Living in sunny Florida has its advantages – excessive heat & humidty, overcrowded strip malls, and plenty of contractors to rip you off in the “Florida is the right to work state” kind of mentality I’ve come accustomed to living here for the past 20 years. Ok but seriously, we do have awesome beaches… that, if I am lucky, I get to visit 2-3 times / year. Oh and Disney too. Yea, ya gotta love Disney – the rides.. the crowds, the theme songs….the crowds, the fire works…the crowds.

Before singing Florida’s praises too much, let me also remind you that it’s the lightening capital of the world. With that, we get some pretty fierce storms which as you could imagine often lead to power outages, surges, etc. This is one of the reasons I am so adamant about using quality UL certified power conditioners to protect your home theater equipment.

No matter what happens on the power lines, I rest well at night knowing no damage can come to my precious home theater equipment while APC is on the watch. In fact, there have been several times where we’ve lost power throughout the entire house, but were still able to listen to some tunes or watch a movie because my entire primary theater room is all on APC power conditioners and battery backup. Yea I’ve got my priorities straight – forget the fridge, the AC, lights. Who needs them? As long as I’ve got music, I’m golden.

Well, my wife doesn’t agree with my logic here. Especially today, as we enjoyed one of those stormy days that caused 3 power cycles before our power went out for nearly 45 minutes. During the last cycle, I heard a sound – the type you know isn’t normal and is likely the sound of a component or device being fried by a surge. This sounded like it came from my garage. Ah my primary air handler is in there. This is not good. Sure enough, when the power went back on two of three of my AC units all came back on as well. The primary was unfortunately dead in the water. Some quick troubleshooting revealed a burned out motor in my primary unit. Since I am running top of the line Trane AC units in my home, this is no ordinary motor. It’s a variable speed 1 amp special which my local AC Company doesn’t stock.

Now I am stuck with only two foreseeable options that immediately come to mind:
Option 1: pack up the family and stay at my parents until we fix the AC
Option 2: move my family upstairs to my home theater room at night to sleep

As much as I love my parents, I went with option 2 figuring we could get by most of the day either in our AC controlled florida room or my theater room which is also where my office resides. Since during the day, my family has quite a busy schedule and are usually not home, I could live with this scenario until the replacement part comes for my primary AC unit.

So as it stands right now, I have my wife, my 6 year old and 3 ½ month old daughters all sleeping in my 6,000 cuft AC controlled theater room. The best thing about this is we are all together roughing it, well sorta. I mean its finally giving us a chance to catch up on movie watching, and what better way to fall asleep at night than to a full scale 7.4 channel surround system playing lullaby music in Pro Logic IIx Music Mode?

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