The power went out in the middle of the night.
- Of course, that means that the heater stopped working too.
The forced air central heater works on electricity, of course. This wouldn’t be a huge problem except for the fact that it is 15 degrees outside and there is a raging blizzard. I don’t want my pipes to freeze. Thankfully, my home has a backup heat source. We have a fireplace. We don’t use the fireplace often. Mostly because I am concerned with all of that smoke going into the air. We do, however, use the fireplace on holidays and a few other times a year. I am glad we do because that means we keep the fireplace well maintained. You can’t just light up a fireplace that hasn’t been used in years. The chimney could be clogged and you will die of a lack of oxygen. Anyway, every year we hire our HVAC supplier to come out and service our HVAC system and our fireplace. They make sure everything is in good working order for the year ahead. So, when the power went out, and with it the forced air heater, we simply started the fireplace up. That kept the house nice and warm and comfortable for the next few days before the electricity was fixed. We were fortunate to have the fireplace too. Some of our neighbor’s pipes burst because of the cold because they didn’t have a fireplace. So they had to go without running water in addition to no electricity. Then they had to pay an expensive repair bill to fix their pipes. Meanwhile, our fireplace kept anything like that happening over at our house.