September 3, 1998
Dear Everyone:
Herein lies the saga of the
ceiling fans.
When I bought this townhouse, back around
Halloween, I didn’t
notice if it was much warmer upstairs than downstairs.
When winter rolled around, it became obvious that downstairs was
much cooler than upstairs.
It could be 58º in the living room; but it was a toasty 72º in the
bedroom, thanks to a small heater that I used each morning.
Then, when we had our first real heat wave, I
discovered just how much warmer the upstairs could be.
A good 10-15 degrees warmer.
That’s when I decided to look into ceiling fans.
Everyone who seems to know anything about ceiling
fans said to buy
Hunter
brand fans. I checked the
Internet and quickly
found Hunter’s Web Site, which explains far more about fans than anyone
should really need to know.
The Site also told me where the authorized dealers were in my zip code.
One of them was The Big Orange Hardware Warehouse Store.
So off I went to The Big Orange Hardware Warehouse Store and
picked up a couple of really nice, top-of-the-line fans.
Two weeks later, I’m still trying to get them
installed. In fact, the
credit card bill for the fans arrived before anyone arrived to install
them for me. Someone at work
suggested that I ask a particular co-worker who knew a lot of guys in
construction. So I asked the
co-worker and he said he would ask his brother if he knew anyone who did
this sort of thing “on the side”.
The brother said he would do it himself and came
over last week to take a look at the situation.
He said that he could do the job for about $200 and that he could
do it the following Monday.
This worked for me since it was my regular Monday off.
As added insurance, in case the job went late into the evening, I
scheduled Tuesday as a vacation day.
Monday morning, the co-worker’s brother called me
to say that he was going to have to bail out on the job.
Seems he remembered over the weekend that he probably didn’t have
an electrician’s license and, should anything go wrong (like burning the
house down), he’d be setting himself up for a lawsuit.
If I got a licensed electrician in to set up the wiring, he
offered to come over and hang the fans afterward.
So, I picked an electric company out of the phone
book. They said they could
have someone there on Tuesday, between 11:00 and 1:00.
On Tuesday, I hung around the house all morning, watching a
production of
Twelfth Night
that I’d taped off of PBS
last weekend. At 1:12, the
secretary at the electric company called to see if I was home to let the
electrician in. She said
he’d be there in 30-45 minutes, depending on traffic.
Two hours later, the electrician showed up.
He surveyed the situation and decided that he would need to
install a new
circuit to provide power to the two fans.
Then he went up into the
attic.
Now, apparently, Tuesday set new records for high
temperatures in the
Bay Area.
It was (unofficially) 104º in the shade out on my patio.
70º in the living room, with the air conditioning on.
And about 80º in the bedrooms.
This means that it was probably about 120º in the attic.
Less than an hour later, the electrician emerged
from the attic and announced that he could not work up there anymore
that day. It was just too
hot. By this time, I had
already called my boss to beg another vacation day, since it didn’t look
like we were going to finish the job in one day.
The electrician left at 4:30 to get some parts and
promised faithfully that he would be back at 8:00 the next morning, 8:30
at the very latest. He
arrived promptly at 9:30, just as the secretary was calling to tell me
that he might be a tiny bit late.
The fans were, of course, still in the original boxes.
The electrician went back up into the ceiling and
made lots of interesting noises while I stayed downstairs in the living
room and read Tom
Clancy’s latest novel (Rainbow
Six, quite the page-turner; I was on page 205 almost before I
realized it). By 12:30, the
fans were installed. The electrician also discovered that someone had
put the wrong (as far as he was concerned) type of
circuit breaker
in for the clothes dryer and replaced it with the correct type as a
courtesy.
And I got a 10% discount as a new customer.
Nevertheless, it cost a lot more than $200.
On the other hand, it was done right the first time; and I expect
those fans will still be going 20 years from now, without running the
risk of burning the house down.
And the fans work!
It’s still 10 degrees warmer upstairs during the day, but it
feels much cooler because the air is circulating, with a vengeance.
All in all, a good investment in time and money.
No movies this weekend.
I worked all day Saturday and met “Marshall” and “Jeannie” for
lunch and shopping on Sunday.
Maybe next week.
Love, as always,
Pete
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