If you’ve ever had to take a 10 or 12 or 14 hour car ride, you know that things can start to seem really tense and dire somewhere along the 6 hour mark. From that point on, it’s difficult to retain a sense of balance and patience for the potential pitfalls of the trip, in my experience anyways. I start to get antsy and uncomfortable around that point, and the rest of the ride is spent praying that nothing comes up to try my patience any further. Of course, last weekend this wishful thinking didn’t save me from a totally annoying set of temperature control issues that persisted for the last half of my 12 hour trek across the country. I was somewhere around Tennessee when I noticed that the air temperature in my van was seeming pretty erratic. At one point I felt like I was going to vomit from the heat building up in the vehicle, and only a few moments later I was rubbing my frigid fingers together and wondering why it felt so cold and drafty. I thought perhaps I was getting sick, and kept asking my husband to feel my forehead to see if I was overheating internally, but he was insistent that I felt fine. We realized after another hour of unpredictably hot and cold temperatures in the van that there was definitely an issue with the onboard thermostat. The heat output was spotty at best, and we noticed that often times the air that flowed from each air vent was actually more like air conditioning than heat. Long story short, we made it to our destination eventually, but I was completely over the trip from the first time I caught a chill.
The different types of thermostats