It’s just no fun to be scared awake. And it’s even less fun to be scared awake during the wee hours by the gas furnace. But that’s just what happened several weeks ago. Of course, this heating breakdown occurred on one of the coldest nights so far this year. We live in a region where you better have your heating situation squared away. While I know this to be true, I’m still not doing what I need to do when it comes to the gas furnace. But all that is changing after what we went through that night. I actually was scared awake by the gas furnace shutting down. It was a weird sound and it almost felt like the house was shuddering. I wasn’t really for sure what was going on but I knew there was something happening in the basement. By the time I got halfway down the stairs, I could smell hot metal and a bit of an acrid smoke. It appeared that the gas furnace had overheated and performed some sort of emergency shutdown. I left it alone for a few minutes while it was clearly super hot. After about 15 minutes, I tried to restart the gas furnace and it did nothing. That’s when I started kicking myself. I knew I had blown it when it came to the heating maintenance this past fall. For some reason, I just forgot and by the time I remembered, winter was fully on top of us. I just figured that maybe I could get through this winter without the heating maintenance. Obviously, that was not the case and I had to call the HVAC professional to come help. I joined the HVAC service plan the very next day.