So, now I'm doing furnace repair

[johnridley]

Our neighbor cornered me as I was arriving home from work (peril of being on a bike, everyone can just pull up and talk to you). He was having furnace trouble.

I showered, changed and went over with a voltmeter. It was blinking pressure switch error codes, but that turned out to be a red herring. After fiddling with the pressure switch for 20 minutes, I dug deeper and found that his hot plate ignitor had burned out. He was unhappy until I said "no problem, I have a spare at my place."

It took a bit of metalwork since his ignitor was slightly different than mine, but no real problem. I went onto eBay and ordered a replacement. They're about $20 on eBay, or $60 if you buy them locally. Add in the $200 call-out charge, and it's definitely worth taking a shot at the repairs yourself, since there's not usually all that much to go wrong with a furnace. So far out of 3 repairs I've had one cold solder joint and two burned out ignitors.

Add in the bad relay for the A/C compressor, which was $12 on eBay and $120 locally, and I definitely get my HVAC stuff online. And for the price it's DEFINITELY worth stocking a few spare parts of things that are failure prone. $35 bought me a backup ignitor and relay.

Comments

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

With my iffy furnace and rebates I'm very tempted to get a high efficiency. It'd be more complex, but I also think it'd overall be easier to troubleshoot as it'd be a proper, modern logic board and a more known set of components. Not that I'd expect to be troubleshooting it any time soon...

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

The furnaces I've worked on (mine and my neighbor) are both high efficiency 90+ or better. They're trivial to troubleshoot. They blink at you what's wrong. They don't seem to give codes for ignition failure, but that's pretty obvious. If it TRIES to do ignition, you pull off the ignition chamber cover and watch it cycle. You either don't have gas or you don't have ignition, and then you fix that problem.

I feel this is similar to modern cars with engine control computers. IMO they're far, FAR easier to troubleshoot than old non-computerized engines (besides the fact that they break down about 100x less often).

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's exactly what I'd expect. No more 24V logic and well-engineered (but opaque) analoge circuits.

I just need to decide if the $2800-ish is worth it. I suspect it probably is, but it still seems like a lot...

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

I want a neighbor like you! You're such a nice guy, John :)