A New Furnace

The new furnace waiting to get into the house.

I own a big 121-year-old iconic Vermont farmhouse that has been added to decade after decade. It is drafty and cold, with granite boulders as a foundation that were quarried from Barton Mountain behind the house. The original part of the house was built with no windows at all on the north side to keep out the cold! My husband was renovating the house, but he only was half done when he died.

I've had years of severe problems with the old furnace. It required $1,000-$2,000 of repairs each of the past two winters. With the cost of heating fuel the highest I can ever remember, this is causing severe hardship. This summer I was finally able to get a new furnace. The problem was that all the home heating companies here are swamped with furnace repairs and replacements, so I had to wait in line. Monday, September 26, was the day it was finally installed!

The old furnace was a combination wood and oil burner. Most people here have these, but I didn't want another one. John burned wood for 10 years here with wood harvested from our land. It was a tremendous amount of work. 

Here are photos of the old furnace that the technicians somehow managed to drag out of the cellar. It had holes rusted through it. The old cast iron fire box was in bad shape. My husband had repaired a lot of it during his life. 

It took two days for them to install the furnace, balance the heat ducts, replace some duct work, and make a new cold air intake in the kitchen. The upstairs is heated by gravity: in the old days, they cut holes in the downstairs ceiling and let the heat rise. And the last addition to the house had no heat at all until John ran a duct over to it. 

I love this furnace. It is so quiet that when I came home from school today I thought it had stopped running. There are no more roaring, cracking, or screaming sounds from the cellar. The heat is even throughout the house now. My new thermostat is digital and tells me the room temperature in real time. I'm running it cooler now, set to 65°F (18°C) all the time. I'll see if that is sufficient when it is -30°F (-34°C) this winter. Well, I'd rather not see that, but it will happen. 

I finally found my lost step stool
that belongs in the kitchen!

For Thankful Thursday, I am thankful for a stress-free winter with no worries to what I will find when I come home from school. Good riddance, old furnace!

Thankful Thursday at
Brian's Home

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