Our winters aren’t nearly as cold as they are elsewhere in the country, which is one of the benefits of living in Southern California. We’ve only just experienced our first serious rainstorm of the winter, and even then, temperatures never dropped below 40 degrees or so.
All of that means we don’t always pay as much attention to our heating systems the way we do our air conditioners (which see far more use than our heating systems as a matter of course). And when trouble arises, it can be difficult to notice until a breakdown occurs.