Not very cherry, it's an oldie but a goodie
Our beloved Blogmobile is getting up there in age. It just got its eighth registration sticker, although we haven't cracked the 100,000-mile mark yet. It runs on just gas, but we figure the greenest thing we can do is run it into the ground.
Last week it got some stuff done to it -- new brakes in the front, and the hideous timing belt replacement. That set us back a bit. And so it was with some trepidation that we noticed last night that the heater wasn't working. (Yes, during Rose Festival, sometimes you turn the heat on in the car at night.) It was blowing o.k., but what was coming out of the vents wasn't any warmer than the air outside.
We called the dealer and chatted with a nice service guy who instructed us to take off the control knob on the heater and see if the back of it was busted. Sure enough, it was. A $9 part. They had it in stock. We were heading out in that direction anyway. We popped the new one on. And within a half hour of the call, the problem was fixed.
Then the sun came out, and we needed air conditioning to keep cool the fruit we just bought at the roadside stand. It worked, too -- anemic as usual, but par for the course. Expensive disaster averted -- knock on wood.
| Posted at 6:06 PM | Permalink |
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Comments (4)
I have 2 1995 model year cars, one with 245,000 miles on it. I've stuck some money into it and it's been worth it
Your AC probably just needs a charge of coolant
Posted by T | June 13, 2011 7:43 PM
Your good experience with a car dealer has been the norm for more than a decade or so. It's sad that Obama ran so many of them out of town.
Posted by David E Gilmore | June 14, 2011 6:22 AM
I'm glad that someone in Portland realizes that it's "greener" to drive the car you already have until it won't drive anymore than it is to buy a Prius, which requires massive amounts of energy to manufacture, to say nothing of shipping the parts all over the world to install them, then ship the car here.
Oh, and those batteries that the Prius run on? Yeah, the manufacture of those uses some of the most nasty and caustic chemicals short of the radionuclides we've been reading about on this blog for a couple months now. But hey, you're saving 15% on petroleum!
Posted by MachineShedFred | June 14, 2011 6:35 AM
I believe it's one of the fallacies of sustainable equations - the calculus of life-cycle costs is never included. As MSF noted, it takes a fair amount of energy, another round of materials, and transportation costs to get a new anything, plus there are now the disposal costs of the old item you just got rid of. Unfortunately, for many smaller items (think toasters and radios), there's little possibility of fixing them anymore.
Posted by umpire | June 14, 2011 12:06 PM