Not technically my house, it’s my parents. But I live here so… its still my “home” for the forseeable future.
(My older brother is still living here too lol, so is my maternal grandmother)
So dad was using some weird temporary fix thing on the heater (like the thing in the basement hat heats your entire house), and now it finally officially stopped working.
I feel like I’ve been living in slums for the most of my life lol.
Not really slum-slum, but kinda feels like it.
House looks so… like broken…
spider webs everywhere in the corners lol, so much pest infestation
bathtub water leaking issues
I’m not trying to complain, hey, at least I’m not out on the street and homeless… so I guess I’ll take that… 🤷♂️
But still…
Still… I’m basically just hiding in one room with the space heater turned on… don’t wanna even step outside the room.
This is making my depression much worse… idk why… like I always feel very very depressed at nights and in winters, and when I’m not in the right temperature, extreme colds and extreme heat…
and it just snowed, so…
ugh…
can’t even touch grass… unless I wanna freeze outside and touch snow…
or accidentally stemp on frozen water and fall and then I’d cry…
so…
yeah…
Political atmosphere is just the icing on top of this cake of misery
plus the occasional verbal abuse from family members
(pls don’t tell me something condesending like “just move out lolz” rent costs the same as an average monthly paycheck, not to mention, the utilities service fees that they charge even with 0 usage)
Anyways, greetings from Philly
I hate my life… even though I know a lot of people had it much worse so I have no right to complain really.
Still depressed tho… 🫠
I feel so embarassed to say this, so pls don’t judge, but I have no clue how any of that heating stuff works. 👀
My dad has always fixed those things (he isn’t exactly an expert on those thing either)
For context: My age is like 20-25. I’ve never really looked at those things before since those things always looks kinda dangerous.
The closest thing I’ve done of that sort was flip the circuit breaker off and back on when it tripped.
I also don’t really know how cars work (don’t have a license either) other than like filling gas.
I feel like I don’t even qualify to be a dude lol. I’m like the least “masculine” dude you’ll ever meet.
Thats okay! I was 30 before I learned any of it. Now im a licensed electrician :) the fun thing about learning is you never have to stop!
YouTube goes a long ways, too.
When you get some time, take a look at the heater. There might be a panel on it with a circuit breaker like youre used to. Is it off or tripped (the handles are in the middle position, between on and off)? We can start from there and work our way through it. The panel youre looking for likely has a hump to it and is held in place by a screw or two. When you get it off and find the breaker, please stop poking around with a screwdriver.
These things aren’t magic, theyre machines full of bits that fail and replacing those bits goes a long way :) that being said, electricity does like to kill people and start fires. We’re looking for where the electricity is supposed to be, and then backing off.
No time to learn like the present.
Heaters that new will have a diagram on the inside of the main panel, with a chart explaining what the diagnostic LED’s mean.
Anything you want to know about your exact heater is an internet search away. Most likely someone’s done a video on how to read the diagnostic lights (these things are stupid simple from an error perspective, there’s like 4 major systems that can fail, with few parts that can cause the failure).
Oil-fired systems are slightly more difficult to trouble-shoot than gas, but nothing to stop you. It’s almost always a controls failure.
If you choose to not learn this stuff it simply leaves you in your current predicament or at the mercy of whoever does know how to do something you don’t.
You have the world of information at your fingertips, and now with AI you could enter the exact model, the behaviour, and it’ll walk you through the exact next steps.
You’re cold right now because you chose to not even try to fix it.