When It Rains….

Ever notice how you can rock along with everything just fine, and then, when one thing goes wrong, everything seems to go bad at once?  I’m sure you probably have -It’s common enough to be a corollary to Murphy’s Law.

That is no consolation when it’s happening to you, and it is happening at the Boggy Thicket right now.

We recently paid to  have our house re-leveled, and to have the floors repaired, and we are currently scheduling the contractors to come in and repair and repaint interior walls.

Our  5th wheel trailer is in the shop – mostly under warranty, but we have no idea what our portion of that bill is going to be yet, hopefully just a $50 deductable, but probably not. And…

Our old Avalon threw a check engine light just in time for its annual inspection.  It is running fine, but will not pass the required emissions testing as is, so I must either get it fixed this month ( $500 + or –) or give it back to my daughter who lives where emissions testing is not required.

As if that wasn’t enough…

I was working in the yard yesterday morning when I heard the air conditioner try and fail to start.  The fan on the condensing unit came on, but the compressor tried but did not start.  A few seconds later, it tried again, and again…and eventually did come on. 

I went in the house and told Honey that it sounded like we had a bad start capacitor, and that we had better get it fixed before the compressor burned up.  She said that she had heard that before; that it had been going on for several days.  So I picked up the phone and placed a service call.

The technician came yesterday evening.  He confirmed my theory that the capacitor was bad, and also said we needed a new contactor.  A contactor is just a relay – it has contacts and a coil like any electromechanical relay - AC and water well people call them contactors and charge outrageous prices for them.

Even though his company had installed our AC, he did not have an exact like-for-like replacement for the bad capacitor; he did have one that was “bigger and better and came with a five year warranty” for only $50 more.

Today, the AC is working, the house is cool, and I have a nice warm feeling knowing that I recognized a problem and averted a catastrophic failure. 

Is that warm feeling worth the $350 in unplanned expense?  Probably not.