Relative Something

It’s not hard to imagine that sometimes it is hard to imagine. We all have the ability to simply make things up, creating stories that never actually happened. It’s a thought exercise. Like all exercise, the more you do it, the easier it gets.

I find I am more inclined to take the easy route and rely on describing what I actually experience. Turns out, it is often less believable than what I could conjure up in invented tall tales.

Case in point, this actually happened… The low-battery warning chirp started on our main smoke detector on the very day we first used a newly installed gas stove/oven in the kitchen. How’s that for timing?

Added context will help to deepen the intrigue.

As Cyndie has amped up her baking in the last few months, the shortcomings of our aging oven were becoming a growing annoyance. We don’t know whether it was one of the original appliances in our 30-year-old home, but the advancing rust and warped door that wouldn’t entirely close helped justify taking the leap of purchasing a replacement.

An added incentive, having tolerated the dissatisfaction of cooking on an electric range in the 8-years since we moved in, we could finally change back to gas burners that we have both always favored.

I needed to change out the 240 VAC, 50 Amp circuit for a 120V/15A, and we needed to hire a professional to add a new gas line from the furnace room up to the kitchen. That was all rather straight forward to accomplish. Timing and doing the purchases online were the harder parts of the project.

Everything ordered seems to take longer than expected during a pandemic and getting all the specs right with clicks on browsers is not a given. Cyndie originally thought she was getting a dual-fuel double electric oven with a gas range. She succeeded on the double oven, but not the electric part. The difference was not a show-stopper, so all gas it is.

The oven arrived before the gas line had been installed, so the gas plumbers were the ones to install the LP kit on the oven when they arrived. Here is how that all went:

1. They cut an electric wire while drilling through the kitchen floor.
2. At their expense, an electrician would arrive the next day to repair.
3. Cyndie ran the double ovens for an hour or two per manual instructions to burn off and season the surfaces.
4. Owner of plumbing company showed up following day to fix wiring.
5. Cyndie demonstrated for him how the bottom oven sounded like a jet engine and he freaked out and turned it off in near-panic.
6. By that afternoon, first guy returned to discover he missed installing the LP reducer in the second oven.
7. We all envisioned the several catastrophic calamities that had just been narrowly averted.

The day when everything was finally correct and Cyndie used the range for the first time to boil potatoes, the smoke detector beeped. The occasional beeping seemed inconsistent to me, leading us both to suspect it had something to do with the new gas range. Maybe there was some problem with the adjustment of the burning flame that needed to occur?

There wasn’t smoke, but could it be carbon monoxide?

Well, no. It was the low battery beep. Installed new batteries and have used the stove and ovens without mishap since.

How’s that for timing?

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