Furnace

Ever since we fired up the furnace this season it hasn’t worked properly. Let’s just say that now is not the time for it to go out.

It has only been a couple weeks since we’ve had started up the furnace again after an unusually long slumber due to a warmer than normal spring and a summer that was about the same temperature as spring. Taking every precaution, I cleaned out the filter, which, by the way, had to be retrofitted to go up and into furnace’s air intake because they apparently didn’t believe in filters when they installed this particular furnace, and then cleaned out any remaining dust from inside the firing box. However, the peculiar thing was that the pilot light lit, the gas fired, and six seconds later it’d just go out and this would repeat a minute later, over and over. Seriously, two hours later the house would still be the same cool temperature it was when this process started, but because every now and then it worked fine, I just figured it was having a little more trouble due to beginning of the season issues.

Last night I came home from work with my partner calling various HVAC specialists in an effort to get them out to repair our furnace because it was cold and he was tired of it not working. So he set up an appointment. My initial thought was to ask if he researched possible causes because everything seemed to work fine it just wouldn’t stay on, but figured I’d keep my mouth shut on this one, mostly because it’s a gas furnace and I didn’t want to accidentally cause an explosion from messing with the gas line. It wasn’t long before my partner was on the computer again looking for possible causes, which he found overwhelmingly was due to a dirty flame sensor. I knew exactly what this was as soon as he mentioned it.

So with new knowledge in hand, we entered the garage, I grabbed a screwdriver and tried to unscrew the sensor, which of course had to be in a very difficult to reach area. Eventually we decided to simply see if I could lightly sand down the sensor while it was in place. Difficult? Yes. But completely doable. So I lightly sanded the thin metal rod, blew the dust out, turned the furnace back on and fired it up. Sure enough, the flame stayed lit.

I guess the moral of the story is to do a little research before jumping the gun. While it seems easier to simply have someone else take care of it, your bank account will thank you for spending a few minutes to make sure it isn’t something you can take care of. And to think it would’ve cost $130 just for the guy to come out and tell us we needed to clean our flame sensor. Of course, he probably also would’ve suggested replacing our furnace because it’s so damn old, too.