My wife and I have the least efficient home in history.  On a good month the cost of heating our 1,100 feet is roughly the same as the lease payment for a Ferrari.   

One of the reasons it is so costly is that the furnace is 200 years old.  The other reason is that our house is a carriage house, or more accurately, a barn, which two men turned into a little house 35 years ago when it was the 70’s and people were doing things like living in their cars and doing stained glass work in exchange for meals at a church, or walking up to people’s houses in Brookline and asking if they could live for free in their garage if they promised to turn it into an apartment.  And since it was the 1970's, the people who owned the houses were all for it.

As a barn, our house has lots of unexplained quirks such as holes into the basement and ceiling, feeding troughs in the corners, and hayloft-bedroom that has either zero insulation in the floor, zero insulation on the 12 foot cathedral ceiling, or both.

A few times since we’ve moved in, we’ve tried to squeeze a few extra days out of our tank of oil and ended up in a situation where my wife is angry with me because she has to take a cold shower or get her hair wet in the sink and blow dry it to make it look like she took a shower like I did when I was in the 4^th grade when the cool kids started taking showers every day.  Running out of oil sucks not only because it means an angry wife and no shower and no heat and general unpleasantness, but because it means having to pay the oil delivery people extra to come and prime the pump, $35 to be exact. 

This has only happened once.  Actually, it happed another time but we were on our honeymoon and hadn’t yet realized that our “perpetual water heater” uses significant fuel to heat water even when nobody uses the water for 16 days so I don’t count it against us.  Last week it happened again.  I noticed the tank was low one afternoon and called the Oil People.  The Oil People told me my options were to pay a $75 fee for emergency delivery in addition to the obnoxious price of oil, or to wait until the following morning and get the regularly obnoxious price.   I opted for the later, and left for my monthly card game, which is held in a humidor and involves a certain degree of cigar smoking.  When I returned from my game I was disappointed to find the water was cold, for the obvious reasons, and because I cannot get in bed with my wife after smoking a cigar indoors without first discarding all of my clothing outdoors or in the basement, and then taking a lengthy shower, which still doesn’t really get the smell out of my hair, and definitely doesn’t get the smell off my hands.

When I got back from work I noticed my tank was full but my furnace was idle and called the Oil People and inquired as to how quickly they could come out and restore my heat.   The woman informed me that I could get someone out for a service call but that since it was not going to accompany my oil delivery, it was going to cost me $90.  I had some choice words for her and threatened to find another oil source, which, it turns out, is virtually impossible when you rent your home. 
 

Feeling stuck, and knowing that I had to come up with something before my wife came home, I meandered to the basement to have a look at the problem.  Knowing something about machines, I viewed several wrenches and tools in my toolbox, and then touched approximately all of the various valves and hoses until I found what I thought was the oil line.  I then located what I thought to be a bolt, which I turned with my hand in either a counter clockwise or clockwise fashion until a steady stream of brown liquid began squirting directly over the plastc cup I had carefully placed beneath the hole and all over my hands, shoulders, legs, pants, and the floor.  Once I had determined that the substance was oil, I jumped to my feet, wiped off my hands and then pushed the button to fire up the furnace. Bingo!  

The actual act of priming my furnace took roughly 50 seconds, and even factoring in the odds of blowing my face off or burning down the house, I still think it was worth it, especially since it’s not my house.  I suppose $90 isn’t the end of the world, but you have to stand for something, and if your hands smell like cigars there’s nothing like a half gallon of fresh heating oil to mask the scent.