"THE HEAT IS ON"

As the Glenn Frey hit goes, "the heat is on". Remember the music from Beverly Hills Cop?

We started up the backup mode of the furnace almost two weeks ago. Since this is electric resistance heat, it is costly to heat this way but it was only temporary until we could get the geothermal heat operational. We had delayed starting the furnace at all until the guys were done with the drywall. Bad idea to be running the furnace when they are sanding the drywall as it would draw all of that dust into the duct work.

To provide heat while they were working on the walls, we relied on a propane gas heater and also an "electric furnace" that the HVAC contractor loaned out to me. The drawback to the electric heater is that it cost about $30 a day to run it but thankfully it was only for a week or so.

Once the drywallers were done, we gave the floor a good sweeping but there was still a lot of dust left in the nooks and crannies of the subfloor surface. I had read tips on either wet mopping the floor to pick up the remaining dust or even using a carpet shampooer. Since we have a carpet shampooer that Barb picked up at a garage sale several years back, I opted for that approach. Just used plain water and it worked very nicely. If I were to do it all over again, I might have covered the floor with rosin paper before all of that dirty work got underway.

Amazing how much moisture is introduced to the house when they "mud" the drywall. Over a three day period when they were finishing the walls, we took about 30 gallons of water out of the air using two dehumidifiers, one I already had and an industrial sized rental unit. I ran both of them for a week and am now just running our own unit in the basement.

Back to the furnace, we got the geothermal side of the system operational on Monday of last week. It's been purring along nicely since then, providing us with cheap heat compliments of groundwater provided by Mother Earth. I think we are going to love this setup. Very quiet and it seems like the air flow velocities are low which eliminates any "cold drafts", a complaint many people have with heat pumps which is technically what our system is.