if it *did* fail in middle of the night, we’d have to wait for a day or more while they ordered the part, and we’d risk the birds dying if that happened, so I said to go ahead and order it. A few minutes later, as he’s leaving, I asked when they were coming to install the part, and he said “I had another look around the truck, and found one, so it’s installed already”.

Dammit, he played me for a chump. He must have known that if he’d said they had one in the truck that I would figure they’re easy to come by and so I could afford to wait until it failed, but if they didn’t I’d want to replace it pre-emptively. I’m such a sucker.

Update:Added the “Where is this body you want disposed of” picture.

We had a Energy Star energy audit of our house recently. One of the things the audit mentioned that there was some asbestos on one of the vent pipes in the basement, and that would have to be “abated” before they could work. Today I decided to take care of it. The pipe in question goes through “the scary room”, one of two dirt floored areas of the basement. Until today, I’ve never set foot in either one of them. There is no apparent reason why this particular pipe has been wrapped in asbestos – the portion of the pipe that is wrapped isn’t close to the furnace so it’s not very hot, nor is it in contact with insulation or something flammable. The register it serves is in the “breakfast nook”, which we suspect wasn’t part of the original build of the house.

I got advice from experts in the field who assured me that the sort of asbestos that forms into sheets isn’t the dangerous kind, but I should still take some precautions.

So armed with a tyvec painter’s coverall, dust mask, googles and rubber gloves, I entered the scary room to do battle with the evil asbestos. And that’s when I discovered that the asbestos wrap evidently held condensation or external water against the bottom of the vent, and now the vent pipe has rusted completely away on the bottom. But it’s fine at the top, which means there is a part between the bottom and the top where there are sharp edges and flakes of rust. So instead of just removing the asbestos wrapping, I ended up hacking out the whole rusty pipe, and stomping it flat to throw it away. And the sharp edges cut my gloves to ribbons, but at least I didn’t get any visible cuts in my skin. Unfortunately the unwrapped part of the pipe only had one hangar on the whole length, so it fell down without the added support on one end. And the “box” where it went into the register in the breakfast nook was also wrapped and rusty so I had to remove it as well.

It wasn’t until after I was done that I noticed the notice on the air mask that said it’s not for asbestos. Sigh.

Well, the whole thing is down now. Hopefully I didn’t do myself any damage doing it.

We got the results of our EnergyStar audit on Saturday. They’re recommending $20,000 worth of work, and promising that we’ll probably save at least $150 a month on average based on last years energy bills. They also said we could save another $150 a month if we did the windows, but doing them in a way that’s sensitive to the age and architecture of the house (ie. not replacing leaded glass windows and wood frames with modern plastic crap) would be really expensive – maybe $30,000 to $40,000.

The problem is that the net present value of $150 a month for 10 years (which is the expected lifetime of the new furnace) is only about $14,000. Obviously energy prices will go up, and the only energy year we have records for, last year, was unusually mild, so the savings might be greater in a year like this year. But it’s still hard to say “go ahead and spend that money” with such an uncertain pay-back. So I have to think about the non-monetary pay-back as well, like the fact that the house will be more comfortable, and it will reduce our carbon footprint, and it might have a small positive affect on the value of the house.

Still, $20,000.

Sigh.