There are so many things in an old house that don’t come with instructions. Or if they do, those instructions were lost long ago. The instructions to some of the things in my house were lost before I was born.

Maybe even before my parents were born.

But yesterday when I went down to the basement to turn the furnace on, I wasn’t worried. I did it last year, somehow, with no guidance. I could do it again.

A furnace, for those of you who don’t know, is an octopus-like thing with a great steel belly and little dials for eyes. In the belly is water, which, when heated, flows out via the tentacles and throughout the house. There it circulates through the gills of the radiators, which are made of molded steel, beautifully decorated.

The whole question of when (and whether) to turn on the furnace is a touchy one. Some people simply will not abide the cold. My sister is an example. My girlfriend is also an example. When it is cold they immediately want an external fix. It can be mechanical, chemical, or even psychological; it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to create a mini atmosphere centered entirely around them.

Other persons are more flexible. To me the onset of cold weather is not a change we must adapt to, but a challenge we must overcome. Turning on the heat is clearly inevitable; it will have to happen sometime. But it’s also a clear defeat. My view is; if the squirrels aren’t yet hibernating, there’s no need for heat.

Unfortunately yesterday there weren’t many of the little creatures around, so I couldn’t prove they weren’t hibernating. “They’re probably watching the news,” I argued. “Or doing an art project. They don’t always collect nuts, you know.”

“They don’t hibernate,” she replied, looking even chillier than before. “At all. They just don’t.”

I pleaded with my eyes, you know, like this (insert pleading look here), but to avail. So I got a box of matches and descended into the maze of shirts that hang from our basement clotheslines.

(Like I said, the house came instruction-less. Are the wires strung across the basement ceiling for hanging clothes? Maybe. And is hanging clothes out to dry in a dark, damp, occasionally smelly basement a good idea? Hard to say. No instructions. We do it anyway.)

But then I remembered that the furnace’s pilot line vale control thingy had been replaced last year. The repairman had walked me through how to relight the pilot, but that was so long ago, and my attention span for that sort of thing is short.

That sort of thing = every sort of thing. But anyway.

I devised a plan. I laid out objectives.

• Plan: put some fire by the gas. Run away if too much fire.
• Objectives: warm house to a reasonable level. Run away if too much warm. Or not enough.

I pushed the little lever to ‘pilot’, moved the match that I’d lit toward the gas outlet very carefully. Slowly…slowly…then…

BOOOM! NOTHING!

Nothing happened. I reassessed, and looked over some instructions for the old burner pilot control valve thingy that were not only irrelevant to my situation, but also were covered in decades of dust and dead bugs.

In the end I realized you have to have the thermostat on, and the gas line valves need to be open. Sheesh. So simple. I did that, then reprised my fire + cover-your-eyes routine, and the pilot lit beautifully. Soon the combustion cylinders (at least, that’s what I gathered they’re called from the dead-bug instructions) were blazing. Dozens of happy little blue flames, like bright paintbrush strokes, tickling the water drum’s underside.

And the octopus laughed and laughed.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 15th, 2004 at 7:23 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.