"Well, THERE'S yer problem!"

...as often said on Mythbusters by Jaymie or Adam when something is well and truly mucked up. (Usually something that they deliberately mucked up).

But I have to back up before I get to that as the punchline.

I came home after my 11 am class (and, incidentally? The heat is not working in the classroom building again. They are working on it but it's kind of getting to the point where some of the faculty are walking around murmuring Milton Waddam's "I...could burn..this place down.." comment. This is a building completed in 2001.)

So anyway. I walked in the door wondering what I would find: an icebox house? a house filled with natural gas? What?

I walked into a warm house. And a furnace with the "happy furnace steady red LED" on (as opposed to the "unhappy furnace red LED blinking in code" I saw this morning).

So I sighed. And contemplated calling the furnace guys not to come. But then I figured: well, what went wrong could go wrong again. And there's something to be said for not being branded either a Crank or an Hysterical Female, so I just sat tight.

The furnace guy arrived at 5 minutes of 1, which is earlier for any 'afternoon call' so far. He listened to my description of the symptoms this morning, and my apologetic "...but it seems to be working now...." and he said he'd go ahead and look at it.

He commented that sometimes the unhappy furnace blinking light pattern I saw was caused by insufficient airflow in the air intake. And by fiddling a bit with the timers, he was able to reproduce the pattern. So he said he'd look for a blockage.

I envisioned maybe a dead squirrel or something in there, and shuddered a bit.

So he took the "plenum" to bits, and I heard him kind of chuckle. (I was sitting out in my living room grading student papers).

"Ma'am," he said, poking his head around the corner, "I found where they used to put the filters." (You may remember - I had big issues this fall with missing filters in the whole thing. I had convinced myself it was a Magickal Furnace that Never Required Filters, but I was wrong. So I had the guys install a filter on the cold air return where it was easy enough for me to change them).

Well, anyway - stuffed in the plenum there were a couple of old filters. Old, dust-encrusted filters. He had me get a trash bag to dump them in so he wouldn't get dust everywhere. And then he put the thing back together. He told me he figured that would fix any problem; that was the only thing he could see wrong with the machine.

Where the filters were, they were not supposed to be. Hence the "Well, THERE'S yer problem" header.

I hate it when people jerryrig stuff and don't tell the next homeowner in the line.

Oh, and I've started leaving its closet door open. The furnace is retrofitted into what was a hall closet and I asked him if having the door closed when the furnace was having to run so much (it's been colder here this past couple weeks than it's been for an extended period of time since I've lived here) might make it heat up and shut itself off. He agreed that it could, and said that leaving the door open would be a good precaution.

(I'm not quite up for taking the door off its hinges. I do have people over occasionally and I don't like the thought of them having to stare at the exposed belly of my furnace if they go to use the bathroom or my phone).

So anyway. It's worked fine all afternoon, and it's not been doing the crazy run-run-run thing it was doing earlier - it would run for a while, the flame would cut out, and almost before the fan shut itself off, the flame would come on again. Which didn't sound right to me. But that was probably due to insufficient airflow, which has now been rectified.

Anyway, it's been cycling on and off properly for a couple hours now and everything seems ok. The little happy furnace light is on (I keep checking). And here's where I get ridiculously anthropomorphic: as I walk by the furnace, I reach out and gently stroke it and tell it it's a good furnace and it's not going to give me any more trouble.

(Well, if Nero Wolfe can believe that mechanical devices like cars are bent on bringing about mayhem and destruction to him, I can talk to my furnace).

I've been picking away at the Barley Sugar Cable socks. I have one repeat and a half left to go on the foot, and then it's the toe.