Juddmansee.com

1) Hidden smoke detector with dead battery

Badness scale – Annoyance

Resolution: Wake up in the morning and track down the actual smoke detector location

2) Car battery died

Badness scale – Inconvenience

Resolution: Su picked up a battery at Sears and ran my errands for me so I could do W2s for church. On Saturday I tried to replace the battery but the mounting bracket was rusted tight. I tried all the tricks I knew to loosen it but with no success. I didn’t have a deep-well socket so I had to use a wrench that threatened to strip the bolt. I took the car to the mechanic who got the deep-well socket and promptly sheared the mounting bracket and bolt. The battery is replaced and I need to buy a cheap mounting bracket from the auto parts store.

3) CO detector starts chirping in the middle of the night

Badness scale – Dangerous, but will be resolved safely

Work in progress: I haven’t been sleeping well lately, but last night I got to bed at a reasonable hour. A few hours into my sleep the CO detector started chirping loudly. I checked the level, and it was at the warning check this out level and not the full blown, blaring, deadly level. So, I promptly turned off the furnace knowing that it is quite old and the CO level zeroed out fairly quickly. I went downstairs to examine the furnace and the quickly discovered the entire exhaust pipe had rusted through and fallen off. For a brief period last night we had a furnace with an 8 inch exhaust pipe venting directly into the basement.

As I write this the furnace guys are out buying replacement parts for the exhaust system and then going to write me a nice expensive quote for a new furnace. Right now, I’m very happy we have the CO detector and I’m very pleased nothing bad happened.