My parents owned a huge ranch out in the rural part of the country.
We would spend lots of holidays there tending to the animals, especially during winter.
Last winter, we went to the ranch as usual just in time to make sure all the animals were okay. The workers had to bring in the cows from the fields before the snow came in. Our parents worked to make sure we had everything to keep us going for the long winter ahead. My mom went to switch on the furnace system when we got to the farmhouse. It wasn’t snowing yet, but the entire space was cold. The electric furnace was not responding, which had my mum panicking. A faulty electric furnace would mean spending winter without any heating in the house. That was not an option, so she had my dad call the furnace repair company in town. The town was miles away, but we knew the furnace experts would come. We had a furnace repair plan with them, which covered the many miles they would need to travel. Hours later, we saw the furnace company van pull up to the farm, and a repair worker got out. The same lady had first installed the electric furnace in the ranch house a few years back. She greeted my folks and got to work diagnosing the problem with the electric furnace. The furnace professional noted it had a cracked heat exchanger, which had happened due to overheating the previous winter. We had a winter storm which forced us to keep cranking up the heat in the house. That might have been the cause of the overheating. The only solution for the cracked heat exchanger was to replace it since it was not repairable.