Eight years ago, when we first purchased our pile o' logs, it was heated by electric baseboard heat.  OmegaDad took one look and said, "That has to go!", and we dickered with the sellers to get the money to cover installation of central heating.

We got bids.  We went with the folks who were smack in the center of the bid pile.  We ended up being extremely unhappy with them (so unhappy that OmegaDad ended up fighting with them about the additional $800 that they wanted to charge us).  (In their defense, the time delays were due to a glitch with the county.)

So we had nice warm toasty central heat.  In the front of the house.  My office--the first room off the furnace--was the hottest room in the house.  No matter what happened, from day one the back of the house was chilly in the wintertime.  Eh, we figured, it's the lousy ductwork configuration the heating folks left us with, we grumbled even more about the company that put it in, and we made sure that we always went with a different contractor to fiddle with the furnace.

As my (vast hordes of) readers know, we had a frozen pipe burst this week.

A side effect was that we had cold air blowing into the back bedroom.

After the plumber left, OmegaDad gritted his teeth, dressed up in his special khaki maintenance-man suit and work boots, and went under the house to check the damage.

While he was under there he fixed the ductwork that had broken loose due to the burst pipe.  Since he was there, he decided to look around.  The end result:  He also fixed three other areas where the ductwork was not properly attached.  We're talking six-inch gaps.  He says the crawlspace was nice and toasty.

Suddenly, the back of the house is not chilly.  At all.

Suddenly, the office is at a much closer temperature to the rest of the house.

Suddenly, the furnace is clicking on a lot less.  A lot less.

Suddenly, the heat coming out of the vent in the kitchen is not just "nicely warm", but positively hot.

I am having visions of much lower gas bills.

Technorati: Silver lining