I'm Melting

Anyway…back to the melting part. We live in a Doublewide trailer and we have lived her for 15 years this October. While we live on five acres of wooded land, our house receives no shade because when we built it, we had to clear out about an acre for the house and the septic system (our lovely red Virginia clay led us to installing a huge septic system). So while there are trees everywhere, none of them shade the house. Between the poorly insulated Doublewide and the complete lack of shade, our home gets pretty hot in the summer time. We keep our AC temp on 72. And even with that, sometimes, our heat pump has to work to keep our house in the 70s on a very hot day. So when I came home Sunday night from a church pool party, I noticed that the house felt warm. I checked out the thermostat and it said it was 77 degrees. I thought that was a bit odd, because it had only been in the 80s, but I assumed it would be fine in the morning. (You know what they say about assuming).

I didn’t sleep well Sunday night and finally gave up at 4:00 A.M. I thought the house still felt a bit warm, so I checked the thermostat. It was still 77 degrees in the house (never mind that it was in the 60s outside). So I checked the coils…not frozen up. Looked at the heat pump and it was running and not frozen up. So I figured we had another Freon leak (we had a leak back in the spring). I went into ‘crisis mode’. I opened all of the windows, turned on all the ceiling fans, turned off all the lights and hoped our house will cool off. HA HA HA!!! (evil laugh….)

By 6:00, the temperature in our house was 91 degrees and I was on the sofa resembling a limp dish rag. (Hence, the reason I didn’t blog about this sooner). DH, the smart one in our family, suggested that I close the windows in the kitchen, den, and living room, close the doors to the bedrooms and bathroom, and turn on the window unit. The kids and I then put sleeping bags on the floor of the den and that was where we slept. By Tuesday morning, the rooms that were closed off were a little cooler and the other rooms were much cooler. We have been blessed with cool, rainy weather since then, so the rest of the house has cooled down in the meantime. Tuesday evening, the heating/cooling specialist arrived. We do have another Freon leak, unfortunately, this one is inside the coils and basically unfixable. The evaporator coils have been here since 1994 and we haven’t upgraded to the new coolant that everyone has to switch to, so since we have to replace the coils, we are going to go on and update the whole system. We don’t want to spend the money, but it’s now or later and might as well get it out of the way…

So braces and a new heat pump system…at least we are helping the economy And we are soooo grateful for the rain and cooler temperatures while we wait for the work to be done.