triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Whiner Jeez

Caring people are upset because a woman in Milwaukee died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to stay comfortable on a cool day after the mean old power utility cut her service just because she owed them $9000. That sum would cover three years heat and electricity for my house, 4800 square feet, drafty, multi-bulb chandeliers in the master bedroom, the kitchen, the foyer and all three parlors, and three computers running 24/7. In other words, she had been getting slack from We Energies for an absolute minimum of three years and probably much longer. They probably would have cut her even more slack if she'd given them the money she spent on a generator and an electric heater. The only thing the utility did wrong in this case was letting her get this deep in dept instead of cutting her off a long time ago.

On a somewhat related note, a heating service company in the Milwaukee area had been running radio ads offering a free carbon monoxide inspection in order to get their sales technician into your house. They cite a statistic on carbon monoxide deaths due to heating equipment. Even before this incident I was annoying the wee wifey by muttering about how few of those deaths were malfunctioning furnaces as opposed to misuse of other stuff.