Haunted

Good title for a post around Halloween, right? Well for a few weeks we really were starting to think we had ghosts in our house. Earlier this month during the evening, we heard a loud, short burst of bass. Like a loud, vibration. It lasted for about 3 or 4 seconds and went away. Throughout the evening, we heard it a few more times - each time we would run around the house trying to figure out where the sound originated. At one point, we thought it was coming from our AC unit outside the dining room window. By standing near an AC vent, we realized that the short bursts of sound (varying from about 3 to 10 seconds) were accompanied by air coming through the ventilation. But the AC unit outside wasn't the source. At about the time we figured this out, the sounds stopped completely.

The thermostat was set to run the AC if the house got above 80, but the temperature inside was only about 75, so the AC shouldn't have been clicking on at all. But just to be safe, we turned the thermostat to "off."

Then late one night a few days later, I woke up to the loud, vibrationy whoosh sound again. This time from our bedroom, it sounded a lot louder than downstairs in the dining room. We realized it might be the blower, which lives in the attic eaves behind our bedroom. The sound haunted us a few more times that night, even though the thermostat was off. D crawled back to the blower and found a physical switch to kill the power - it completely turned the thermostat off and also the blower itself. Finally, no more noise.

I guess if there were an ideal time for a part of an AC system to break, October would qualify.

We called our heating guy (the same company who came half a dozen times a year ago to fix our heating problems). They came out a few days ago to diagnose the situation and found a fried relay in our circuit board. Of course they didn't have the part they needed, so they promised to order it and come back later. Fortunately, "later" turned out to be a few hours after their first visit - they were able to find the part they needed locally. $300 later, we have exorcised the ghosts from our AC system - it is on and behaving. We also got to keep the fried circuit board to take pictures because, you know, that's what we do here on Brave New Home: