Turning on the air conditioning

Yesterday I made an executive decision to turn on the air conditioning. The high was only 82 in our neck of the 'burbs, but Cate was cooking dinner on the stove and it just seemed like the right move so that we weren't all sweltering long into the evening.

It turned out to be the right decision. And not a difficult one.

This was not the case last year, however. Turning on the AC for the first time in 2007 involved a fair amount of finger-crossing and some tense decision-making.

As you may remember, we had operated for most of the previous nine months under the premise that we were moving. Cate and I -- mostly Cate, since I was in Connecticut, were preparing the house to put on the market and get out of Northern Virginia.

Neither of us is particularly handy. I don't think this is a surprise to anyone reading. But we had managed to get a few projects done in the interim, taking down the outdated drapes in a couple of our bedrooms and installing blinds among them.

The house also had the original 1973 thermostat, one with all the precision of a Dick Cheney hunting trip. The best we could do was hope for the temperature to be in the range of a few degrees for a short time until it needed adjusting again. So I did a little reading on the subject and determined we could manage this project ourselves.

It was relatively easy to pick out a new unit at Home Depot at the seemingly reasonable price of $80. We had the tools we needed to install it and all was set to go when, on a January afternoon, we removed the old thermostat.

The instructions were fairly comprehensive, thankfully, and referred to two possible configurations for our old, single-zone heat pump setup -- four wires or five wires. Like seemingly everything else in this house, however, it was not standard.

It had six.

Almost all of our wires were properly labeled. Almost all of the labels matched what was described in the manual. We just had an extra wire to deal with.

We spent about a half-hour agonizing over it and just decided to guess, make sure the heat worked, and let it go. Our rationale was that we weren't planning to be in the house when we needed the air conditioning anyway.

Well, of course, the NBC job went south and so did I at the end of April. And while we held off through the first heat wave of the spring, by mid-June it was clear that we needed to bite the bullet. So we threw the switch, and voila, it worked.

And the house didn't burn down or anything.

Just don't ask us to repeat it. Thanks.