Broken Pipe!

While we were in Idaho at the call family party on Saturday, Jake called me from Provo to ask if he could borrow our truck. Shantell was doing a demo at a nearby Albertsons and somebody brought her a table that ended up being the wrong size. The table they had hoped to have would have fit in their car. This one was a little bit longer. Jake decided to call me to see if he could borrow our truck so that he could return the table to the family that dropped it off.

I told Jake that we weren't home but that he could feel free to come on into the house and get the keys to the truck and borrow the truck.

And while later Jake called my cell phone once again. He told me that there was water spraying all over in the garage. It looked like it was coming from our furnace closet in the garage. He shut off our main water line there to stop the flooding. He said that there was water all over in the garage and that the roof of the garage was soaked so that the insulation was hanging down fairly low.

I asked him if he could stay there for a little bit and I would call my neighbor who is a furnace guy. I called Ken Kosmicki and asked him to run over there and take a look at it with Jake. He quickly headed over there and assessed the situation. He told me that looked like it was a pipe going into our humidifier on the furnace. He said that he thought it would be something that he could take a look at that evening. He was just heading to the Ward Christmas party but he would come back later to see if he could fix it. He said that it looked as if the flooding in the furnace room had fried the motherboard and possibly the blower engine. He and Jake said that it was making some weird sounds and was not functioning. Jake told us it was 50° in the house.

Amber and I were really hoping that the motherboard on the furnace would be okay. It didn't sound like it would be okay -- if indeed it had fried it would be the third time we would have replaced that motherboard since we moved into this house two and half years ago. All instances have been freak accidents that haven't really been related to each other. It was kind of stressful to think of going home that evening from Idaho, arriving late, not having heat in the home or possibly not even water to the house. Not to mention, a huge mess to clean up in the garage.



Jake was kind enough to run back to his home and bring back a box fan and his kerosene heater. He set them up in our garage and waited to see it if the heater would help make a difference in drying out the insulation. The initial results looked hopeful and he called me to let me know that he thought it would be able to save the insulation. Jake also mopped up a lot of the water that was on the floor of the garage.

By the time we arrived in Provo and got to our house, we found Ken Kosmicki hard at work in our garage. He told us that he thought he would have to replace the motherboard. He actually did replace the motherboard but found that it was acting the same as the old motherboard. So he took the old motherboard and dried it out on a heat lamp that he was using. Once he dried it out it seemed to function okay. He also had to clean up the burners to the furnace. They were full of ice from the spraying water. He dried them out and got them working again also. After an hour or so at our home he got our heat back on and also our water. It ended up not costing us anything since it appears that both motherboard and burners were salvageable -- and ken is a good friend who was willing to donate his late-night holiday labor. There is still a chance that the burners will go bad here soon, but were excited that at least we have a chance that they will be good still.

I left Jacob's heater on in our garage all night last night. I woke up every 40 minutes or hour to check on the heater to make sure that it still had plenty of fuel and it was not smoking too bad.

I am really grateful to Jake and Ken for acting on the spur of the moment to help us save our garage, our plumbing, and our furnace. I don't know what we would have done if we would have arrived that night and opened the garage to pull the Van in -- only to see hot water and steam pouring out of the furnace room. We would have been overwhelmed to cleanup the huge mess, wonder what the damage was, and go without water and heat for the next day.

We owe Jake and Ken big time for their service to us. Thanks guys!