Well, I wasn't burning down the house, only spending 10 hours of my Sunday in the basement with my dad cleaning out my furnace and adding some new controls to make it more efficient. My dad does all of the knuckle-banging and swearing and I hold the light and fetch tools and clean things and get water and so forth.
After 10 hours of this, my dad, (who recently went through his Oil Burner certification at SMCC), did a bunch of tests. Not running terribly efficiently. The last guy who serviced the furnace had, fortunately, left a note about what he had done...so we could see (looking at the specs in Dad's notebook) that my furnace currently has a nozzle that's too big for the amount of pressure the pump is at, meaning that I'm using about 10% more fuel than I should be using at that much pressure. Looking more carefully, we could see that the type of nozzle the last person put in is the wrong kind of nozzle altogether (solid when it should be hollow). You can bet my dad will be back soon to change the nozzle and up the pump pressure--doing so means I can use 20% less fuel.
Two words: gas boiler. :-) My oil furnace is extremely interesting, but I'll take "clean, efficient, and low-maintenance" over "interesting" any day. So when my dad said "if I could get you a good deal on a gas boiler, would you be interested?" Ayuh. I was.
Now I get to go write a mid-term. And clean my apartment. And do the 10 other things I thought I was going to get done today before the shenanigans with the furnace began. Argh. On the other hand, it was fun to hang out with my dad, and while he went to the hardware to get another kind of fitting, I drilled a hole through a basement window frame and wired up a plug so I can light up my plum tree. Merry Christmas!
