It is stupidly hot outside. It's the type of hot that smacks you in the face and then drapes itself over you like a very unwelcome parka, clinging to the sheen of sweat on your forehead and generally making you feel less than human. When it is this hot I cannot function. Luckily (?) I work in an air conditioned office building but ye olde homestead is not so well equipped. We do have a few window A/C units to cool off 3 key rooms in the house (our bedroom, The Wiff's office, and the weird little bedroom where I keep my computer) but the rest of the house is all hot and bothered. From the weather reports that I have heard (quick tangent if you don't mind: I have a problem retaining weather information. I can sit and listen to a forecast and 2 seconds after the report ends I have no idea what the weather will be like for the next couple days. Dunno why that is but I thought it worth mentioning), we are unlikely to be getting much in the way of relief from this heat any time soon. Fantastic.
Being as it is so bloody hot, one could assume that the heating system in the house would be off right? The thermostat is turned off, all the windows are open and it's 89 degrees inside. Sounds like a reasonable assumption to me. Well, as it turns out we're both wrong. On Tuesday of last week we had the oil guy come in and service our boiler. One of the tests that the technician ran is called the combustion safety test. It's a somewhat involved procedure that requires that the appliance in question is turned on and allowed to run long enough to get to operating temperature. Why do I know about this test? Two reasons: 1) I'm a nerd. 2) I used to do this test as part of my job at CSG. After he ran the test and gave the system a clean bill of health, he packed up and left. Since I was on vacation last week I was glad to have the rest of the day to myself and so I continued puttering around the place.
A few days later on Monday (the 5th), the Wiff and I were cleaning in the kitchen (yes, the kitchen project is very nearly complete. We have a couple very small things for the contractor to fix and then there's the final inspection by the city. We expect that to go smoothly and I will post pics and stuff soon...I promise) when she noticed that the baseboard heaters were hot. "These are really hot." she said. "Pfffffffff." I replied. "Of course they're hot. It's like 95ºF in here." "No, seriously stupid, these are hot." she said. I'm not sure why she was so mean to me. I'm like a really swell guy and everything. "Is the heat on?" she asked. I leaned down and checked and sure enough the heaters were on. What the frick? I went over to the thermostat and made sure it was off. It was. I went downstairs and stared at the boiler. It sat there and gave me zero information. "Hmph." I was out of ideas at that point.
The Wiff then called the oil company and the guy said that he knew what the problem was and that they'd come out and fix it. Apparently the technician must have left a jumper cable on something in the control box so the guy on the phone suggested shutting off the boiler completely. Nice. Luckily it is hot as Satan's buttcrack after a game of "Fling the Sinner into the Pit" (a very popular game in Hell I'm lead to believe) so needing hot water for a shower is not a priority for the moment. Even though they said they'd be at the house yesterday, they called and rescheduled for tonight. I just hope that they didn't break anything or waste a lot of oil.
UPDATE: Turns out it wasn't the phantom jumper cable (or whatever) that was causing the problem. It looks like we have a faulty pump/check valve thing. When our hot water tank calls for hot water, this broken piece allows water to flow into the first floor zone and heat up the baseboards. Great. Now we have to have that damn thing fixed or replaced too. Luckily the technician showed us a temporary "fix" where all we have to do is shut off the zones in question and that will keep the hot water flowing only to the tank and not the rest of the house. Then in the winter, we'll just open those valves back up. Stupid house.
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