Hanukkah in March?

Chaotic collage style image of a ancient furnace, a rainbow graphic, a thermometer and a menorah all against a green clover background.

In my quest to find a photo to accompany today’s post I typed the word “thermometer” into my photos app search bar thinking possibly at one point I had taken a picture of one. Alas, all it returned was a screen shot of a pair of vintage skis and another screen shot of a pen, which doesn’t prove that I didn’t take a photo of a thermometer so much as it proves my phone doesn’t know what one looks like.

Why did I want a thermometer photo? Well, it’s been a chaotic week temperature-wise. A little over a week ago friends stopped by for a visit on a day that felt like summer. We stood out on our disintegrating deck and apologized that we hadn’t yet taken the patio furniture out. As it turns out this was a wise decision because though the temps got up into the 80s last Wednesday on Thursday it was snowing.

Meanwhile there was some temperature chaos going on inside as well. Our house is heated by an oil burner furnace/boiler. We have automatic deliveries set up with the local oil company and this winter for the first time ever they had actually been good about regularly delivering the stuff without us having to nag them. Then a week and a half ago we noticed it was getting low, and put in a call to let them know. They promised they would be there before the end of the week. They didn’t come. By Friday the tank was on E, and the temperatures were decidedly less warm than they had been at the start of the week.

We turned down the thermostats. We washed our hands with cold water—the furnace is also our source of hot water. We decided, if we made it through the weekend without running out of oil it would be a miracle.

Sunday we renewed our research into electric heat pumps as the furnace made ominous sputtering noises. Are the hydronic ones they have now the way to go? Infrastructure-wise everything’s already in place. Would a standard heat pump make more sense? Then we could replace our ailing furnace and ailing air conditioner in one fell swoop, but there is the matter of all the ducts that would need to be installed. So many questions that we didn’t have the answers to, not least among them, how is this furnace still going?

It wasn’t quite the same as the story of the Maccabees, but it did feel a bit like Hanukkah as somehow the furnace managed to hang in there until the oil company finally came with a delivery first thing Monday morning. We were prepared for all the gunky bottom of the tank stuff to wreak havoc on the furnace because that had happened once before, but so far our miraculous luck seems to be holding. Sometimes the gold at the end of the rainbow is nothing more than a working furnace.