I learned a valuable lesson this weekend.

We have a maintenance agreement with Advantage Heating & Air. Every spring and fall they send a technician out to check our air conditioning and heating equipment. We have been doing this for years.

During our fall check up, the technician told me we would need a new pressure switch for our furnace. He wrote it up on my work order and the office left me a reminder message to set an appointment to get this done. All I had to do was return a phone call.

Well, I forgot to make that call. And on Friday night, I paid for that mistake.

After dinner, my family and I were enjoying our evening, when we noticed it felt a little chilly in the house. I checked the thermostat, and told my husband I didn’t think the heat was working. He went to the basement, turned the furnace off and on according to the instructions for our unit for trying to reset it, but no luck.

I called Advantage, and they were at my door within an hour. I was thrilled. Hopefully, the technician would tell us it was nothing major. He would get the heat going, and we could resume our Friday night.

He went down to the basement, tried the same thing my husband had done to reset the furnace, and again no luck. So he continued his investigation into our troubles. When he came upstairs, he told us we needed a new pressure switch. He did not have one in his truck to replace the old one, so he got the furnace running, and said the new part would be ordered on Monday.

Well, overnight the furnace went out again. It was 3:30 a.m. when I woke up pretty chilled. I got my husband up and told him there was no heat. He tried to reset the furnace again to no avail. So I made another call to Advantage. This time, a different technician called me back. I told him what had transpired with the first call, and he told me he would be out shortly. This technician didn’t have the correct part in his truck either, but he went to the office to see if he could find something close enough to get us through the weekend until the correct piece was ordered and replaced. He returned with the part and got the furnace going. The second technician went out of his way to help us that morning.

The funny thing is, it still hadn’t occurred to me that I was told to get the pressure switch taken care of back in the fall.

Later Saturday morning, it hit me. The memory of that particular fall day, the message from Rhonda at Advantage reminding me to set my appointment to replace the pressure switch all came flooding back to me.

I could have avoided this whole mess had I taken the time to make that call. What a costly mistake. I could have gotten the work done for the regular rate instead of paying the “emergency” rate.

Lessons learned: It’s important to have regular maintenance on your units, and when work is required, get it done promptly to avoid any additional costs.