Randall and the Burning Bush

Moses has nothing on me. We arrived home last evening to find that our gas had frozen up. The house was getting cold, and the forecast was for zero overnight, so I knew I'd better get someone out to thaw my regulator. I called Dominion Gas (as I had been told to do years earlier when it had frozen before) and I was told that that wasn't their problem. I explained that to the operator that she was mistaken (nicely) and that since I wasn't getting any gas through the meter, I was fairly certain that it was their problem. She asked how I knew it wasn't coming through the meter and I told her that I had loosened the union on my side of the meter and nothing was coming through. She then put me on hold to talk to a supervisor. She came back on and told me that her supervisor told her that it was my responsibility to winterize my meter and that I would have to call a plumbing contractor. I then ended my call (not quite so nicely) and proceeded to do just what she said. I called two contractors who told me what I already knew: that it was the gas company's responsibility and I should recall the gas company. By this time I was getting a little bit irritated, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I took my space heater (that big torpedo) out to the meter, directed it at the regulator and plugged it in. I then went inside, gave it a couple of minutes and tried the pilot and behold, it lit. I was feeling pretty good about my ingenuity about that time, and went back out to put the heater away. You can imagine my consternation when I saw that I now had a ball of fire burning at my regulator. It turns out that I had melted a plunger inside the regulator and that raw gas was now venting from the regulator and burning colorfully. Remember the barberry by the meter? It was also burning brightly too. I rushed over through the foot of snow on the ground and knelt down at the bush to attempt to extinguish the flames with the snow all around. That's when Bryan H. went by. He said he looked up in the field and saw me kneeling in front of a burning bush and thought I was having a religious experience. He came up (he didn't want to miss it if I was being saved) and we shut the gas off. We then called Dominion back and explained that we had a gas leak by my house. You would be surprised by how fast they sent a crew out. I was a little anxious about explaining just how the leak had occurred, but when the gas guy got there, and heard that the office had refused to dispatch someone in the first place, he was mad and apologized his ass off. He told me I probably shouldn't have done that, but he said he probably would have done the same thing too. He was a very nice guy and we spent the next hour together putting on a new regulator. Well, that should have been the end of it, but when we got the furnace relit, we found that it kept going out even though we now had gas. So, we spent the night without a furnace. I called a repairman this morning, and he said that the frozen gas had damaged a gas bell inside the control box, but he also found that I had a cracked heat exchanger (not related)that was not safe. Well to shorten an already looooong story, I ended up with a brand new, high efficiency gas furnace which he installed today at a cost of only $2500. I guess it all worked out okay, since I was planning to replace the furnace anyway. I ended up with a new furnace which will save me lots of money in gas bills, and a story as my contribution to this week's blog.

Warmly,
r