Tips Tuesday – A Christmas Tale of Service

Happy Christmas Eve, y’all!!

We’ll keep things quick today with a short story of my HVAC breaking down on a cold night this past weekend.

I’ll have my 2025 year predictions for you next week, along with new things coming from the BlogAid family of sites.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Around 8pm Saturday night it was 30 degrees outside with a feels-like of 25.

I went to my thermostat to turn down the heat so that the house could cool off by the time I went to bed.

It was one of those touchscreen thermostats and it was totally dead.

The first rule of thumb when things like this happen is to not panic. And I instill this in my clients as well.

Just start methodically working through the problem. 

I remembered that the thermostat was electrically powered, not battery powered, but I carefully pulled it off to check that anyway. No battery.

I checked all of the pins and wires, all were good.

I blew off the dust from the connectors and reseated it, hoping that would fix it. Nope.

Then I went down to the basement garage where the breaker box and the unit are.

All the breakers were fine.

Then I walked over to the unit and it was off.

But there was a little box in the tray it sits in that was running. It had the Power, Run, and Alarm lights on.

Okay, the only thing I know about this box is that an alarm on it is not good.

Next rule of thumb for me and my clients – when basic troubleshooting doesn’t work, call for help.

So, I called the HVAC folks and was told there would be a $189 emergency charge for coming out. That’s a discount on their normal emergency service fee because I’m in their monthly “club” where I pay a wee bit to get “free” spring and fall services and discounts on everything else. It helps me maintain a budget and I know that my unit will be properly serviced twice a year, plus I’ll have priority help if anything pops up, like this issue.

Good to Have a Backup

My old house in Nashville had 2 fireplaces, one upstairs and one down. The downstairs one was gas. And there was also a ventless gas heater down there too. When the power went out in the winter, it was super easy to close off the downstairs and stay warm with those 2 heat sources. And I had to do that 2-3 times in the 20 years I lived there.

When I bought my new house in Clarksville, it had gas heat, but only for the unit. There were no supplemental heat sources.

So, one of the first things I did was have that gas line run to the other corner of the house. And I had connectors run to both the upstairs living room and the only finished room in the basement, which was right below it.

Then I got a portable, ventless gas heater.

Even if the power went out, I could have heat.

I also have 3 of those floorstanding oil radiator heaters that help to keep the rooms I’m in during the day a little toastier than the rest of the house, when needed. So, if I had electricity, I could keep the whole house warm even if the main unit was out.

And knowing that I had provided all of that backup as a safety net gave me a LOT of peace of mind that I could easily stay warm no matter how long it took to fix the main heat.

That’s the same way it is with our sites.

No matter what catastrophe strikes, we have backups stored off the hosting and we can restore our sites, even to another host, if need be. And I had to do that for myself and clients back in the days when hosts would suffer a DDoS attack and be down for a week or more at a time.

Tools and Knowledge are Good to Have

The on-call tech for the HVAC company called me within 5 minutes.

He was the same man who had done the recent annual service on the heating unit.

We had all kinds of great tech conversations while he was here.

During that chat I told him that my dad had owned a Heating & Air company and taught me how to be handy and troubleshoot things. And that’s what led to my career of being an electronics engineer for 30 years.

He also saw my large collection of woodworking tools and the things I had built for the shop.

So, he knew he was talking to a tech buddy and we swapped some funny repair stories from when I was a field service engineer.

The same happens with my DIY site audit clients. I know they are able to handle most things on their sites themselves. They only need help with the super techie stuff, or when something breaks and they don’t know next steps.

Quick Fix

When the HVAC tech called, I told him all of the steps I had taken to that point.

He said that little box in the tray that was running was the condensation pump, and that it had a clog in the line.

Sure enough, when I inspected it, I could see the clog in the clear vinyl hose. It was right where the hose connects to the box.

He agreed to talk me through the fix, as he knew I was handy enough to do this fix outside the unit, and because he had his young daughter with him and no babysitter. 

Every tool I needed was hanging on the pegboard of my workbench.

In 10 minutes I had the hose off and the clog cleared.

And he told me to remove the governor that created the clog in the first place so this wouldn’t happen again.

I reconnected the hose and plugged the box back in and within just a few minutes, it drained enough water to turn off the alarm.

I went back upstairs and the thermostat was on and resetting.

In just a few minutes, it was back to normal and I had heat again.

Same with Site Fixes

Little things come up all the time with sites.

My site audit Hub clients pay a little bit a year for Hub membership and extra support.

Most of the time that is me sending them a tutorial on how to add a new security feature at Cloudflare, or getting them ahead of what’s coming, like PHP updates, and changes to WordPress.

They have the tools and the knowledge to be able to follow those instructions and do it themselves.

But, when something looks broken, or is a little more techie, we do a live session so I can see the problem and guide them through the fix.

It’s quick and easy and they don’t have to tackle it alone.

Plus, they don’t have to pay an emergency fix charge to get a 10 minute remedy either.

And, being a DIY site owner instead of a hands off site owner means that they don’t have to pay $100/mo for someone else to deal with the issues completely either.

They are happy to “click here, do that” as long as they have guidance.

Having a backup, a little knowledge, and someone to call for help is THE best peace of mind you can get as a site owner.

And I am so glad that we are prepared, and have sites that we knew were already in order so that I could do for my clients what that HVAC tech did for me over the weekend.