/mike

This is getting ridiculous. When I moved to my current place over a year ago it was pretty mild in terms of temperature so the coolness in the house wasn’t that bad. Of course this year, when winter came, I realized just how cold winter really gets.

Originally I thought it was just the fact that I lived in an old house that wasn’t even close to being energy efficient. So after a month or so my roommate started noticing that the thermostat temperature needle wouldn’t move past 16ºC — even when the thermostat was cranked up to 25 — which was warmer than outside but the draft coming from the windows and doors made the actual temperature inside seem a lot colder.

Shortly thereafter a call was placed to the landlord. He was understanding and came to check out our furnace — that he repeatedly reminded me on the phone was a new furnace. After a few hours the landlord came upstairs and reported that the belt on the furnace had busted and he replaced it. According to him everything should have been fine from then on.

Fast forward a month. The damn thermostat seems borked again. Yay! Another call to the landlord brings him over to check out our “should be working fine, don’t know what the problem could possibly be” furnace. Turns out the “new belt” the landlord put on the furnace last time was “a bit loose” and wasn’t actually turning the fan as it should.

That would bring us to today. After waking up this morning and turning the heat up, as part of my morning ritual, I’ve been sitting in my office waiting for it to warm up. It’s now 3 hours later and I’m still freezing my butt off. A quick check of the thermostat and guess what. Yup, still showing 16ºC. Woohoo!

Why does this piss me off so much? Well, the first thing is that even though I live in Canada I don’t like the cold weather. The other reason is that I’ll have the thermostat turned up and the furnace will actually run which increases my heating bill. So I’m paying for the heat but since the fans not working to push the heat into the house I’d be better off starting a fire with a brick of 20 dollar bills.

Time to call my “helpful and experienced” landlord again. Hopefully he’s back from vacation by now or you’re going to see one pissed off rant here soon.