August 12th, 2024

I don't know if I've ever mentioned this to you before, but my husband is a freakin' genius.  I'm serious.  If ever there is an issue, a problem, a conundrum that I take to him, he has an answer for me.  For anyone really.  He doesn't intrude into situations uninvited, but if you ask him a question, he will find an answer.  It's very cool.  And I guess I am so used to it that I don't really think about it anymore.  I suppose you could say that I take him for granted.  Shame on me!

Now I don't mean that I expect him to solve all of my problems.  I don't go whining to him about every little piddly thing. I have a perfectly good brain of my own, I am reasonably well educated and well read.  And I have always lived by the adage that if you don't use your brain it'll go bad on ya.  So I use my grey matter on a regular basis.  However, now and again, things come up that are just beyond my own capabilities, knowledge or experience.

This weekend was one of those times.  

Now I have to back up a little bit.  When we first bought this house, one of the things we did immediately was get a new HVAC system.  It was June in Florida - a hot and humid place - and we had newly arrived from Colorado - a dryer far cooler place.  Good AC was paramount.  

Originally the  HVAC  in our newly purchased home was rather old and inefficient.  It also lived in the kitchen (of all places) in a teensy tiny closet squished in next to the washer and dryer.    It was a terrible place for all of it.  So Tim had them construct the new system in the adjacent utility room instead.  Brilliant idea right off the bat.    So that's what the HVAC did.  

The brand new HVAC system was built on a plywood platform that they constructed and goes all the way up to the ceiling.  I don't think I've ever seen an HVAC system built that way before but in my head it sort of made sense.  Hot air rises, Cold air sinks.  So if the cold air in each room starts at the top of each room and sinks slowly to the floor, the entire room would feel cooler would it not?  Ok.   Maybe I'm wrong as to the why of it, but that's how I worked it out in my little head.  I've never actually asked.

And at any rate, the only part of it that figures into this story is the platform part.  That is essential.   You see, Thursday we found a little water on the utility room floor.  Not that big a deal, it's happened before and usually it is corrected by Tim replacing the filter and bleeding off a little water into a bucket, adding some vinegar, I mop up the water and then all is well with the world again.

This time it was a little odd tho because he had already replaced the filter recently. Hmmm.  Oh well.  And we went about our day until I found water on the floor again and again and again!  Grrrrr.  Each time I would sop up the water with towels, then dry the towels to be used again. For his part, Tim would look the system over, fiddle with this or that, look into things and hmmmm again.  The filter, interestingly was all bent up.  It went in nice and neat and straight as a pin but came out bent over like an old man with osteoporsis.  Not Good.

Tim's diagnosis was that the HVAC itself was somehow bending.  That's very weird and not good at all.  We spent that first night, every two hours, replacing soaked towels with dry ones, running the wet ones through the spin cycle of the washer then the dryer, then folded them and stacked them ready for their turn to keep the water at bay.

Friday, after doing just a few absolute essential things for work, Tim took the day off to really concentrate on this issue.  One of the things he discovered was that the system was leaking, not directly onto the floor but into the box platform.  Which, as I said before, is made from plywood which then bleeds it out onto the concrete floor of the utility room.  The scariest part is that the entire system rests on this box which is now compromised, that is weakened, by water.  We were terrified that the entire thing was going to kind of collapse into itself.

Now obviously, an HVAC repair guy needs to be called, but nobody in their right mind wants to pay emergency rates, I promise you.  If you've never had to do that, I'll just  say this, it's sort of like taking out a second mortgage on your home.  You really want to avoid an emergency visit.

So first order of business is to make sure the platform continues to hold up!  Tim dove in and checked it out and ultimately put together supports via lally columns and 2X8'sto prop it all up securely.  He then shop vacced/toweled out the wet inside the box.  Great!  Whew!  

Next up was rerouting the leak.  He found a way to force the leak to exit at the front of the contraption into a bucket.  Once the bucket was full, we could easily empty it outside.  Taadaa!  Great idea!  Except,   you have to constantly pay attention to how full the bucket is which means, you aren't leaving the house for very long and you are absolutely going to wake up  multiple times during the night to be certain it isn't over-flowing.  And then too, it's a HEAVY bucket. Water is phenomenally heavy.

The obvious (to Tim not me) and logical next step was to put wide circumference tubing into a hole in the side of the bucket toward the bottom with a valve so when the bucket is full, the valve can be opened and the tubing can be pointed out the back door and the water emptied super easily right back into nature where it belongs.  Awesome.

But that wasn't good enough for my man!  His last tweak was having the tubing go directly outside on it's own so that nobody has to mess with it at all.  What a relief!

The utility room is dry, the dang leak is draining outside directly and nobody has to be awake and on duty all night long ready to leap to DefCon 4 at any moment.  

Now we can just go on the schedule of the repair guy and he will get here whenever he gets here (who knows?) and fix it, as he fixes it, and the only stress with be the price tag of the repair.

I could have been a very different scenario.  If Tim wasn't such a smarty britches and figure out how to at least put a really really good bandaid on this problem I cannot even imagine what today would be like.  I might have been writing this from an ark.  Or underwater.  

Like I said, My husband is an absolute genius!  Reason number 356 why I adore him.

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