February 18, 2008

• As much as I love our little house on the hill, one of the serious drawbacks to living in a place with "character" is the ancient heating system beneath us. The oil burner and boiler date from the forties, and are at the center of a maze of poorly insulated ducts and pipes in our dirty, scary-ass basement. The whole thing is decrepit and inefficient, and soot covers everything downstairs, and sometimes wafts up through the floorboards. Our bed happens to be directly upstairs from the behemoth, and when it clicks on at night i can sometimes smell the oil. In our house, the cobwebs are all black.

  Like I said, the place has plenty of.... character. 

  The heat also regularly fails us, and is ridiculously expensive. That's partly our fault for choosing a place with beautiful 12 foot high ceilings and big windows, but the fact that some of the radiator pipes aren't even insulated means we're operating fairly inefficiently from the outset, here. They can't even repair our burner if it comes down to it, since nobody  manufactures parts for it anymore.  Add in outrageous fuel prices, and we're talking six hundred dollars a month just to keep the place minimally warm.

  At first, during the beginning months of the winter, it was only a mild concern. We even found humor in how scary the basement is, or the fact that the boiler is older than my parents. Ugmoe's feet have become black with soot, which is more worrisome. But things seem much less funny now that we're paying hand over fist to heat a place that's filled with fumes and soot. It's like living in Dickensian London or something.

  Don't get me wrong; I love this house. It's the first place that feels like home since I don't know when. We've done our best to be proactive with the landlord and fuel company and have been careful about conserving heat. We've had technicians come at least three times this winter to rummage in our basement and fiddle with the boiler for various reasons; we keep hoping it will get a little better, or maybe someone will tel us if it's a do-or-die sort of situation. They always joked about how old and decrepit it is, and usually make some minimal recommendations about getting a new this-or-that, and then go on their merry way.

  But it's still just old and dirty and expensive. I'm not the type to get freaked out over dark, filthy basements and old machinery, but this thing gives me the mechanical heebie jeebies. Not to mention that ever since about a month ago, since we had the whole system "cleaned", i've started finding black, oily soot upstairs.

  What gives me serious pause is my own health, since i'm pretty much puttering around here all day long. I haven't been breathing so well lately, and my initial thought was the typical winter culprits: maybe i'm not getting enough exercise since it's been cold out, or perhaps it's allergies, or just a malingering low-level respiratory infection. I get seriously winded when i walk up the hill, to the point where I'm gasping for air. And for the past month or so I've been waking up in the night, unable to breathe at all.

  So, yesterday the heat conked out on us again. The tech arrived this morning to come have a look and get us up and running again. I lead him downstairs to have a look, and made the usual banter about how old and disgusting the thing was. He agreed, then poked around a bit and got the boiler going. I waited up in the kitchen. What he said when he came upstairs, though, has given me cause for deep concern.

  Apparently the thing is not only old and dirty and poorly insulated, but now the insulation is decaying. Asbestos insulation. Bits of it are falling off, along with the usual oily soot and grime, and are strewn all over the unit and surrounding area. Which is, like i said, directly beneath the warped and cracked floorboards of our bedroom. He didn't even have me sign off on the service slip; he just said he was going to put in a call to his office and that it was pretty urgent that our landlord get in contact with them. Other than that, he said the system was crap and should be replaced not only for efficiency reasons, but because it was unhealthy and unsafe.

  I called Matt in the middle of having a low-level freakout. He immediately put in a call to the city inspection services, and notified our landlord. Tomorrow someone is going to come and look and let us know if we are in any danger; if so, I am very much going to flip the eff out. It's not like nobody's been down there (at least three times this winter!) who could have possibly missed that shit, and i don't care who's specifically responsible if our health has been put at risk during the nine months we've lived here.

  Heads are going to farking roll, i tell you.

  • 2:16 pm
  • 13 Comments