Yesterday morning I woke up to find the house at a crisp 55 degrees. Worried that my furnace was broken, I fooled around with the thermostat a little bit (turning it on and off basically), and the furnace fired right up, no problem. I came home last night after work and the house was a normal 70-ish degrees. Well, this morning we are back down to 58 degrees at the moment and no matter what I do to the thermostat, the furnace refuses to activate. There's a little red light on the furnace I've never noticed before which blinks red whenever I have the thermostat set to heat. Its blinking now. hmph.
Anyway, I've made the necessary call to a 24-hour furnace shop and they said they'll be sending somebody by this morning. Wish me luck. In a way this is kinda convenient because I have a new couch scheduled for delivery this morning as well. it will be busy around the old Racegate today.
4 comments:
Whitey,
Could that red light be indicating that it's in some sort of "Timer Mode"? Like at 1am it's programmed to drop the temp?
A.P.
If you are implying it has something to do with the way I've programmed my thermostat, it's not the case. The furnace guy (here now, a personable fellow named "Aulio" which is pronounced just like "Julio") tells me that he thinks the flame sensor is bad and that this causes the furnace to go into a set of three "failed attempts" at ignition before it just shuts itself off for three hours and starts over again. Of course, the furnace actually does ignite those three times but the sensor can't tell. Somehow he was able to discern all that just from looking at the way that red light blinks (a pattern of four quick flashes and then a pause).
I just wrote all that before Aulio told me to come downstairs and take a look at something else he "found". My positive first impression of this guy has just changed dramatically. He was trying to tell me that he found two cracks on my heat exchanger and was threatening to "condemn" my furnace because cracked heat exchangers lead to carbon monoxide accumulation in the home and that then leads to death. He said "he wasn't going to ask me to crawl underneath the furnace to see it because its hard to see without a mirror." So I just chip up and say, well let me borrow your mirror and I'll check it out. Then he says, "hold on, let me just look at it again so I can tell you where it is." At which point he crawls back under with his mirror and starts making a bunch of scraping sounds for too-long a time before I just say, "what are you doing?" prompting him to crawl back out to make me a drawing of where the crack is (notice how it went from "cracks" to "crack"). So I crawl under there and check things out and after some poking around, tell him I can't see anything. he then comes in from the top with his mirror and tells me I'm looking in the wrong spot. Once I'm looking in the right spot, I can clearly see a freshly scraped line in the aluminum of the heat exchanger, just at the bottom of a designed bulged in the metal, and just within reach of a short metal instrument.
Aulio apparently thinks I'm an idiot.
So I crawl back out and I say, "Listen, before I replace my whole damn furnace I'm going to call some other company and get a second opinion on this, in the meantime, can you replace my heat sensor?" At which point he backs down. He's replacing the heat sensor now, we'll see if he tries to pull anything else. In retrospect, maybe I should have become suspcious when he tried to sell us ont he idea of having our ventilation system cleaned out even before he went downstairs to look at our furnace.
Sorry for the typos, its a first-pass comment.
PS: The name of Aulio's company is "Sanford Kramer Plumbing, Heating, and Air Conditioning."
*sigh*
Tell him he's a MexiCAN, not a MexiCAN'T!
You know who...
Post a Comment