An After Christmas Miracle

We have been without heat for almost three weeks. It started with our furnace blowing only cold air shortly after we returned from Mexico. We called a company, they came out and determined it was the transformer. Ten days to order the part. Fine, we live in Southern California and even in winter, it doesn't get terrible cold. We got a space heater for the chilly mornings and waited. 

They returned with the new part, but a different technician. He is on the phone the entire time and seemed very unsure about what he was doing. After more than an hour, he tells us the new part did not solve the problem and he is going to have to take both old and new transformers back to the shop for troubleshooting. Someone will call tomorrow to reschedule he says. 

Tomorrow comes and almost passes, before my wife gets on the phone to find out when they will be coming back. The original technician tells her that they won't be able to troubleshoot for a few days (Christmas is just three days away after all) and she might want to contact someone else.

We wait until after Christmas to call a new company as we were concerned about the original estimate (more than $600) and didn't want to pay an extra holiday surcharge on top of that to solve a problem we had been tolerating.

Yesterday, we contacted a different company, who came out this morning. This technician pointed out the circuit board that is now fried, above, and tells us he has to get a new transformer and circuit board, before he can be certain what the problem is. We are expecting weeks of waiting and lots of expense, but less than four hours later he has our furnace running perfectly for a cost of $350 - $200 of which was the cost of the circuit board (which we are both convinced the other technician fried while trying to install the new transformer).

Good to have heat once again!