I'd been feeling kind of run-down all week, so I slept a little later on Thursday, and just worked through lunch, eating lunch at my desk. It was an unremarkable morning, except that I was feeling a bit feverish. I took my temperature at least once, but that wasn't the cause. Finally about two or three o'clock—the time was melting together at that point, I happened to look at the thermostat as I went to the bathroom.

78°? What the...

To my horror, the air conditioner was off. I mean, completely off. The thermostat downstairs was completely blank; the one upstairs was still working because it has a battery backup. I went down in the garage and checked to see if the breakers had popped. No, the ones labeled "A/C" were fine. (It turned out everything was dead because a breaker had snapped, but it was the one labeled "furnace." I had forgotten the blower is actually on the furnace circuit; the A/C circuit just runs the compressor.)

So I called up our maintenance provider and they sent someone over, who arrived just as James got home (in the meantime, I put every fan in the house on high). Turned out our freon was down to two pounds (it's supposed to be five). We could get a charge, but the technician suspected we had a leak and it might last a day, or a week. He thinks what happened is the unit came on and, because the freon was low, the breaker snapped.

So rather than next spring, as I'd planned, we're going to get a new unit on Monday. Two stage instead of one stage, with an air filtration system (for our allergies), a remote control for the thermostat, and they are going to look into why the air flow in the master bath is about half of what comes out of the registers in the kitchen and the dining room (so that in the winter we freeze in there). They're also going to put a larger register in there. He thinks the two-stage system will also solve the problem of when we put the heat on downstairs in the winter, it gets cold upstairs. And vice versa when the A/C is on.

Damn. I didn't want to do it now, but in the spring when we had a little more money saved. Anyway, put the down payment on my credit card so I get something out of this in Amazon points; then I'll just pay the credit card off with the money put aside from the tax return.

Talk about life is what happens when you're making other plans.

At least it was cool enough to sleep tonight. With the additional freon (which we get a refund on when the new unit is installed) it went from 81 to 75 by bedtime.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:09:00 PM

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