Why does our furnace go out every winter? (and other burning questions)



The furnace goes out every winter.

I never know what it is. Some switch or some gauge. I’m not an expert in HVAC. All I know is that my wife ends up asking, “Is anyone else cold?” And just as I realize that I actually am feeling kind of cold, she informs me that the thermostat is reading 64 degrees.

I spent about two hours down there in the corner of the old basement next to the cobwebs and the window fans. Detaching that little tube. Using my wife’s hair dryer to dry every little drop.

It always happens at the worst possible time. I don’t know why, but it does. It’s not in November, when it’s a little chilly. It’s not in April when we're warming up for spring.

It’s in the middle of February, when we’ve got two feet of snow on the ground, highs of 13 degrees in the day and lows of 2 degrees at night. The furnace always goes out during the coldest time of the year.

A history of failure

I remember one year it was out for a couple weeks. They sent a guy out a few days after we called. He installed a temporary switch, but then that went out pretty quick. They forgot to order the permanent one, too. Then, that ended up taking an additional seven days to get here.

By the time they finally came back to fix the furnace, we had all become so used to the space heaters, we had almost forgotten what it was like to have a normal heated house. “Wow, this is pretty nice,” we all said.

Last week, like clockwork, the furnace decided to go out again. Fourteen degrees, February, after 5:00 p.m., so no one is going to come fix it until tomorrow at the earliest. “Lovely,” the resigned father (me) muttered under his breath as he skulked down the stairs to take a look at the cold furnace.

DIY dad

The last time the guy was here to fix it he explained the problem. Condensation in some tube. The buildup of the moisture forces a shutoff. He showed me how to fix it in case it happened again. So there I sat, down by the furnace, with a headlamp around my forehead, fiddling with this thing, trying to remove the little black tube without damaging anything else.

I spent about two hours down there in the corner of the old basement next to the cobwebs and the window fans. Detaching that little tube. Using my wife’s hair dryer to dry every little drop.

Reattaching it. Running upstairs to turn the thermostat back on while my wife and kids ate dinner. Heading back downstairs, turning the furnace back on. Waiting for the blower to kick in and hoping it stayed on this time.

I repeated the process at least 15 times. Over and over again. Little droplets of condensation kept coming out of that little black tube. Remarkably, just as I was about to give up, it worked. The furnace was fixed.

It's always something

It’s always something. That’s the truth. If we don’t already have enough to do, something else is thrown into the mix. If we aren’t already stressed enough, some other problem comes along.

Of course, the furnace isn’t really that big of a deal. Yeah, it’s freezing up here in the deep north, but it’s not life-threatening when it goes out. Just very annoying. It’s just another thing to take care of when all we want is for everything to go right.

That’s life. We just want everything to go right, but it never really does. There is always something. The furnace that always goes out at the worst possible time is a metaphor and a reminder.

We can’t control everything. Things are going to happen that we can’t anticipate and we can’t fix forever. I know the furnace will go out again. Maybe in a month. Maybe in two months. Maybe in a year. But what I know is that it will go out again, someday. All I can do is wait and then get down there in the corner of the musty basement to try to fix it again when it stops working.

Fuel for reflection

It sounds funny, but I think mundane problems like the furnace going out really are good opportunities for reflection. They are little hidden lessons of life. Opportunities to open up and consider bigger questions. How do we react when things going wrong? Do we try to deny them? Or face them head-on? Do we rely on someone else — and sometimes we need to — or do we rely on ourselves? What do we do?

We can sweep some problems under the rug. Others, we can’t. The furnace is like that. The snow that needs to be shoveled at 6 a.m. is like that. The one toilet in the house that’s not working is like that. The flat tire on your way to dinner is like that. They are small problems, but they’ve got to get solved. They simply can’t be ignored.

Things go wrong. They always will. Sometimes it’s big things, and sometimes it’s little things. For some reason, they always seem to go wrong at the worst possible moment. At the end of the day, it’s up to us to decide how we are going to handle the problems when they eventually come.

It’s true for the little problems of furnaces and toilets. And it’s true for the bigger problems, too. The tough ones without any good answers at all.

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Proposition One garnered a nail-bitingly close victory, but the slim margin signals the tide is turning against a failed housing policy.

SPINE-CHILLING: THESE are the stats banks DON’T want you to know about, according to RFK Jr.



It’s no secret that the housing market in the U.S. is a giant disaster. Interest rates have skyrocketed, prices have quadrupled, and these mysterious entities seem to swoop in with cash offers and buy up many of the available homes on the market.

What’s going on?

Democratic candidate RFK Jr. recently addressed these issues on the "Tim Dillon Show."

“Not only are we, you know, suffering inflation from the constant wars,” but “also you have these three giant companies – BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard,” who “ already own everything, and now they've decided they're going to buy every single-family home in America.”

“They're on track now to control, to own … 60% of the single-family homes in America within six years,” he explains.

It’s no wonder young people feel so discouraged these days. This is a death sentence to many people’s dreams of owning a home.

“Think about this for a second,” says Dave Rubin. “They're telling us and have been telling us for years: ‘You will owe nothing and be happy.”’

“Now the banks have gone from 2.5%-3% interest rates” to “around 9%, so the average person now if every month you have to pay 9% on that mortgage, now you're paying an awful lot,” Dave explains, “and suddenly you can't get that mortgage, you can't buy that house, and then what happens?”

“You have to end up renting,” which means “you're getting no equity, you're not building wealth over time,” and most importantly, you’re not owning anything, which is exactly what these mega corporations want.

“You can see the connection,” Dave says. “If the banks raise interest rates high enough, the average person is like, ‘I can't take out the loan’…and then BlackRock and Vanguard and these other companies come in … and they just buy the house for cash.”

