Feature
October, 05 2008
Me Against My Furnace
by The XY Files
The winters were always cold where I grew up, but there was always my old reliable friend, the baseboard heater, to keep me warm and toasty. Sometimes at night I would sit in my bed and slowly drift off to sleep to the clink and clack of the metal as the heat filled the radiators and started to fill my room with comfort. Other times I would wake up in the middle of the night and say to myself "My goodness! It sure is chilly in here!" Then I would get up, walk to the thermostat, turn it up and wait for that beautiful heat to magically manifest itself from the bottom of my bedroom walls.
Things went this way until I started living in apartments, some of which had baseboard heaters, some of which had radiators that got blisteringly hot, some of which had forced air heating. The common denominator among all the winter warming systems in the homes I have lived is the fact that someone else was responsible for the upkeep of the heat. Usually the bills for the heat were paid by yours truly (except at Mom and Dad's house, naturally). At the heart of the matter, though, was the fact that when it came to the heat, I turned on the thermostat and my relationship with the heat began there and ended with toasty warm goodness coming out of someplace in my living area. The furnace? Not my concern. That was for the landlord. Or Mom and Dad. Naturally.
Now life is completely different for me and my family. Our new house is not only approximately 1000 ft. above sea level, but we live a block away from a big lake. That means the winters are not just cold - they are COLD. Like, Antarctica cold. Well, okay, maybe not that cold, but cold to the point where lately the temperature has been dipping down a lot further than when we lived on the outskirts of New York City.
Mind you this is not a complaint in any way, shape or form! The weather is great as far as I am concerned - we will get lots of snow over the course of the winter (maybe even a White Christmas for the kids?) and the cold air makes for crisp, clean nights filled with tons of stars. Coming from the amber-lit skies of northeastern New Jersey, being able to actually see stars like that more than makes up for the cold weather.
Up until now, the chilly nights and mornings have been staved off by our love for our new fireplace. When I was a kid, Christmas Eve was always spent at my uncle's house, where his fireplace would roar as we stoked it with the shredded wrapping paper from our gifts. On Christmas Day, I would get reprimanded for trying the same at my other uncle's house. I promised myself that when I had a house there would be a fireplace for burning anything and everything I could get my hands on and a basement in case of tornadoes. Well, now we have that fireplace and we have been using it to warm up the house in the mornings and evenings.
We were running low on wood, which is one of those things you need to make a fire, along with cardboard boxes and newspapers and sticks from the backyard, so this past weekend I decided that the time had come to (pun intended) fire up the furnace and get some heat rolling into our new house.
The house has a steam furnace that looks like a contraption from an H.G. Wells novel. There are gas lines and pipes and copper pipes all snaking out from the furnace and disappearing off into dark little nooks and crannies in the cobweb covered ceiling. There are also faucets here and there, one with a bucket filled with dried, crusty rust-colored... stuff. As I looked at the furnace, feeling the chill drifting in through my basement, I was flummoxed. What was I looking at? How did you turn it on? What was in that bucket?
My wife, who is generally much more practical than me, printed the instruction manual off the internet. After reading through the manual I was even more confused. This was not how things were supposed to work! I mean, for all my life you turned the thermostat, the heat came on, and that was the end of that. Here was something completely different. This was a challenge that I needed to meet. Here is my saga:
I managed to light the pilot (something I am pretty sure most people are capable of doing) and then waited. And waited. And waited. Until about 15 minutes later when the radiators on the first floor started that familiar hissing sound. The heat was coming and I couldn't be happier. With little to no trouble, the heat was on and before long all we would have to do to access that heat was push the stupid button on the thermostat and--- but wait a second. The hissing has been replaced by a spitting sound. And there is water shooting out of the pressure release valve on the radiator in the family room. The spitting in the living room is a full-blown spouting of brown water.
Then, all hell proceeded to break loose in my house. As the radiator in the living room spouted and dripped through to the floor to the basement below, the radiator in our master bedroom erupted like a brown geyser. We used at least two towels sopping up the spurting boiling hot mucky water. Then the radiator in the family room underwent a change as the slow trickle of water blasted into a full-blown chocolate fountain. Pressing a bath towel to the valve as hard as I could, the water soon soaked through completely. When I pulled the towel away to see what was going on it was like a scence from a war movie, only instead of blood jutting from a gaping wound, I was contending with hot chocolate.
My son's bedroom and the kitchen soon followed, and before long every one of our towels was soaked through with brown hot water. Now, you have to understand that all of this was taking place within a space of about 10 minutes. Calling this mass chaos is an understatement. This was like a war between my family, the house, and the steam furnace. And the victims of this war were the radiators, my walls, my wife's clothes and our rugs.
But I will say one thing: Steam heat warms the house up quite well.
What I learned this week is that you can't turn off your steam furnace for the summer and then start it up for the winter without having the system flushed. A fact I wish the previous owner had bothered to share. At least when Old Man Winter rears his ugly head, I won't have to waste firewood trying to heat the house.
Steam heat appears to be where it's at, until one of the kids gets burned touching the radiators.
