My House is Warm

Tonight our house is warm. As I mentioned before I pulled the fan out of my furnace but I was unable to pull the fan off of the motor shaft so I had to take it in to my work. I put some penetrating oil on it and then went and dug out a pulley puller but the fan the was already loose. I then pulled the fan off and soldered in new wires to replace the ones those stupid rats ate. Monday night I put the repaired fans back into my furnace and when I hooked  everything back up my fan came on. That was quite exciting until I couldn't get the fan to go off. I mean I turned the thermostat off and everything else I could turn off and my fan wouldn't turn off. How frustrating. 

The brain that runs everything on my furnace is a control box and once I decided that the problem must be in there I was now out of my league. I'm a materials guy, not a sparky. I can make my way around electricity but when you get into a circuit board I get just a bit nervous. I decided it was time to pull in some help. A friend of ours uses a local handyman to help her out with these odd jobs so I gave him a call. He knew even less about my furnace than I did but what he did know was the name of an independent HVAC guy. What a life saver. I called Clayton and he showed up at noon today. It took him about five minutes of poking around when he told me my transformer was burned out. Duh... why didn't I check that? Well the reason is because the transformer is buried in with the big ugly circuit board and so I kind of shied away from it. It took Clayton all of ten minutes to put in a new transformer and $100 later he was on his way and I was very happy. 

As for the mice, I'm quite sure they are rats. I've set a dozen traps in my garage and almost every day one of them is set off but nothing is in the trap. One of the traps even disappeared and I'm thinking that somewhere in my garage is a big rat with a wooden board stuck to his leg. I've got a couple of big rat traps but they don't seem to get set off. Dixie told me about some good rat poison that I can get from Walmart and I've decided that is the next step. I hate to use poison because I don't like the idea of some dead rat rotting away in my garage but after cleaning up after those rodents I came to the conclusion that it is worth it. Die rat, die.

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Scientists have genetically modified the mosquito that carries dengue fever so that the female babies (only the females bite) have no wing muscles. This means that when they evolve out of their pupal stage the females just sit there on the water and can't fly or mate while the males, who are also genetically modified, go off and mate with the native females giving them wingless babies. In controlled trials the entire mosquito population crashed within just a few months. Real world trials are just beginning now in Mexico.

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