The Miracle of Heating

My office is cold. It's not yet numbingly cold, and maybe it won't be, but I'm a bit worried about it.

My office is a room off the kitchen in the house we rent in Rockville, Maryland. It's nice because it has windows on three sides that look out onto the backyard, which is quite large and very pleasant. Here's a picture of the view straight back:

The problem is that the house is aging, and not well. Since we've moved in, the pipes in the basement have sprung leaks half-a-dozen times. The landlord sends out a guy to fix them, he repeatedly tells her that she needs to replace the whole pipe system, but she insists he simply patch it.

A couple of months ago, the furnace broke down. Again, our landlord went to discount labor sources, in this case, a tenant at one of her other properties. That guy took awhile to show up, then didn't fix it. The landlord got another guy to come out, who finally replaced the oil pump, but when the furnace started shutting itself down again a few days later, he came back and found that some other part of the furnace was also busted. Basically, the whole thing needs to be replaced.

In the last couple of weeks, we've learned that the landlord doesn't intend to continue renting the house out once we move out, something we are thinking of doing next spring anyway. She intends sell it to a developer who will subdivide the property, tear down this house, and put up four million-dollar-plus homes. Under the circumstances, it seems she doesn't really want to fix stuff.

Instead, she promised us a couple of big free-standing electric heaters. Having seen the one the my friend, Ben, uses at his house, I was willing to give that a try. Yesterday, I got home from taking Gregory to a Cub Scout event to find two small, electric, parabolic space heaters on the front doorstep - one of them very dusty and missing a knob. I'm very skeptical that these (plus the two other heaters we bought ourselves do handle the cold days while they futzed around with fixing the furnace) will replace the normal heating capabilities of the built-in heating system.

We will have to see how this works out, but since the next place we live will also be a rental, you can bet that it will be in a commercially run operation where you don't have to worry about adequate heating being high enough on the landlord's priority list.