So this was a good gag. Our air conditioning was turned on this past Friday (not to brag but we live in Texas where that’s occasionally a thing in December), and when I went to take a shower, I noticed there were a bunch of dark spots on the bathroom ceiling. Then I noticed water was dripping out of an air vent in the middle of all the spots. What does this have to do with the air conditioner? Well, when our landlord came over on Saturday to check it out, he determined the water was coming from the air conditioner, long a foil of ours. It seemed that when I turned on the shower, the water vapor rising into the ceiling and the air’s temperature, warmed by the shower, combined to create a lot of condensation due to some problem with the unit, and that this had been happening for presumably a few days.
This is a lot of talking about my air conditioner. I promise it gets better, though. Because now we’re going to talk about the heat.
After the landlord visited and called in the maintenance request, the air conditioner stopped turning on. This was fine. It was supposed to get colder overnight on Saturday anyway, and our house has terrible insulation. The problem was that when it did get colder overnight on Saturday, the heat didn’t turn on either, and we woke up Sunday to a rather frigid home (not to brag but temperatures had dropped into the 20’s or 30’s outside, this being January and all). We went from needing air conditioning and having it to needing air conditioning and having it but with the cost of water damage to not really needing air conditioning and not having it to needing heat and not having it, all in the span of two or three days, with the clincher coming as we rifled through those last two phases in the span of a few cold-front-coinciding hours.
Eventually, after a couple days of space heaters and wearing slippers and googling “how cold is too cold for a bernedoodle” and then googling “how cold is too cold for a bernedoodle heat broken” to make clear this was an indoor problem and I wasn’t just into leaving hypoallergenic dogs with hypersensitive stomachs in the backyard, the whole thing got fixed. Well, not the water damage. But the heat turns on again, I assume the AC will turn on again when its time comes (not a safe assumption, but we can’t defend ourselves against everything), and I’m back to googling various puppy gastrointestinal symptoms as I try to gauge whether Fargo needs to go to the vet or just needs a couple hours to get through what’s hopefully simply a peanut butter hangover. What was the problem, you might ask, that was making our heating and cooling system shoot a bunch of water into the attic and then not work in either of its arenas for three days? The same thing that’s almost always the problem: The drainpipe gets clogged. The stupid freaking drainpipe gets clogged.
The drainpipe has gotten clogged now, to the point of overall malfunction, four or five times in our not-yet-two years of living here. I don’t know why it’s getting clogged. I’m changing the air filter pretty regularly. The technician on Tuesday didn’t say he saw all that abnormal an amount of dust up there. But the AC’s condensation drain keeps getting clogged, this time it evidently briefly failed to shut off when it was close to overflowing (and was then actively overflowing), and I guess that can turn off the heat too. The worst part is that we know about this, and that our landlord knows about this, but that while he was up there on Saturday he didn’t say, “You know, I should probably check the drainpipe.” Maybe he thought I was already doing that. After all, the last time this happened, his wife talked about regularly pouring bleach or vinegar into the drainpipe, and I said something like, “Ok, but I don’t have a ladder that can get me into the attic,” and she didn’t say anything. I’ve made clear I don’t own a ladder. He brought his own ladder when he went up there on Saturday.
Yet another silly little part of this is that we live in a duplex and while our AC unit and our neighbors’ AC unit share a drain (this is, per the technician, probably the cause of all these problems—that’s too many AC units for one drain), our neighbors’ AC works just fine. Always. They’ve never had an issue with it. Now, ours did shoot a bunch of water into their side of the attic, so they have water damage now, too, but they were at least at their preferred temperature this weekend while appreciating the growing splotches from beneath.
Anyway, that’s what was going on with the heat. Still not positive what’s going on with Fargo. She seemed pretty good yesterday, now feels like shit today. Our year, though.
