We just got a new furnace and it was quite the production. We live in a long rambler-style house with a basement accessed by a fairly steep stairway. It took about 650 pounds of muscle and an electric-powered dolly to get the old one up the stairs. It was an impressive maneuver. I have pictures.
When we bought this house, we knew eventually we would have to replace the furnace. No surprise there. We signed up for the “yearly clean the furnace” city service policy, just to keep the existing furnace going as long as possible. And it went along fine for quite a while. Until this year.
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We’ve been in this house for 11 years. Now and every year, the guys come, do their spick-and-span routine and report to us: “Well, we know the furnace is getting up there, but it’s still working just fine, so no need to do anything about it this year."
Well, the sigh of relief was enough to blow your hair back when we would hear that. You do know how much furnaces cost, don’t you? Not as much as a new car, but maybe as much as a used Mustang.
Not that we are totally ignorant about furnaces, mind you. Truthfully, I don’t even remember looking at the furnace in our first house, but it had to be old since the house was from the 1920s and I don’t remember a banner headline “New furnace” on the MLS listing.
Not as old as the furnace before that one, in the 1840s German “mansion," where we lived while Tom was in the Air Force. That one had its own mailing zone and was built like an octopus on steroids. It would gobble coal like it hadn’t eaten in weeks and then hunker down and give off an evil glow.
Of course, when we signed the rental agreement, it didn’t cross our minds that there was a grand purpose to the statement that we were responsible for buying the coal. We never thought about the fact that we were on the first floor and the landlady lived upstairs. And heat rises.
When we bought the Victorian house in Duluth, it had a furnace similar to the German one, only the size of a smaller brother. It ran on oil with a newer tank filled every so often by a large truck that chugged up the driveway. There was a horror story circulating at the time about someone getting an oil delivery to a tank that had been removed and the resulting disaster was the basement with several feet of oil sloshing around in it.
I used to look up at the old oil tank, wedged between the studs in the basement ceiling and think about what a great hiding place for your valuables that would be and wonder if the thought had occurred to anyone else. And would it be worth my while to get out the ladder and climb up there for a look? My attention span usually died out before I could get as far as looking for the ladder.
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In 1990, we decided to splurge and have the new in-floor heating installed in the log house we were building. After living in a drafty old house, whose only insulation was a few crinkly newspapers stuck in the walls here and there, it sounded like being in a tropical paradise to have your bare feet be warm on the tile floor while you were watching the snow swirling outside.
The four bright-red heat pumps and all the shiny copper piping were most impressive, but most of all was the furnace, which was the size of a small carry-on suitcase. Amazing! No octopus arms.
While we were building the log house and waiting for it to become “habitable," we lived about 75 feet away in a 27-foot fifth-wheel trailer. At that time, we had two large dogs and our Victorian house had sold and been closed on by Aug. 1 and no rental houses or apartments seemed to be working out. We thought we’d be trailer people for two, maybe three months — summer months, at that. I believe the heating unit for that trailer setup was propane.
I only know that by the middle of December, after four and a half months squished into 27 feet, we gladly moved into the unfinished log house. The furnace and the sewer system for the trailer were freezing up and pretty soon it was going to be one really big ice cube.
That’s what was in our minds last June when the furnace maintenance guys came up from their cleaning session with apologetic looks on their faces and told us that our boiler was leaking and one wall of the unit had rusted away. We needed a new furnace. No more putting it off
Oh, no! Can’t fix it? Can’t even try? How about used ones? Are there used furnaces? No, huh? OK, let’s do it. After all, that furnace owes us absolutely nothing, and better to replace it in August than in February, right?
The jaw-dropper came when we found that the old furnace was original to the house. When was the house built? In 1952. Nineteen-fifty-two! The furnace was 72 years old! As I said, it owed us nothing.
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Rest in peace, Weil-McLain! A job well done. Let’s hope the new one is made of similar stern stuff.
The Trust Project
