Chilly Night

      This morning, a sign of the changing seasons: it was 61°F inside Roseholme Cottage and I ran the furnace for the first time this Fall.  

     Between the ancient thermosiphon (or "gravity") coal converted to gas forced-air furnaces* in my long-ago duplex and the smelly, cantankerous oil-burning furnace in my first Indianapolis home, the first furnace run of autumn always worries me.  It wasn't too many years ago that the furnace here had a cracked heat exchanger (which I smelled and then saw) and had to be replaced.  The process went okay this year.  Now it's a toasty 64° and I'm enjoying a plate of Breakfast Hash for lunch.

     It's a fancy variant of Breakfast Hash.  I don't make the stuff much, partially because I need to pick up a decent modern wok or deep cast-iron skillet, and because I've cut way back on potatoes and rice; the doc is right about enjoying that stuff sparingly.

     Still, every once in a great while is acceptable, and today's mixture of diced potatoes, scrambled eggs and a couple of strips of bacon is accompanied by sliced green olives, pickled okra and mild banana peppers, a hot piparra pepper,† a whole fire-roasted piquilla pepper and a half-dozen little peppedew peppers, all of them pickled and, except for the very last, chopped up.  
_______________________
* They were an education in the start-up process, with a large ring burner in the old coal combustion chamber and a candle-sized pilot flame in the center, all under a thick steel plate and with a thermocouple stuck in the pilot: if the pilot went out, the furnace couldn't open the gas valve, since the tiny current from the thermocouple powered the controls.  A normal start took nearly a minute, from the tiny click of the valve, the whoosh of gas, the long pause 'til the burner caught and a muted roar as it heated the air enough to trip the fan control.  The fans were different on each side of the duplex -- an external squirrel-cage unit in the cold air return on my side, but the other side had a much larger horizontal squirrel-cage fan inside the hot-air distribution octopus at the top of the furnace and an external motor hanging in a spring-loaded mount driving a set of belted pulleys to run the fan -- a little one on the motor and a large on top of the furnace.  When that system kicked on, the motor would bounce in the springs and the big pulley would wobble and yaw until the fan rotor came up to speed and stabilized.  The entire top of the furnace flexed; the bearing for the fan was in great shape but the sheet metal hadn't been designed to support a fan and the reinforcement wasn't enough to hold it steady.  My furnace guy -- the only one in town who would work on such historic contraptions -- swore it was perfectly normal behavior.  Still, knowing what was lurking down in the basement, I laid in bed on many a winter night, counting the seconds after the first click and rush of gas....twenty-two, twenty-three, twent- foomph, there's the fire, okay, one, two...fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seven--...click, whirrrrrrr, there's the fan, all right, I can go back to sleep.  Running big transmitters for work, I applied the lessons the furnaces taught me, learning the sounds of a normal start-up and often noticing when it stalled before my coworkers did.
 
† For my taste, these are hot enough that just one is plenty in this, and two or three in a big pot of chili.  However, they're very tasty and YMMV.