There is something about that smell of dust burning off of the burner (and I presume A coil and whatnot) that will always remind me of that time of year. All of you in the midwest, all you Northern Cities Shifters know… That time of year when the furnace is first turned on, the burner comes to life, heat is working for the winter, and the faint “oh, the furnace is on” smell fills the air.
Mmm…
Also, it’s amazing what my neighbors throw out in the trash. When taking out the trash on this previous Sunday there was a box sitting atop the pile of bags holding two GENERALAire 990-13 Evaporation Pads. That is, the media required for the most popular centrally installed humidifier made, the GENERALAire 1042. The design of this humidifier will make it last essentially forever, provided one changes the media. You know, the bits that they threw out.
Ah well, at least I got some free media out of it… I think these cost around US$15 each, beyond being a bit of a hassle to get.
(It is currently 69°F in my house, and I suspect that it’ll be around 62°F by the time I wake up. I don’t think that’s cold enough to require the furnace. The blanket does a plenty good job keeping me warm and snuggly comfy.)
How cold does it get where you live? We don’t get too many extremes of temperature over here so there isn’t the ceremonial “turning on of the heating” each Autumn.
Saying that, I did have to download the manual for my boiler so I could program the timer. Who makes these things?, they don’t make sense. It’s as if someone has sat down and thought “right, this 20 memory programmable timer… how can we make it really hard to use? OK, let’s give the user five buttons to play with, and a small segmented LCD display. Using nothing but this and a toothpick they should be able to set their heating”.
It’s almost irritating enough to make me want to learn electronics, PIC programming and build a HTTP server to control it ;-)