Overlooking the Obvious
I got a lesson today in the common problem of overlooking the obvious. It is so easy to make something that is simple complex.
The church that I go to is over 140 years old. Sometimes keeping a building of that age in good repair is a challenge. We are always working on something.
This winter our utility bills have gone up dramatically. I am not talking a few dollars, they have almost doubled. We have had this come up at our last two monthly meetings. Many different ideas have been discussed.
We decided the meter was defective. The company checked. It was fine. We thought maybe someone was coming in and adjusting the thermostats. I didn’t think this was too likely. We had insulated a few years ago so we didn’t think that was the problem. We never could come up with a good answer.
Today, I was walking around the building looking for fire ant beds to destroy with Results fire ant killer, when I noticed some dried leaves blowing out from behind the air conditioning unit.
No wonder the bills were high. It isn’t completely clear in this picture but there is an inch and a half gap in the duct leading into the building. It was putting out a lot of air. I went in the building and almost no air was coming out of the vents. So we have been heating the great outdoors all winter.
It never occured to me to actually go and look at the unit. I made the simple complex. What really got me to thinking was the realization that this isn’t an uncommon occurence. I do it all of time. From now on I am going to try to remember, when trying to solve a problem, to start with the simple.
Yes the simple is often overlooked. My uncle had complained that the gas bill at my grandmothers house was horribly high and attributed it to her keeping the house so hot because that was comfortable to her. After we had to put my grandmother in a nursing home, I was over at her house working on some things and had to go under the house and that is when I determined the real problem and potentially explosive problem. When her house was built in the early 1950’s they had run the gas line in the ground under part of the house and the gas line had rusted completely through in some places. Literally you could see through the gas line. Fixing the gas line was relatively easy. Had it not been fixed and the foundation vents not been open allowing the excess gas to escape, the furnace most likely would have ignited the gas and blown the house up. So check the simple stuff first.
That is scary. There must have been good ventalation under that house. It amazes me that there arent more accidents than there are.