Help! I'm Locked out of Lux 1500!

For control-focused individuals (freaks is such a nasty word) change can indeed be traumatic. Especially a change as drastic as a new home, new job, and new state in 3 days. There are new patterns to set; new routines to formulate. When it is all new, everything takes more time. And when it doesn’t come easily… well, one can feel like a bit of a dolt.

Take for instance my lighting problem. Scott, George, and I managed to find and rent a house on Saturday -- a cozy little place in Yarmouth with a working fireplace and enough space to handle our many boxes of books. We moved in Sunday afternoon and managed to get to the grocery store before it got dark (which happens early up north). About that time, we realized (a) there is no overhead lightening in the house, and (b) we didn’t pack any lamps. We lighted up the fireplace and lit the many candles and settled in for a romantic evening. It wasn’t so romantic, come Monday, with just George and I. Yet, with new responsibilities and a new town, I’ve yet to find time to go buy lamps (or a shower curtain for that matter). However, I did manage to find some AA batteries and pull my headlamp out of my camping gear – enough light to suit me just fine until the weekend.

My story about the Lux 1500 started out about the same way. The Lux 1500 is one of these fancy dancy thermostat regulators that will automatically turn the heat up at 6 am when you’re waking up, turn it down around 8 am when you leave the house, turn it back up around 7 pm when you get back, so on and so forth. Very eco-friendly. Love it.

Only, on Monday night I managed to “lock” the Lux 1500; the result was that I was unable to increase/decrease the temperature in the house. Lucky for me, it was stuck at 50 degrees, rather than 30 or a 100. However, when it’s down in the single digits here in Maine, 50 degrees still stinks. I spent much of Tuesday emailing back and forth with my landlord – trying to determine what I had done, whether or not it was actually broken, and how to fix it. By that evening, I didn’t have a solution. George was bit pissy as time went by and the house didn’t heat up, nipping at me as if to say: “I bet there is heat in DC” and “what have you done to us!” Megan brought dinner over the house and we realized things were getting bad when we could see our breath as we huddled over our pasta.

When Scott called later that night, he had the good sense to know that if he told me stand in front of the thermostat and do what I had already done, I might scream. However, he did offer to google the thermostat name and brand – which is how we discovered that enough people had locked themselves out of their Lux 1500 that “Help! I'm locked out of Lux 1500!” actually registers as the 2nd most relevant topic under the brand.

God bless Google.

So, while I’m making my way in this strange land, it is nice to know that my ineptitude isn’t always ineptitude. Sometimes only google can save you.