Sorry Saint Francis.
Saturday night Jodi turned on the heat. Like most Minnesotans, seeing how long you can go without kicking on the furnace is always a fun game. My friend Matt usually made it to November. Of course if you visited him in October you had to keep your coat on for most of the visit, but thats beside the point. He made it to November.
Sunday morning I had to check what size filter our furnace has so I went to the basement and opened up the doo hicky where the filter lives and as I was doing it I could hear a high pitched whine and noticed something smelled hot. Then I realized that although Jodi had turned on the heat the previous night I had never actually heard the furnace kick in. So I opened up another doo hicky and exposed what I later learned is an induction motor. I touched it. Yes, it was way stinking hot and no it was not motoring. I’m no HVAC specialist but something told me this was bad. I turned off the power to the furnace. Like any Man worth his weight in Fleet Farm Assorted Nuts and I knew what the first step was. I squirted it with WD-40 and turned the power back on. No luck.
Now things got more interesting. I decided to take the motor off. This would’ve been easier if I hadn’t gotten WD40 all over my hands (still not sure how that happened). First I removed the nuts that mount the motor to the furnace and then the screws that attach it to the exhaust pipe thing which blows all the bad Carbon Monoxide and what not straight to the chimney and up and out into the ozone. It’s important to know that the fan blades attached to this motor have a direct line to the outside world. Why? Because as I pulled the motor off of the furnace and spun it around the first thing I saw was a wing.
Yeah, I kind of thought I was going to puke too.
Apparently this bird had flown down and made itself a little home in the blower. And thats why the blower couldn’t spin. I won’t go into the details of how I got it out but I will tell you that it was an unfortunate day to have chicken for lunch.