I am more tired than I ought to be. I think it’s probably all the time I spent the last two evenings trying to get my furnace back working. The morning after I thought I had everything working I found out that after the gas heat never turned on (it’s supposed to switch from the heat pump to the gas furnace when it gets cold outside). I changed the switchover temperature so the heat pump worked at colder temperatures.

I called the owner of the HVAC company and he told me that he’d have someone come by. The HVAC tech added one wire to make the gas furnace run at two levels. When I got home, the vents were pumping out cold air. I found I could get the gas heat on, but the heat pump would never switch to heat. I talked to the tech and the owner of the HVAC company and they the reversing valve was energized in cooling rather than heat.

So, I called Nest. I was on the phone with Nest for 3½ hours. Turns out they lost a call center and the first-line support was not that great. She tried to make me call back once (no way in hell I was going to wait on hold for another hour to get back to a human) and also told me to have the tech call instead (no way in hell the tech was going to wait on hold for an hour just to talk to someone). When she said to send her a picture and call back I asked to talk to her manager.

Fortunately, instead of the manager she sent me to second-tier support. The second-tier support seemed skeptical for a while but he got the troubleshooting bug and we tried a bunch of things. We found we could get the furnace running without any controller and rewiring the Nest revealed the big problem: the Nest itself was broken and couldn’t switch to heat! It also started thinking it was 15ºF warmer than it really was.

9PM was too late to get a replacement and it was the coldest night of the year so far. Fortunately, the gas heat still worked. Amazon’s return policy is spectacular and Home Depot sells them locally for the exact same price. Today, two days after the ordeal started, I have a working heater again.

I am pooped.