The doorbell rang yesterday.

On the other side was a younger woman who was there to ask us a question.

The houses around here were built in the 1950s with radiant heat, and time and several mild and one big earthquake later, those inefficient old systems are falling apart. People who grew up with it have told me they love it and I’ve long wondered how it would be to wake up to a warm floor, and we even once looked into taking our house back to it. We were quickly talked out of it. It would require jackhammering the entire length of the house to replace the pipes under the slab.

Doesn’t every foundation need weak points in a quake?

So. The woman and her husband had just bought a house in the next block. They needed to replace the heat. They could see that we have an HVAC unit on our roof and wanted to know, were we happy with it?

She clearly had a lot riding on our answer: she wanted what we have, very much. Her husband was convinced it would make the house shake every time it came on.

The thought had never occurred to me. Yeah, you can hear it running quietly in the background, sure. But shaking the house? No.

Richard chimed in.

I told her how a dual unit had been nearly the same price as a simple furnace, so that for $100 we got whole-house air conditioning, and you can’t do that with radiant heat. I gave her Joe Lerma’s name at A-Z Techs Mechanical and said, Joe really knows his stuff, he’s good, his prices are good, and he’s very honest. I think you’d be very happy with him; we have been. We found him when he was recommended by the roofing company.

She was tapping into her phone and his name and number were already there. Got it.

She left looking hopeful. You could just see her telling her husband, this being right after a record-breaking heat wave: Air conditioning, too!

I’m really hoping for them.