10 Home-Improvement Great Goofs

Honey, someone’s at the furnace!
by Bob Schwindt
September 2004
We needed a new doorbell, so my handy brother-in-law helped us install one. A few days later, very early in the morning, the doorbell rang. We got up to check the door and nobody was there. About a half hour later, the doorbell rang and again nobody was there. Convinced it was a practical joke, we camped out by the door. It rang again, and this time we could see there was definitely nobody there. We knew that a doorbell uses low voltage supplied by a transformer. We traced the wires and noticed that my brother-in-law had wired the doorbell into an existing transformer that was also hooked to the furnace thermostat. As a result, whenever the furnace turned on, the doorbell rang. We purchased a dedicated transformer for the new doorbell and are now sleeping in on weekends.