This past winter we had to replace the motor on the furnace. Of course it happened during the coldest winter on record in northeast Florida. After that, I decided that we should have someone come out to look over the whole system. I didn't want to be without air conditioning in the middle of the summer. So I called the number on the handy magnetic ad that was on the furnace/ac unit, and the helpful woman on the phone scheduled an inspection. Early one morning, a nice young man named Mr. Scott showed up. I pointed him to the furnace and the circuit breaker box and went back to reading my book.
Soon I can hear him whistling. It's not the tuneful whistling that a person does because they're happy and doing something that they like. It's more of a high pitched sound that drops suddenly, like Wyle E. Coyote falling down from a very high cliff onto a very hard surface. It's that piercing "Incoming!" whistle that you hear just before everyone gets blown up in war movies. It bodes.
"What's going on?" I ask and Mr. Scott shakes his head and says, "This is bad. This is very, very bad." He gestures to me. "Come over here and take a look." He pulls a metal panel back so that I can see the coils on the ac unit. They look like they're covered with something nasty, but then again, maybe this is how they always look. I find myself wishing I knew more about air conditioning.
Mr. Scott points. "Look at this. There's dog hair and all kinds of dirt. This is nasty." He shows me my old air filter. "See this? This is no good. If you can see through it, other stuff is getting through, too," he says.
At first I think that he's telling me that I need to change the filters out more often, and I start to tell him that I am very bad at remembering to replace my filters every month, but he cuts me off.
"Use these," he says, holding up a filter with a fan folded center made of opaque white material and covered with a silver metal grid. "Okay," I tell him. I'm still embarrassed that the filter he pulled out, the cheap one, is so darn dirty. It's like having the dental hygienist clean your teeth when you haven't flossed in a week.
Mr. Scott tells me he's going to have to wash the coils, "in situ", because there's no way to take that component out. The unit is too old. It will take him at least an hour and it's going to cost me $250. "Okay," I say again. I'm feeling better about him, probably because he used "in situ" in a sentence. I wonder if it's part of HVAC training, to say "in situ" when you're selling the customer an expensive scrubbing procedure. $250 doesn't seem so bad. I tell him that I'm going to take the dog for a walk and I'll be back before he's finished.
When I come back in the house an hour later, I notice that the air conditioning is on, because it's cooler inside than out. Also, it smells wonderful. Kind of fresh and flowery. I go to find Mr. Scott. "Wow, it sure smells nice in here! You know, I always thought it was my boys that made my house smell like a locker room," I tell him. He chuckles. "Maybe a little bit, but mostly it was all the dirt on those coils," he says. "Glad you're back," he adds. "There's a couple things that you should replace before I do the rest of the cleaning."
He leads me to the back of his truck and shows me some mechanical parts, explaining to me in great detail what they're for and why they're important and how they're going to cost me roughly $150 each to install.
I think for a moment about what my husband Steve will say. This whole inspection was supposed to cost only $139 and cover two visits, one in the spring and another in the fall. He's going to have a fit when he sees the final bill. Still, the house sure smells nice, now. Maybe he'll notice the nice smell and forget to ask about the cost.
Back when we bought the house, there was a room between the garage and the kitchen that we used to call the "stinky dog" room. The previous owner had bred Yorkshire Terriers for extra money and it smelled so bad that Steve had to wash it down five times from ceiling to floor with bleach before you could walk through there without holding your nose. You'd think that a smell like that would be unbearable to someone and they would have done something about it, but it's amazing what you can put up with, if it creeps up on you a little at a time.
I tell myself that Mr. Scott seems like a nice man, and he's spent over two hours here already, and my house smells truly wonderful for the first time since we moved into it. I think I'm falling in love with Mr. Scott. I'm pretty sure that if he'd told me I had to buy another AC unit I'd have pulled out my credit card for it and told him, "Okay."
Up until now, I've always assumed that the bad smell in my house was because I lived with three testosterone emitting males and a mostly dampish dog in the great swamp that is Florida. It's amazing to me that in just a few hours and for only around $700 my house smells like someone's house who maybe doesn't live with any men at all. Or dogs. Or in Florida.
Anyway, I spend the rest of the day remarking on how nice the house smells. The boys give me rolled eye looks and agree with me, just to get me out of the room. I'm already looking forward to October, when Mr. Scott will be back to check the furnace.
