First of all, after I blogged yesterday, I found one of the shammies I bought. I stored it in its original box under my bed, for safekeeping. (The other one, alas, I think Father threw away, thinking it was a disposable rag.) It took soaking that shammy in the bigger-than-I-thought puddle that pooled up in the boiler room and Mother's office adjacent to the heater (a lot of things are damaged there, and the wall separating the boiler room from the office is still wet around the cracks in the wall) two dozen times, but in 45 minutes all the standing water was absorbed, wrung into a container, then dumped.
I turned off the furnace and turned it back on, for only a little bit, after I got home from work and before I went to the Golden Gopher soccer match yesterday. I was assuming, maybe even hoping, to find where the leaks were. Looking online I assumed that either a line was cracked or some filter needed cleaning and/or replacing. But even though it was only 15 or 20 minutes, I did not see any leaking. Huh. (I'm running the heater back up again, right as I am writing this, for a longer period of time to see if that triggers any condensation and/or leaks.)
In the meantime, shutting down the furnace and cooling the house seems to have caused another bad thing. The fire alarm in the upper floor of the house, the floor where I sleep in, has been chirping off and on for the past several days now. As some of you may know, that chirping is a sign that the alarm needs a new power source or needs to be replaced.
However, and this is weird, it seems as though this alarm stops chirping if it's warm enough. And after thinking about it, when the furnace has been on full blast, I don't hear any beeping. However, when I get home from work and the heat hasn't kicked on yet, I hear the loud chirping from the alarm.
Further compounding matters, when I looked at it up close, I noticed a few things. One, it is hardwired into the housing in the ceiling the alarm covers up. There is no battery to replace. Two, I have no goddamn clue how to remove this fucking thing. There is no back cover to either unscrew or pop open; whatever's in that alarm, including any beeping component, is still in there. However, someone (Father? An electrician?) was able to feed two wires into this apparently hermetically sealed alarm, and short of cutting both wires, that alarm is still going to be up there, beeping whenever the heat's off. (Oh, and three; I tried looking up how to disassemble this alarm, but I can't find any literature on this particular model because I think it's so old. Seriously, I think that alarm if from the fucking eighties.)
So, do you see my dilemma? If I turn the heat off, not only do I get cold but the alarm will start beeping again. But if I turn the heat on, eventually the furnace will begin to leak water again. (I just went down there because I heard a noise from somewhere; some boxes fell down in the pantry, mysteriously. Anyway, I checked the humidifier, and goddamn if there weren't drips of water in the mop bucket I put under the hose.) Can't turn the heat on, can't turn the heat off. I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't.
So my strategy now is to heat the house whenever I am close to having frostbite, but only for a long enough time where I don't flood the basement. In the meantime, maybe I should I reach out to somebody to get this fixed -- the heater, the fire alarm, or both.
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