Time to turn on the heaters!

Today the temperatures in our part of the world did not reach 55°. Since I had been paying attention to weather forecasts - I prepared for this event by cleaning all the heaters in our house. We don't have a central heating system (NW Natural keeps the junk mail coming, trying to get us hooked up to their clean natural gas....). In each of the rooms in our house we have Cadet wall heaters.

This is nice in that we can turn off the heaters in rooms we are not using - like our bedrooms during the day, and then all the rooms besides the bedrooms at night. At the same time. this is not nice. Because - programmable thermostats are difficult to find, since these heaters run at 120V and not the 24V of a normal furnace thermostat. There are a lot of neat programmable thermostats out there and they are widely available. Last time I looked - Loews did not have an 120V models, and Home Depot was out of stock. Time to take a trip to the store again, I guess.

The other pain of these heaters is that you have to take them apart every six months and clean them. There are no filters on them, and so the dust collects. Turning them on in fall without cleaning them gives your house that nice, burning smell. The design doesn't make it too easy to take apart, though it is not too difficult. Just removing three screws is all it takes - but putting two of the three back in is a little tricky.

I got all the heaters (almost all - still have three more to clean, but they don't get used much) cleaned last night. Tonight they will get a workout. First time since last May that we have had to heat the house. Winter is coming!

Another interesting thing about Cadet, the maker of the heaters. This company is based in Vancouver, Washington - and I know the location very well. At some point in the past - solvent got into the groundwater at the site (and many of the surrounding business properties as well) and it is currently being cleaned up. My company, AMEC Earth & Environmental, was involved from the start when the contamination was discovered. Back then - I even analyzed some of the soil and water samples in our analytical laboratory. Later, I was in charge of managing all the environmental data from monitoring wells, soil borings, and air sample data and using GIS to create maps of the contamination, groundwater contours, and cleanup progress. AMEC did such a good job of defending Cadet against the Port of Vancouver in a lawsuit and actually getting the cleanup going -that we worked our way out of a job. Cadet sold the property to the Port, and the Port has their own environmental consultants working on the project now... No links to them here...but you know how to use Google, don't ya?

Ready, set, search!