Left and my plants were decimated by hot indoor air

Now, I’m not the sort of person who likes to make a big deal out of things if I can avoid it.

When something goes wrong, I try to keep a cool and level-head. I don’t want to explode or be a curmudgeon about honest mistakes because I don’t like to make people feel bad. However, right now I am pretty livid about my family’s negligence when it comes to very simple tasks. For the past month I’ve been warning them that I needed to go on a business trip for approximately a week, and asked if they could keep an eye on the central heating and cooling system while I was gone. My family normally lets me handle the thermostat programming, HVAC maintenance, and energy efficiency around the house. Leaving for a week in the dead of Summer made me very worried that they were going to use the air conditioning system and rack up massively expensive energy bills while I was gone. I also worried that they would damage the central cooling system by demanding too much cooling power from it or adjusting the thermostat temperatures up and down too often. Well, I should have been worried about the indoor air temperature, but apparently I didn’t need to worry about the air conditioning unit itself. My son called me yesterday to tell me that there had been a mishap and he had some bad news. They had left the house for the evening and turned off the central heating and cooling system before they left. Unfortunately, they were gone longer than they expected and the indoor air temperature climbed through the roof in the heat and humidity of our outdoor climate. When they came back home, all of my house plants were completely fried from the heart and stagnant indoor air. I knew they couldn’t be trusted, but I didn’t think my plants would be their victims.

Duct sealing