It is so cold… How cold is it?

When most people think of Arizona, they think about the hot desert.  While Phoenix and Tucson and a few other cities have extreme heat, such is not the case where I live.  My town is at 4900 feet elevation. The next town is a mile high.

This past Thursday, we woke up to lots of snow.  We only get snow here two or three times a year, and it is never so deep we have to shovel a drive way.  Even so, we got six inches of snow on Thursday, and it was beautiful to see – from inside my house!

My husband and I woke up this morning to find our house really cold!  We played with the heater, and it simply would not go on.  It was 26 degrees outside.  It was very early, so we planned to wait a couple hours before we called a plumber.

When we started to make oatmeal for breakfast , we discovered that the stove wouldn’t go on.  Light bulb moment!  There was nothing wrong with our stove or heater.  We were out of gas!

We must use propane gas where we live.  For convenience and financial purposes, we are on auto payment and a level pay plan all year.  We also are on auto fill, which means that the propane company tracks the level and fills the tank when necessary.  When we checked the tank, it was at ZERO!

Still very early in the morning, we called the propane company’s “emergency” line. We tried repeatedly and tried a couple other numbers for the company, but no one answered.  Great!

Finally at 8 AM, we made contact with our local propane office. A receptionist answered, but she was alone in the office and could do nothing.  She called their regional office and the General Manager called me. 

Apparently they use a formula of sorts to determine when we will need gas.  It is based on the size of the home (ours is 2250 square feet) and the number of gas appliances in the home.  Although we’ve been with the company for years, for some reason those numbers were not in their computer.  She informed me that we had no delivery since APRIL!

Within an hour, the manager had arranged for someone to deliver propane to our home and relight all the appliances.  She said we would get 50 gallons free due to the inconvenience.  Our tank took 212 gallons to fill. If we weren’t on the level pay plan, it would have cost $742.57!

So, here I sit in my home office wearing a jacket, a wool scarf around my neck with a blanket covering my legs.  I am drinking hot tea and holding the cup to warm my hands.  It will take a couple hours to warm the house up.  I realize that am fortunate compared to all the people who lived in much colder weather for a long time after Hurricane Sandy and other storms.

The moral of this story, we are looking for a new propane company.

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