Check Your Heaty-Cooly-Unit!
February 23rd, 2011 § Leave a Comment
A computer named Watson won at Jeopardy a few weeks ago against two pretty smart humans. My car talks to me in a very loud voice every so often without being asked to and my television thinks it is smarter than me – and it is most likely right.
The obvious fact that we don’t run things anymore is more and more evident. We probably haven’t run our own affairs for some time now and are just realizing it. Think back – when was the last time you understood how things worked? It has been some time for me since I understood anything.
Home heating and air conditioning units are a good example. Older home heating units involved putting something flammable into a furnace and burning it. The hot air from the fire would waft into your house and it would be heated. When I was a small boy, we still heated our home with coal and later in my childhood we burned oil. Air conditioning during my early childhood involved opening the windows when it got hot.
Our heating and air conditioning unit for our house is worked on by a person who has the acronym HVAC written on his truck. I have no idea what HVAC means but that doesn’t matter because I misunderstand the meaning of so many things. Our HVAC unit (which is the real name of it I guess) heats by smushing air and recirculating it while bombarding the smushed air with radioactive black matter particles, dog hair and that weird smell from outside.
In the winter, this process results in slightly hotter air and a four hundred bazillion dollar electric bill. In the summer, it puts out slightly cooler air for about the same money. My HVAC guy tells me that it is the same process for both hot and cold air – except backwards.
You might think that this completely describes the complexity of our “heaty-cooly thing” but you would be ridiculously in error. I can almost hear the HVAC guy quietly laughing a knowing laugh in the background as he figures up my bill.
Your heaty-cooly-unit (the HCU) has to ask the electric company if it is okay to run. Many houses now are hooked up to the electric company’s “we’ll give you electricity when it damn well suits us” program. This is supposed to save you at least one bazillion dollars a month in sparky-juice. At least that is what the old geezers in the TV commercials tell us.
Basically, it works like this: It is very hot outside so your heaty-cooly-unit decides to turn itself on and chill your house. It sends a signal to the electric company who returns with a message saying: “are you out of your electronic mind? It is hot and a lot of people want electricity – therefore, you can’t have any… we’ll give you some electricity later when it is cooler and you don’t really need it.”
It makes perfect sense to my HVAC guy who must get a kick-back from the electric company for selling those little control boxes.
You and I may think our HCU is the most complex technology in our house but we are so much in error it is laughable. The most complex and evil computer in our home is the one that runs our refrigerator’s ice machine. It waits until things are very quiet and you are walking by completely relaxed.
Then it drops a load of ice and scares the crap out of you.
