Appliances

We discovered after buying a house that appliances require maintenance.  So far, the major culprits for us have been the AC, the fridge, the furnace, and the oven. This is more of a what we have learned with home buying type post, so if you're not interested, feel free to skip this one.

The AC:
We still feel bad about this one.  Since we bought the house and then realized we weren't going to get to Texas for several months after, we had some friends stay here for a few months.  They were great sports and always told us things were going fine when we called to find out how they were doing.  It turns out the AC had lost most of its Freon and was totally useless.  This is not a nice circumstance in Dallas during the summer.  We got that fixed and it ran fine the rest of the summer.  Then next year we turn it on, and it isn't working again.  Turns out the guy who filled it didn't get the cap properly sealed, so we got to do it again.  Later that summer it just quit working.  After much head scratching and tinkering, I realized that a large capacitor inside the outside unit was bloated and dead.  Magically, I replaced it and it worked again!  The next summer, the hottest in record for Dallas, it stopped again.  This time the wires leading to the capacitor had completely burnt through so a few new connectors and another capacitor and we finally have a working AC again.



The fridge:
We were given an old fridge Maren's parents and were grateful to have it.  We decided the golden rod color wasn't ideal for the house, so we painted it black and it ran fine for a while.  The seal around the doors started to not work quite so well with time, but it still kept cold inside.  One day Maren and I were watching a movie, and heard something in the kitchen.  It turns out the fridge had decided it was done and sent out a smoke signal to notify us.  We quickly got on Craigslist and started e-mailing any fridge listing under $100, and soon found one we could pick up the next day, was running, was only $50, was running, and had and ice maker (only inside)!  We felt very blessed to find it and were grateful for our friend in the ward who helped me pick it up the next morning.


The furnace:
Just before we left for vacation to see family, the furnace quit working.  I won't go through everything I tried to fix it, but I ended up ordering a piece that it didn't need, and it turned out that the plug was just upside down. That was a lot of work for something should have been easy, but we are glad we figured it out before we called a service guy since then it would have been expensive as well as cold and embarrassing.

The oven:
We woke up late one night to a beeping in the kitchen.  It would stop if you pressed cancel, but then start up again.  We ended up flipping the circuit breaker and going to bed.  When we flipped it back, it stayed quiet for a few days, then started beeping again.  The error code it was giving indicated the ERC (the electronic range control, the part with all the buttons and circuit board) was dead.  Since it is a smaller built-in oven, replacing it was not a budget friendly option, and it also turns out that the ERC panel had been long since discontinued.  The only options then were to pay lots and completely replace it, or try sending in the ERC to a repair shop.  We opted for the latter, even though it was in the ~$150 range and there was no guarantee that was actually the problem.  The fact that there aren't that many things that can go bad on an oven and I had checked several of them and we really didn't want to figure out how to replace a built-in oven led us to go ahead.  The shop e-mailed us and said they have fixed it.  Hopefully it will work now when it comes back!