Do check right away with your Gas company. We had an ad in yesterday's paper offering something like a $400 coupon for a new gas furnace - from Nstar, our gas provider! Thankfully, our is running nicely. And all of you with your "old" furnaces from 1981, 1964 ... Ha!

When we bought this house, the furnace in it was, by Dad's guess, original to the house. It was certainly a coal-burner, converted over to an oil-burner. Our house was built in or around ........ 1890!

By the way, it is still in the basement, rolled over to the side. It is too big to fit through the cellar door, and too heavily built cast iron to be "broken up" for removal. The people who replaced it went through three diamond-edged blades just to cut it off from the pipe - then had to send one guy out to buy more blades. They had quite literally never seen anything quite like it. It, by the way, worked, until we helped Bertha move into a nursing home. I think that once it realized she was not coming back, it waited until bitter cold set in, then I had to go over every day, before we even owned the house, to go down to the basement and hit the reset switch so the pipes wouldn't freeze.