May 15, 2020
Dear Everyone:
One week ago today, the installers were huffing and puffing their way
through replacing my condominium’s old central heat and air conditioning
equipment with a much newer and more powerful one.
The indoor unit, in the hallway closet, towers over its neighbor,
the water heater. The
outside unit bears some resemblance to the prow of the RMS
Titanic. Not quite as
big, of course, but certainly bigger than the compressor belonging to my
upstairs neighbors, which sits next to it.
The next day, a special technician arrived to complete the connections
between the gargantuan system and the very Smart Thermostat.
This alone took several hours, during which I worked on some
crochet project or other.
Last Sunday was a beautiful Spring day.
Sunny, with a light breeze to keep things from getting too hot.
I decided to open all the windows, which I could now do as I had
replaced them last year. It
was lovely to allow all that fresh air to come wafting through the
place.
As evening approached, it started to get a tad bit cool, so I shut
everything down and turned the heat on.
I figured the time to run the heater was while it was still not
very warm, but not very cold.
Summer may arrive at any moment and using the heater won’t really
become necessary for several months.
Now was the time to confirm that it was working properly.
Which is when I discovered that the heat wasn’t working at all.
The next morning, last Monday, I sent a text message to the company.
A short while later, I got a response.
So sorry for the inconvenience.
Could they send someone out between 2:00 and 5:00 that afternoon.
Works for me.
One advantage of all this staying at home is that my calendar is fairly
clear these days.
A bit after 2:00, I got a phone call from the same technician who had
set things up on Saturday.
Apparently, he felt that he had done all he was qualified to do and
wanted to kick the problem upstairs to someone with more experience.
Could we reschedule for the same time period the next day,
Tuesday?
Again, I had no scheduling conflicts.
The new technician showed up right on time, with a large
assistant in case they had to move anything.
They knew that they had found my place when they spotted the
outside unit looming just behind the meant-to-be-concealing wall.
A few hours later, they had found and resolved the problem.
Both the heater and the air conditioner are working perfectly.
Now it’s just a matter of my addressing the issue of the Smart
Thermostat. Which I’ve
decided to call “Stan”. Stan
is so smart that he can communicate with a virtual assistant like
Amazon’s Alexa. At the
moment, I don’t have a virtual assistant, regardless of its name.
Stan can also take direction from my smart phone, assuming that I have
successfully downloaded the proper application (“app”).
This will not be likely to happen.
The phone, “Bianca”, is usually sitting on a stand on the kitchen
counter, or in my purse because I forgot to take it out when I got home.
I would almost certainly have to walk further to reach the phone
than to walk up to Stan.
Stan is so smart that he can communicate with the local power company to
turn the air conditioning off during “peak hours” on especially hot
days. Needless to say, I do
not intend to introduce Stan to said power company.
I don’t care how many pennies they offer to save me.
When the outdoor temperature soars into the 90s, I want the air
conditioning to come ON, not off.
So Stan is pretty much on his own now.
He does have some interesting ideas about what would be
comfortable.
For instance, if set to “Summer”, Stan will not turn the heat on unless
the temperature drops below 65 degrees inside.
He will also not turn the air conditioning on unless the
temperature goes above 85.
Fortunately, I can reset these two extremes.
Unfortunately, Stan’s idea of what is comfortable doesn’t exactly match
mine. As far as I’m
concerned, if the temperature gets below 74, turn the heat on; if it
goes above 72, turn the air conditioning on.
You can see how Stan might get confused.
For now, I just keep everything turned off for most of the day.
I set the heat on “low” for the night hours.
Morning and afternoon, since I’m home most of the time, if it
gets too warm, I’ll turn the air on for a while.
Once summer arrives, things will change, of course.
In the meantime, Stan can stay on “standby”.
Love, as always,
Pete
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