LJ Idol Week 13: Fan Death
It was completely silent.
And not the type of silence that makes you sigh in relief and bask in your moment alone, but the type of silence that makes you worry there might be a serial killer outside your bedroom door.
My eyes fluttered open, and I listened for sound. Any sound. But there was nothing, not even the dog panting in my ear.
I sat straight up in bed then, looking around. Fenway was always curled up next to me in the mornings, giving off her insane amount of body heat that left me sweating. But she wasn’t next to me, nor even on the bed.
I looked around in a panic, searching every inch of the bedroom, until finally, I spotted her lying in the bathroom, stretched out across the tile floor.
That’s weird, I thought. Especially since I was still sweating as much as if she had been pressed up to me all night.
I headed out into the hallway to check the thermostat. Big green numbers reading “82” stared back at me. I frowned and peered at the numbers telling me what the air conditioner was set to. “75” it said.
And then I realized. The silence. The air conditioner wasn’t on. The air conditioner - which in Texas was almost always on from May to October - was silent.
I headed downstairs. In the house I lived in, there were two thermostats, one to control the air upstairs and one to control downstairs. I headed straight to the thermostat downstairs.
“75” it told me, with the air also set to 75.
That must be the problem, I thought, and lowered it a couple degrees. Sometimes the system was messed up and wouldn’t turn on if one floor was at the right temperature, even if the other floor was sweltering.
I went to make breakfast, confident that the little snafu was resolved.
--
The snafu was not resolved. An hour later and the sound of a whirring machine was nowhere to be heard. Starting to feel nervous - after all, my sister and brother-in-law had just had to replace their entire AC unit and it was not cheap and I did not have that kind of money at the moment - I went to my most trusty resource on this type of situation: my good friend Google.
Google informed me there were about ten different things I could try.
I started with the easiest: Replacing the batteries on the control units. Sure, they had both been blinking “Replace battery” at me for months and the air conditioner had been working fine, but it couldn’t hurt.
It also didn’t work.
Next, Google said to replace all the filters in the air vents. Which was handy, since I had a ton of unused filers in the garage that I had bought months ago and just never had gotten around to replacing. So I found the filters and tugged a chair under the air vents one by one, and somehow managed to replace all of them and also not fall off a chair and kill myself.
Plus, I discovered when I was changing the filters that there was air blowing out of them. Not a lot and not very cold, but it made my heart leap with hope.
Google said it could take a couple hours to feel the effects after the filters were changed, but as the sun was rising in the sky and the temperature outside was creeping up to the high 90s, the temperature inside was creeping up too. The dog and the cat were now lying downstairs in the kitchen, stretched out, looking miserably.
I went back to Google for tips on keeping cool.
I opened all the windows downstairs to let the breeze in, while keeping the blinds drawn tight. Of course, there was no breeze at all, and the only thing that happened was moist heat pressing up against the windows.
Another site recommended hanging a wet towel over the window screen, because the air floor would distribute the water drops and cool things down.
Maybe it was the lack of a breeze, but all that happened was a pile of water beneath the window.
Fenway and Pigeon (the cat) were still looking miserable. I was sweating, so I knew it was worse for them. I filled up their water bowls and added half the ice in the freezer. And then I dipped bandanas in cold water and tied them around their necks.
That was the first and only time they happily wore the clothes I tried to put on them.
A few hours later, though, and there was still no progress with the air conditioner. Google said it could be a circuit breaker, so I headed to the garage. I read all the labels on the rows of breakers but none of them listed air conditioner as something it controlled so I turned them all off and back on anyway. And then spent the next hour reprogramming clocks and waiting for the satellite tv box to turn back on. But no air conditioner.
Until I read another article that mentioned maybe the air conditioner circuit breaker wasn’t in the same breaker box as the one that controlled the living room.
I thought, and thought, and then the hint of a memory started to form. Back when I bought my house and the builder was showing me how different things worked.
I hurried outside to the backyard, and there it was - the other circuit breaker box, tucked right in next to the water meter and the electric meter and the phone lines. I figured out how to open it and found the one labeled air conditioner. It didn’t look like it was blown, but no matter. This was the answer to all my worries. I reset the breaker and waited.
Nothing happened. No sound, no air, no nothing.
And now it was getting late.
Fenway, Pigeon and I curled up on the couch, hopeful that the night air would drop the temperature so we could continue our quest for relief in the morning.
--
The next morning brought no relief. Far from it. Instead, it brought lots of light and lots of heat and thermostats now reading 84 (downstairs) and 89 (upstairs). So much for the cool overnight air helping. Probably because there had been no cool overnight air.
I had a few more things to try, though.
I started by heading up to the attic to check the actual air conditioner (a process in itself, since to access the ladder to the attic, I had to move the massive amounts of stuff that was in the way. Who puts an attic entrance in the middle of an unused bedroom anyway?). But I made my way up the rickety ladder and peered around when I got up there.
I had never been up there before, but I decided the huge machine in the middle must be the air conditioner. It was making noise - not a lot of noise but there was definitely sound emanating from it - so I took that as a good sign.
Google told me I was supposed to check for clogged condensation lines, but there were no puddles of water or signs of anything leaking, so I decided that wasn’t the problem and headed back down.
Next, Google said to check if the fan was blocked, so I headed outside to the side of the house where the fan resided. I looked down at it. It was moving very slowly in circles. So it wasn’t blocked then.
Back inside I went. By now it was getting late again and the dog and the cat had barely moved all day and the temperature inside was creeping up and up and up.
We were not going to survive the night at this rate.
I read the next step on the do-it-yourself AC repairs website, and that’s when I knew. I was not doing this myself. This was not something I could fix.
So I Googled something else instead - the name of an air conditioner repair shop. I found one right down the street but of course they had closed five minutes earlier.
I called the emergency number and left a voicemail. Ten minutes later my phone rang.
“We can be there in ten minutes,” said the man on the other end of the phone once I had explained the situation, and I had never been happier to see someone.
Ten minutes later I was showing him the thermostats and explaining that yes, I had changed the filters, and yes, I had checked the circuit breakers and then pointing him up the ladder to the attic while feeling very proud of myself for the steps I had taken, even if they had resulted in nothing.
He came back down the ladder, apparently satisfied, and we went outside to the fan. He pulled out some fancy looking tools that looked like they were made to test something.
“The capacitor is dead,” he said a minute or so later. “That’s an easy fix.”
He was right. Barely a few minutes later, we were back inside, standing before the thermostat. I turned it to on. And waited.
The sound of a fan starting up echoed through the house.
It was the prettiest sound I had ever heard. I’m sure Fenway and Pigeon thought so too.
True story. One which I will never repeat if I can help it.
This was written for Week 13 of therealljidol. I hope you enjoyed it! If you would like to read more entries, you can head over here. Voting should come Monday night!