I finished the book I have been working on for the past 4 months and just about the time I pushed the big button to send it off, I got a call from my wife letting me know that the A\/C seemed to have been running constantly all day and yet the house wasn’t getting any cooler.\u00a0 For you folks up north in the fall season, I am quite certain that you’d say to yourself “No big deal!\u00a0 I have 9 months to get it fixed!\u00a0 RELAX!”\u00a0 In south Texas, a non-functional A\/C unit in September is a 4 alarm emergency.\u00a0 So the euphoria of “book finishing” led to a quick check of checking account balances and the looming knowledge of a weekend $ervice call adding up to the cost of a vacation trip to the Cayman Islands.\u00a0 Better take a look first, when I get home…<\/p>\n
Now, you are probably thinking that a guy who would attempt an A\/C repair is right up there in insanity with a guy who would do his own brain surgery.\u00a0 You are probably right, but after fixing things by making simple repairs, I operate under the assumption that a look a problem with some common sense can often save money and time in getting a broken thing running again.\u00a0 Most of the time, I am rewarded with success, and, even when you include trips to the emergency room,\u00a0 I am money ahead.<\/p>\n
I have cracked our A\/C unit open before for a little preventative maintenance.\u00a0 I have fixed two furnaces, simply by replacing a $50 igniter, so, foolhardy or just plain lucky, I feel pretty comfortable cracking open things and “taking a look”.\u00a0 I wish I would have taken a picture of what I saw in the control box of the A\/C unit that was non-functional.\u00a0 I HAD turned off the power (foolhardy yes, stupid no) and and almost immediately noticed a wire, burned at the end, that seemed to be going nowhere.\u00a0 Now, just because there is an un-terminated wire in an electrical circuit, it doesn’t mean that is the issue.\u00a0 Sometimes a wire is clipped off because of an “engineering change” to accommodate a non-original part so I don’t immediately assume that a loose wire is the culprit.\u00a0 In my case, I have TWO identical units, so I disassembled unit #2 so I could compare the wiring.\u00a0 Sure enough, the burned wire *should* have connected to the big honking capacitor and somehow had come loose.\u00a0 I called Debbie out to watch and call 911 in case the capacitor chose my tinkering as an opportunity to discharge, and pulled the now orphaned connector off of the capacitor and re-crimped the burned off end on the connector and re-connected it.\u00a0 I closed my eyes, I threw the big switch, waited for smoke and the unit rumbled back to life.\u00a0 Life-giving cool air was now flowing from the ceiling vents.\u00a0 Success!<\/p>\n
When asked how I knew what to fix, I said “It was just common sense” but as I thought about it, I realized some folks have no common sense, especially when it comes to simple repairs.\u00a0 Yeah, I am a geek and I admit that I was in electronics class in high school: That is where I developed a healthy respect for capacitors which jokesters would fully charge and then toss back into the parts box, just *waiting* for someone to rummage through and find it the hard way…. But you don’t have to be an electronics geek to be able to figure out simple stuff like I did in comparing the two wiring layouts.\u00a0 You don’t have to be a licensed HVAC engineer to look at a furnace and notice that the “little thingy” in front of the burners isn’t doing any thing and looks burnt out. What it takes is “common sense”.\u00a0 To me that is having a way of evaluating things logically.\u00a0 You don’t have to fully understand everything, you just need to be able to logically walk through how something works.\u00a0 That is usually enough to identify the problem, even if you don’t have a damaged frontal lobe like I do that doesn’t prevent you from proceeding to attempt to fix it.<\/p>\n
Technology is working against humanity developing common sense because so much of the world’s operation is now hidden in “black boxes”.\u00a0 When I was a mechanic, long ago, most repairs to engine problems involved tweaking or replacing tangible items.\u00a0 Points, condensers, distributor caps, spark plugs were the items I worked with.\u00a0 Now my Chevy Volt is plugged into a computer that evaluates the computers in the Volt for software updates that may fix an engine issue.\u00a0 I may be a programmer, but hacking into my Volt to fix one of a million lines of computer code is beyond my capabilities or interest.\u00a0 Give me tangible hardware any day!\u00a0 But it brings about a bigger question and that is:\u00a0 Are we losing our ability to logically think through simple repairs because we have handed off “logic” to the “black boxes” in our lives?\u00a0 Is “common” sense becoming extinct?\u00a0 If so, I’d recommend a job in the “trades” like HVAC, electrician, plumber.\u00a0 Although I “robbed” my HVAC guy of $250 in fixing my A\/C unit, I’ll just be handing it over to the Chevy mechanic to update my Volt’s software….zero sum, I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I finished the book I have been working on for the past 4 months and just about the time I pushed the big button to send it off, I got a call from my wife letting me know that the … Continue reading