Wake County Schools: all classes cancelled. Michelle’s off the hook for today. Not that this makes her happy. Delays are much better than cancellations, because you don’t have to make up a delay.

I don’t know about the status of my job. Common sense tells me that the roads are going to be atrocious. Even though there is only a measly 1-2” of snow on the ground, the temperature is not supposed to be above freezing today (highs in the upper 20s, lows in the teens). So, whatever is on the road is probably frozen, no matter how clear it looks.

All this is fine. I’m warm, snuggled in. Then, I realize that the comforting sound of the furnace running isn’t there. Too quiet. Get up. Cold. Yikes. Check the thermostat… it’s 62 degrees when it should be 68. Oh, crap, not again.

I awoke this morning to find that, for the second time in a few days, the furnace had gone on strike. Reason: the little condensate pump next to the furnace responsible for expelling water produced by the combustion of natural gas couldn’t do its job because the outside end of the pump’s drain tube had frozen over. Thus, the pump motor would run and not be able to pump. Eventually, the pump motor’s thermal cutoff would kick in to prevent the motor from burning up. The tray where the water collects would fill with more and more water until—click!—the float switch, which signals that the tray was about to overflow, would trip and tell the furnace to stop making more water by way of burning natural gas. Thus, no heat for us shivering folks inside the house, who don’t give a damn about the float switch. The bastard!

Like I said, this has happened twice in the last few days. Each time, the solution was to (a) go outside and down into the basement, (b) grumble some about the damn furnace, © pull the condensate drain tube back through the masonry, (d) soak the end of the tube in warm water to melt the ice, thus allowing the pump to resume its pumping, and (e) replace the tube in the masonry so it can pump the water outside the house. This worked fine last time. This time, halfway through steps (d) and (e), the pump cut off before it had pumped enough water out of the tray to satisfy the float switch, which led to step (g): grumble and curse. Still no heat. Damn. I tried to wait for the pump’s thermal fuse to reset so it could resume its duties, but I was starting to get cold, even in the relatively-warm basement.

Solution: get a heavy object, and weight down the float switch, rendering it helpless. The heavy object turned out to be a standard door hinge. Voilà! Problem solved, albeit temporarily. This time, if the pump can’t pump, the water just overflows into the basement, which has a cement floor and a couple of drains and is no stranger to water, since anytime it rains hard enough the floor of the basement turns into a scale model of the Mississippi River delta.

Sometimes I think the whole pump/drain setup doesn’t make sense for my house. It’s designed for people who have installed the furnace into a location which is never supposed to get wet—like, say, an attic. Our basement gets wet anyways. Besides, it’s not like the drain tube protrudes far enough from the house to keep the water from running down the outside of the foundation, so it probably works its way right back into the basement.

Anyways, I’ll probably be removing the makeshift float switch bypass later on today. Right now, I just want the house to be warm. The power-mad float switch, abusing its anemic authority over the furnace—which, on any given day, could kick its ass in a cage match—can get bent, as far as I’m concerned.