Once they acquire the house, “they let it be empty … or they then allow it to be rented,” meaning they own everything, while people own nothing, which is exactly what they’ve said their plan is.

“So you see how the banks are connected to exactly what BlackRock is doing,” Dave concludes.


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A North Carolina pest control company will pay you $2,000 to let 100 cockroaches into your home



Would you like to live with cockroaches? If so, then one North Carolina pest control company may just have the deal for you!

The Pest Informer, a Raleigh-based company, is offering homeowners $2,000 to allow about 100 American cockroaches into their home for a pest control treatment study.

"As technology advances, we're always looking for the newest and greatest ways to get rid of pests (cockroaches specifically)," The Pest Informer said in an advertisement for the study.

The company explained it is looking for 5-7 home-owning volunteers to "test out a specific pest control technique." Those who sign up for the study would be paid to admit hundreds of disgusting new tenets into their homes for a period of 30 days. The Pest Informer will then use its new technique to attempt to eradicate the roaches and "gauge how effective this treatment is."

David Floyd, founder of The Pest Informer, told NBC News Monday that the company has received more than 2,200 applications for the study.

Participants would be required to allow The Pest Informer to film the treatment and are not permitted to use any other cockroach treatments for the duration of the study. Applicants must be at least 21 years or older and must either own the home or have written permission from the owner.

If the new pest control treatment doesn't work, the company is offering to get rid of the cockroaches using traditional methods at no additional cost.

Floyd said there are about 10 new treatments he wants to try, which "are designed to be more DIY treatments with materials and ingredients that someone can purchase themselves and that are safe to family and pets."

American cockroaches are the largest of the house-infesting roach species in the United States, growing as big as 3 inches long, or about the size of a human thumb. They have wings and can fly, but do so rarely. They are commonly called water bugs and sometimes misidentified as palmetto bugs.

This cockroach species is commonly found in basements, crawl spaces, and any warm damp areas, according to Orkin. While they prefer to live outdoors, they can enter homes in search of food and water and are commonly found in kitchens and bathrooms.

Fortunately, American cockroaches reproduce at slower rates than other cockroach species, but a female will still lay about 16 eggs in a protective capsule.

Unfortunately, they are a major pest. Their odorous secretions can alter the taste of food in the home and they can pick up and spread disease-causing bacteria.

To prevent a cockroach infestation, The Pest Informer says homeowners should use caulk to seal any and all cracks and crevices around cabinets, sinks, countertops, baseboards, and anywhere else roaches may enter the home. Clean frequently, and eliminate clutter around the home to deprive roaches of a place to breed and live.

When an infestation does occur, pest control services will typically use traps or poison bait to get rid of the infestation.

What Happens When Hedge Funds Buy Up Neighborhoods

A real estate firm estimates 'that in many of the nation’s top markets, roughly one in every five houses sold is bought by someone who never moves in.'

Big investment companies are buying houses at high prices and renting them out, squeezing would-be homeowners



Rising housing prices across the nation are putting first-time homebuyers in a bind.

While record-low interest rates make mortgage financing incredibly easy, few people can actually afford to take advantage of these loans because prices for houses are too high. Part of the problem has to do with soaring lumber costs, which is driving up the price of building. There's also a labor shortage for builders, which means many would-be buyers fighting with each other to find pre-owned homes, which is driving up those prices.

Those that can afford to buy a house are having trouble finding one for sale before someone else buys it. Another dimension of the problem is these first-time buyers aren't just competing amongst themselves, they're also facing competition from large investment companies who are buying up houses to turn them into single-family rentals, blocking many Americans from becoming homeowners.

A new report from the Wall Street Journal details "the rise of big investors as a potent new force in the U.S. housing market." The story covers the example of Fundrise LLC, an online property-investing platform that purchased 124 houses in Conroe, Texas, for $32 million, paying building firm D.R. Horton Inc. "roughly twice what it typically makes selling houses to the middle class" — illustrating how home builders stand to make more money by selling houses to investment firms instead of middle-class Americans who want to own their first home.

The report goes on to detail how "yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family houses to rent out or flip," contributing to the scarcity of houses for sale and driving up prices for everyone.

According to one estimate from John Burns Real Estate Consulting, as many as 1 in 5 houses sold in the nation's top housing markets is purchased by someone who will never move in. As a result, the consulting firm expects prices to continue to rise, climbing 12% this year and at least 6% more in 2022.

"You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house," said company CEO John Burns. "That's going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive."

Burns notes there are more than 200 big money companies and investment firms competing with families and first-time buyers for houses, including titans of finance J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Blackrock Inc.

Important changes are happening in the housing market because of the involvement of big money investors. The record-level home prices driven by firms paying much more than regular people can afford for these homes, or maybe even more than the homes are worth, could lead to a market bubble.

The Journal's report compared the speculative bubble created by these investors to the housing bubble that began in 2004 and 2005 and ended with the 2008 financial crisis.

Also, many of the houses bought by these companies are not being sold to potential homeowners. Entire neighborhoods bought by Wall Street are being turned into rentals, leaving few options for those who want to own a home.

With prices rising and big companies outbidding the middle class for the few houses that are available, how are families ever going to afford to own a home?

Ready to Rent Your Home from the Government? | Wilkow Ep 236
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Ready to Rent Your Home from the Government? | Wilkow Ep 236

Joe Biden: Nobody Should Have to Pay 30%+ of Their Income for Housing, 'Including People on the Street'

Former Vice President Joe Biden told residents of Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Thursday the cost of housing should not preclude anyone from having a roof over their head - be they employed or living jobless on the street.