I made a mistake that literally cost me thousands of dollars.
Thankfully, that was all it cost me because the problem could have definitely been worse.
I own a vacation house in the North. I live in the South, and the temperatures here get very hot. During the winter, I love that I don’t have to use my furnace much because the temperatures are pretty warm, but I don’t like having to use the central air conditioner during the summer. Even though I know that furnaces cost more to run than air conditioners, I always wondered how I could avoid paying the cost of using the air conditioner during the summer. I realized that if I purchased a house in the North, I would no longer need an air conditioner. I could stay in my northern house during the entire summer and live in the South for the rest of the year. The only thing that I would have to do is ensure that the furnace was working during the winter so that I wouldn’t have to replace the plumbing. However, when I left my vacation house in the fall, it was kind of chilly, so I turned on a space heater. However, when I left, I never turned the space heater off, and it ran for an entire year. I didn’t realize how much a space heater can cost in electricity, but I learned that day. Thankfully, the space heater didn’t burn down my house, or the problem would have been much worse. I guess that I should have just turned on my furnace.