Cold comfort in AC unit’s untimely demise

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/07/2021 (1846 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In life, timing is everything. That is especially true when it comes to air-conditioning and heat waves.

The truth of that statement was tragically driven home on the morning before Canada Day as I lay in bed with our two dogs, wondering why I was perspiring like a Butterball turkey on Thanksgiving.

Which is when my wife, who was getting ready to leave for work, burst into our bedroom and informed me that, just as the heat wave that has been scorching Western Canada rolled into town, our central air-conditioning system had decided to drop dead.

“I noticed the house was getting hotter so I looked in the furnace room and the air-conditioner is frozen solid,” she explained as the dogs and I looked up from the bed with expressions of abject horror on our faces.

Look, I am not an expert in modern air-conditioning technology, but I felt fairly certain that having your system turn into a large block of ice at the beginning of a heat wave that has been causing birds to burst into flames in mid-air was not a positive development.

Before leaving for the office, my wife called our air-conditioning guy, Gerry, who promised to come right away and see whether he could resuscitate our central air, which it turns out is in its mid-30s, roughly the same age as my two children.

When Gerry arrived, the dogs and I greeted him with a twinkle of hope in our eyes and beads of sweat dangling from our previously cold noses.

We took him down to the basement, where Gerry approached the problem like the air-conditioning equivalent of a surgeon, which is to say he frowned at the frozen system and began shaking his head.

We also looked on in confusion when Gerry marched into our sweltering back yard and attached what looked like a series of medical-style gauges to the outdoor unit to measure whatever stuff those things are designed to measure.

Then, when I returned to my home computer to bang out a column, Gerry descended into the basement and began performing mysterious and noisy operations on our seriously ill central air system.

“Bang! Wham! Clang!” came the noises from the basement as I attempted to write a column via the technique of wiping away drops of sweat that had fallen from my face onto the keyboard.

Every 30 minutes or so, Gerry would stomp upstairs to provide me and the dogs with an update on the health of our air conditioner. “I thought the problem might be a buildup of crud on your filter,” he explained, then shook his head sadly and added: “But I put in a new one and that didn’t help.”

Then he’d vanish back downstairs while I resumed typing and tried to ignore the fact that our house was starting to feel like the inside of an oven. Despite the rising temperature, I bravely Googled the words “air conditioner” to see what the bill might be if Gerry’s technological heroics were to prove in vain.

Which is how I stumbled on a guy named Elagabalus, who became infamous as the most decadent, scandalous and hardest-partying emperor in the history of the Roman Empire. Most of the things this guy supposedly did I cannot share in a family newspaper, but I can tell you he loved playing pranks on his dinner guests, such as siccing lions and leopards on them in the middle of the dessert course.

It turns out Elagabalus, who met a gruesome end, was also a key player in the early years of home air conditioning. “In the third century, Roman emperor Elagabalus stepped up his empire’s air conditioning game. He built an entire mountain of snow — yes, snow — by employing vast squadrons of donkey trains to move snow from mountains into the garden next to his very own villa, despite being extremely inefficient, not to mention costly,” notes the website of Advanced Heating and Cooling.

But we don’t have time to think about ancient history today, because we need to focus on the crisis unfolding in my basement. After about six hours, Gerry finally asked me sit down and have a heart-to-heart chat about the fate of our central air system.

“I’ve tried everything I know, Doug,” he explained in a soothing voice. “But the news isn’t good.”

I nodded my head and began pondering the dent this was going to put into our household budget. It occurred to me this might be a punishment from above because the previous night I’d called my relatives on the West Coast to point out we were basking in an AC-cooled house while they were baking in their overheated homes.

“You mean, our air conditioner has breathed its last gasp of cold air?” I croaked, a touch misty-eyed.

Gerry said all the right things, but it was cold comfort. He used words like “freon” and “evaporator coil” and even drew a little diagram of what went wrong, but nothing helped. “It was an old system, Doug,” he finally said. “It was at least 32 years old, so it had a good life.”

Now, in the midst of our grief, my wife and I have no choice but to welcome a brand new, pricey air-conditioner into our home. I miss the old one, but I’m praying they can deliver the new AC as soon as possible, because when it’s this (bad word) hot timing is everything.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca