Tag: furnace

  • Best of 2006

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    The (C)old House

    One thing I don’t like about an old house is that it is very hard to keep it warm. It’s a combination of a lack of insulation and inadequate duct work. If I had to do this house over again I would have installed radiated heat… but instead we have a blended system of forced air and electric heat. The result is that some areas are warmish while other areas are constantly drafty.

    It’s been a joke of visitors that our house is always cold. People say “We’re going to Adam’s house, we need to dress warm.” Or my personal favorite is a friend of mine who says “We McLane their house sometimes.” (Now we’re a verb?) Why? Um, pretty simple… we can’t afford to keep our old house at 72 degrees. Even at 65 during the day and 58 at night, we’re a little worried about energy costs this winter.

    Read the rest

    As much as we love San Diego, we still miss our house in Romeo. It’s a great place to live and I’m happy to hear that someone is finally living there again. I just hope they figure out a good way to heat it before winter!

  • I will not turn on the furnace

    Having spent 29 of my 32 year in the upper midwest, I am resolute that we will not need to turn on our furnace this winter. Seriously, it doesn’t get cold enough in San Diego to even turn on the pilot light. Call me cheap, but I don’t plan on firing up the furnace this winter.

    For those outside of Southern California. While the San Diego climate is mild year-round, it does get noticeably cooler in fall and winter. Hardly cold, but still chilly.

    If you ever visited our house in Romeo you’d know that Kristen and I like to keep the house cool. Todd and his family talk about putting on layers to come over for dinner. Of course, the joke was funnier knowing that we would actually turn the thermostat up to 70 when company came over. At night, we allowed the house to cool to 58. Understand that we lived in a 135 year old house and keeping it warm all night long would mean the furnace would literally run all night long if I tried to keep it at its day time temperature of 65. At the same time, we’ve always kept our houses at similar temperatures. Some people like a really hot house, I like a relatively cool house.

    So, some things about us never change. Just like in Michigan, Kristen and I wake up and tiptoe to the kettle to warm up water for coffee or tea. Just like our house was in the mid-fifties in the mornings, the same is true of our San Diego home. But, just like in Michigan, we are thinking of cheating by installing a couple high efficiency space heaters just to keep the nip off the air.

    After all, we’d feel like bad parents if the kids could see their breath when they crawled out of bed.