Friday, November 30, 2012

Furnace Failure

Over the past weekend we had a small issue with our furnace.  The furnace had gone out overnight so that when I woke up Sunday morning and it was only 60° in the house.  This has happened before, and because of the issue we had with the air conditioner over the summer, I know the furnace is old and needs to be replaced.  It has happened before ( a couple of times last year, maybe a couple of times the year before that I can recall) and usually when it does happen, I just need to go reset it by flipping the breaker off and then back on.  So I did it and about 30 seconds later, the furnace was going. 

Unfortunately, it happened again on Sunday night/Monday morning.  When I got up to get ready for work, I went downstairs and reset it again with the breaker, and put calling someone to come take a look at the furnace on my list of things to do.  I was busy at work all day Monday and didn't get a chance to call, and since the furnace was running I thought no problem, I'll call as soon as I have a chance.  So Tuesday morning when I got up for work it was down to 59° in the family room, and I could tell as soon as I got out of bed.  Luckily, it reset again as soon as I flipped the breaker off and back on, but I made sure that I called Tuesday morning to have someone come out and check things out.  Luckily the place I called was able to send someone out right away.  When they guy looked at the furnace he apparently knew right away things were not good.  The verdict is that we need a new furnace.  I am pretty sure that when we moved in the paperwork we had said it was installed new in 1991, which then puts it at almost 22 years old.  The service guy said he could replace some part that it needed right away so that it wouldn't keep going out, but it would need to be replaced. 

So now we have things scheduled to have the furnace and A/C replaced in a couple of weeks.  Even the small repair he did isn't perfect as we could see the thermostat showed the furnace was on and running but there was no warm air blowing out, and when I went downstairs to check on it, it wasn't running.  But after a bit of flipping switched on and off, it kicked in.  So I guess we are getting lucky.  I look at it like at least we can keep it going until they can get it replaced.  It wouldn't have been very good if it had just up and died and left us without heat at all.

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