From November 27 past the middle of December, our area underwent a prolonged unseasonal chill, with below-average temperatures every single day, save maybe one. It reached its nadir in the wee hours of December 15, when the house weather station recorded a low of 14°F. That’s certainly inhospitable, but the injury added to the insult was that the front of the house got down to 56°F, even though last February I had a completely new HVAC system installed.
When the tech from Webb Heading & Air Conditioning came out that Monday morning, his all-too-speedy verdict was that the filters on the new system (which were supposed to be good for 6 months; they’d been installed in August) were blocked by...candle soot.
This has long been a candle-burning household but this is also a house that’s almost 5000 square feet. I am having trouble wrapping my mind around two or three candles burning several days a week bringing my system to its knees in about three months.
But apparently that’s the price of progress, when looked at a certain way: advances in filtering technology mean a whole lot of stuff you don’t want blowing around your house, or passing through your system, might also include some trade-offs. The comfort specialist who did the original design of the new system and the service manager from Webb Heating & Air Conditioning came out just before Christmas and worked me through the options for striking a better balance on maintaining the system’s integrity and functionality while also living a normal warm-scented life in a candle-loving household.
We’ll have to experiment with less efficient filters and I’ll need to look at how to manage their cost better, but I appreciated the cooperation and collaboration to figure out how the dilemma could be navigated.
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