The Great Furnace Adventure

October 4, 2011

Now that autumn has settled into The Okanagan, the weather has turned cool and damp, with overnight temps dipping down into the single digits (Celsius, that is).  So, like Canadians everywhere, we fired up the furnace to test it oot & make sure it works the way it should.  We were pretty sure it'd get warm upstairs pretty fast, given the number of vents we counted.  And sure enough, the warm air was pouring oot fast and strong.

Then we went downstairs.  Where were the vents?  We found larger wall vents, but quickly identified them as cold air returns.  There were no vents anywhere.  It was really strange.  Maybe these wall vents weren't returns, but blocked vents?  But given how few there were, and the odd placement of them, that didn't seem likely.

So we had a furnace technician come to the hoose and check it oot.

After checking the upstairs/main floor vents (everything was A-Okay), he ventured (get it?  VENTured?) downstairs to see what I was talking aboot.  He looked up at the ceiling and then back at me with a confused and amused look on his face. 

"Well your vents are right there" he pointed up. 

"No, that's the built-in sound system," I told him.

"No, no.  Those are your vents.  THOSE," he pointed at the speakers in the ceiling "are your speakers."

They looked exactly like bass speakers, or maybe smoke/CO2 detectors.  But nothing aboot them led me to believe these could possibly be furnace vents.

"Problem is, they're closed up tight.  That's why you have no heat down here."

I fetched him a ladder, and he reached up and gave it a twist and it opened up like a Stick-Up deodorizer.  "You just keep twisting to make it open up wider to let out more heat."  Looking around, I now saw them - 3 in the family room, 2 in each bedroom, and one in the bathroom.  I couldn't believe it.

"Sorry, but being from the States, I've never seen anything like these before in my life.  Are they common up here in Canada?" I asked him.

"Oh, yah, you betcha they are, pretty common."  Yes, he actually said 'yah, you betcha'.

And with that, my heating issue was solved.  So simple, and it made me feel so foolish.  But honestly, there was nothing aboot them that indicated in the slightest that they were heating vents.  The property manager didn't know anything aboot them.  I had even consulted the architectural drawings of the hoose before calling in someone to help, trying to see if there was a schematic for the heating system (there was not).  When I mentioned these in an email to my Mom, she was equally flabbergasted.  She wanted pictures.  So here are what they look like (they are now open):

Floor vents upstairs - standard & common (& what we were looking for downstairs)

Can you spot the heating vents?  The speaker is on the right, lights in the middle, so that on the far left is the heating vent.

Heating vent on the left (when closed, it looks like a smoke detector), speaker in the middle, light on the right.

The infamous ceiling vent.  Twist the bottom to open it up more and more.

Part of me feels like a bumpkin not being able to figure oot how this fancy new hoose works.  But luckily we have figured oot how to use the heated floors in the bathroom, as well as the fireplace in the living room.  Once I was told aboot these new-fangled vents, I went oot to the garage to see if maybe it, too, was heated.  No such luck.  Still looking for the heated garage floor switch, though....



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