He heard it come on at three in the morning and lay there in the dark waiting for it to do it again.

It was the first hard cold of November, the week the wind quits being weather and starts being a presence in the house. Brick ranch from the seventies, out on a section road east of town, one of those houses where the living room is the whole house because that is where the television and the recliner and the dog are. Retired fellow, widower, seventy-eight, lived alone. Three weeks earlier I had put a new furnace in for him. The old one had cracked its heat exchanger, so there was no debate about replacing it, and the new one went in clean.

He called the office a little after seven the next morning. Not mad. Worried, which is worse, because worried people have already decided something and are hoping you will tell them they are wrong. He said the new furnace was cycling wrong. It came on at three in the morning when the house was not cold. It ran, it shut off, it ran again. He said the old one never did that.

I went out that afternoon myself. A new install with a complaint in the first month gets me, not whoever is closest, because if I made a mistake I want to be the one who finds it. I pulled the filter. I checked the limit switch, cleaned the flame sensor, watched it fire, timed the blower ramp, and put my probes on the supply and return to read the temperature rise across the exchanger. All of it was inside the lines on the data plate.

Then I pulled the run log off the thermostat. The furnace had run eleven times between dark and daylight, most of them eight to twelve minutes apiece, spaced the way a setback schedule spaces them. There was a cycle at 3:08. There was also one at 1:50, one at 12:35, one at 11:20, and one at 9:45. He had heard exactly one of them.

Core line: "For the first couple of weeks you are going to notice it, and it will be at two or three in the morning, because that is when the house is quietest and your sleep is thinnest."

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