Thanks to a partnership between Snelling Co. and Lennox’s Feel the Love program, Bob Rymerson, a Marine Corps veteran from St. Paul, received a new furnace and air conditioner at the end of October.

Feel the Love’s aim is to provide heating and cooling equipment at no cost to community members “who consistently put others before themselves and need a helping hand,” according to the organization. Through the program, more than 2,300 heating and cooling systems have been installed around the country since its launch in 2009. While Feel the Love will normally give a heating or cooling system to anyone who is in need, their regional partner, Snelling Co., wanted to offer the program only to veterans in the area, according to owner Phil Krinkie.

“We at the Snelling Co. tried to narrow it down a little bit in the context of our local community and our veterans here in the Twin Cities,” Krinkie said.

Snelling Co. has been partnered with Feel the Love for about a decade, and Krinkie said they have helped install at least half a dozen cooling and heating systems in that time.

Rymerson, who was in the Marines from 1987 to 1990, said the new furnace and air conditioner was a huge help for a multitude of reasons. Not only have he and his wife been trying to build up their credit for the past year, but damage from an August storm to their house that has been in Rymerson’s family for more than a century added financial stress.

The new furnace and air conditioner also symbolizes something larger for Rymerson. After legal problems and dealing with injuries from his time in the military, Rymerson had to “start from zero” and rebuild his life.

“You basically have to do all the leg work and put your life back together piece by piece,” Rymerson. “I think that that was very important for me to do at the time because if someone would have just given it to me, it would have been too easy and it wouldn’t have meant as much.”

Rymerson said programs like Feel the Love can be particularly impactful for veterans because it can be hard for them to ask for help when they need it. He said he hopes acts of kindness like the one Snelling Co. and Feel the Love showed him can be used as inspiration for other veterans and those in need.

“It’s a little embarrassing and sobering, but in reality, it’s also … rewarding because it allows me to get some use out of those years that I thought were lost because that knowledge that I gained in those years might be able to help somebody else and to stay the course and to not give up,” Rymerson said.