Tech: “Did you pull the thermostat off the wall?”
We are outside with the HVAC technician. He has just forced our heating unit to come on (that’s a relief, it’s not dead) and is trying to determine why it was not working.
Me: “No.” Pause. “That’s an interesting question. Do people do that often?”
Tech: “You’d be surprised at some of the things we find.”
We have had a spell of unusually warm February weather. However, last night, it turned somewhat cooler, and the house felt cold this morning. A glance at the thermostat showed … nothing. No breakers are tripped, but the thermostat screen is blank.
The technician digs around for a while, then comes into the house to show us a section of the thermostat cable that has been chewed by some critter—a mouse, squirrel, or chipmunk most likely. The wounds were old, the bare wire corroded, and replacing that section has not fixed our problem. He thinks the wire-chewing varmints have been at work farther in than he has been able to go. He will have to come back tomorrow with a partner to help pull cable.
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After a chilly night and morning, our technician and his buddy are back. Nancy and I go about our chores as the two traipse in and out, with many trips to their trucks (yep, two technicians, two trucks). This sure is taking awhile.
We are out in the garage when they track us down with an update.
“Your electrician cut the wire. We found one end, but we don’t know where it went from there.”
“Cut the wire? How could they have done that!” Nancy explodes.
It hits me in a rush. “No, they didn’t. You did,” I answer.
Okay. That was unfair. I told her to do it.
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A little background.
One of the unsightly features of our new house was wire—yards and yards and yards of wire. Telephone wire and TV coax tacked around the exterior and poked through the walls into each room. The house was built in the ‘60s, and decades of added technologies were evident in wire under eaves, wire up and down walls, wire protruding from baseboards. The service boxes had multiple inputs and outputs. It reminded Nancy of the 1920s scene from Disney’s Carousel of Progress. We have given up landlines and cable TV, so we have been pulling down these wires with abandon. Indoors, too. Our remodeling turned up wires from defunct doorbells and security systems. Cut ‘em out!
Last week, we finally got around to fixing up the musty closet underneath the stairs. Painted, hung shelves. There was a wire running along the intersection of wall and ceiling. Nancy asked me if it was needed. Clearly it was not a power cable. “Cut it,” I said. She did. And did such a neat job of patching the hole in the ceiling that the HVAC techs could not see where the other end of that cable went. The critters that chewed on our thermostat cable were of the species Homo sapiens. They took a six foot long bite right out of that cable.
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That was a costly six feet of cable. The only consolation I can see is that we are now among the infamous stories the HVAC techs can tell. I can just imagine a future conversation:
Tech: “Did you cut a section out of the thermostat wire?”
Homeowner: “No. Do people do that often?”
Tech: “You’d be surprised at some of the things we find.”