The heating system in our house is what’s known as a gas pack: gas heater combined with an air conditioning unit.

It’s great, when it works.

The trouble is, it often decides to stop working. The obvious solution: call a heating/cooling specialist to come take a look. We have. Four of them have come. They’ve all suggested and done different things. The gas pack still refuses to work.

That’s an exaggeration, though, because it does work. It just never works when we leave for a long period of time. It doesn’t matter what we do — turn off the heat completely or turn down the thermostats — the results are the same: it won’t turn on when we get home. Or rather, it won’t turn back on wants it thinks the temperature is correct. It’ll crank up, blow hot air for a while, and then shut off. For good. But not quite — it’s still running. I go outside and put my hand on the exhaust vent (which blows out a fair amount of warm air when it’s working) and it’s cold, though the exhaust fan is working.

Here’s the trick, though: I can get it working again. Beside the unit, there’s a breaker, installed so repair folks don’t have to go all the way to the breaker box to turn off the power. When I reset it there (disconnect the power, reconnect it), the machine turns on, warms up, and everything is fine. However, when I restart it from inside the house, by flipping the breaker off and then on, it will restart a couple of times (repeating the whole blow-for-a-while-then-never-turn-back-on process), and then it won’t restart again. However, when I restart it from outside, it continues working longer. In fact, it works like normal sometimes.

Thankfully our real estate broker insisted on the seller buying a home warranty. We really haven’t had to pay that much for all these visits.

Which leads to the delicious dilemma: to restart or not to restart? The repair guy is coming again this morning. He asked me not to restart it next time it’s doing it’s little on-again-off-again dance, but what can I do? My house is cold; Dziadek gets sick easily; I have a little baby. Of course I’m going to restart it.

“Can’t you deliberately cause the malfunction?” you might ask. No — that’s the annoying thing. Once I restart it from outside, it runs fine more often than not.

The only solution I’ve come up with so far is to take a weekend trip, then call the repair people while we’re still on the trip and have someone be waiting for us when we return.

Or sell the house…