Baby It’s Cold Outside

I know I shouldn’t complain in southern California, considering how brutally cold it is back east, but we woke up this morning to a 63-degree house, and listening to a struggling furnace on the morning after the coldest night of the season to date. The blower seems to be on the fritz.

On a Sunday.

I had other plans today, but I’m going to have to take it apart, and see if I can fix it. It’s twelve years old. Hoping it’s just a bad capacitor. I doubt I’d be able to find a replacement motor today.

[Update a few minutes later]

Not really complaining, and have no right to. If we were back east right now, this would be life threatening, and we’d either have to get an emergency HVAC guy in, or find somewhere else to stay, but for us, it’s just an inconvenience. Worst case is extra blankets tonight, and I’ll find a replacement motor (or limit switch, or whatever the problem is) tomorrow.

But it’s also a reminder of how thin the veneer of modern technology can be, and that nature is not our friend. Whatever the climate is doing (and anyone who claims they can confidently predict it out decades is either fooling themselves, or attempting to fool us), we have to maintain enough societal wealth to deal with it. The policies promulgated by those who insist we can control the climate would have the opposite effect.

[Monday-morning update]

When we woke up this morning, temp in the house was 61 F. A couple hours later, it’s down to 60. It will probably warm up when the sun gets higher, but high temp today is only predicted to be 67.

In troubleshooting, I’ve learned two things: 1) Modern gas furnaces are complicated as copulation and 2) the burner isn’t lighting, which is why the blower motor isn’t bothering to. The status light isn’t flashing any of the error codes in the manual, just steady on, the way it’s supposed to if everything is copacetic, so it’s not useful for diagnostics. I’m suspecting the gas valve (a problem with which the control board would be unaware), but not sure how to tell if it’s working. Could also be the igniter, except I’d think I’d at least momentarily smell gas if that were the problem. Anyway, I’ve got to go start poking at things with a VOM.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I am briefly smelling gas when it tries to start up, so the valve seems to be working. Now suspecting igniter:

1. Remove burner compartment door to gain access to the ignitor.
2. Disconnect the ignitor from the Ignition Control.
3. Using an ohmmeter measure the resistance of the ignitor.
4. Ignitor cool should read between 40 to 75 ohms.
5. Reconnect ignitor.
6. Place unit in heating cycle, measure current draw of ignitor during preheat cycle. Should read approximately 4 to 4.5 amps.
7. If ignitor is receiving 115 Volts and will not light, replace.
8. After check and/or replacement of hot surface ignitor, reinstall burner compartment door and verify proper unit operation.

Supposed to be 40-75 ohmns, showing infinite. That seems like the problem. Looks like they’re about $20. Now to go out and find one.

[Update a while later]

OK, a replacement (and improved version) was $42 bucks. The old one had clearly failed; you could see the burn through in the element that had opened it up. It probably got hit by a piece of dust or something when it was hot. House is now warming up.

[Update a while later]

Temp is up to 64 degrees and rising. In retrospect, I would have saved time if I’d relied on Occam: If something isn’t igniting, first check to see if there’s ignition.

Further thoughts: Pilotless ignition saves fuel, and is probably more reliable, but if a pilot blows out, it doesn’t cost $40+ to relight it.

Anyway, I understand my furnace much better now. It was the first time since we had it installed a dozen years ago that I’d opened it up to see how it works.

28 thoughts on “Baby It’s Cold Outside”

    1. Outside temp, last night? Probably in the forties. There were freeze warnings in the valleys. It’s supposed to be mid-sixties today, but the sun will heat up the house in the afternoon, then the heat will soak in in the evening.

      1. Sunday morning when I checked the weather report where I live and it said 29, a measure substantiated when I left the apartment by heavy frost on fallen leaves. Central valley California.

    2. It was so cold that when Dolly Parton stayed at the house, three people were admitted to the hospital for eye injuries.

  1. Actually, what this highlights is how easily humans mitigate life threatening situations. 63 degrees is deadly exposure without mitigation (blankets.) If you lived somewhere where blankets were not enough and a breakdown had no option of immediate service, what would you do? Redundancy of course, with a backup plan to that. In principle, no different on mars.

    Why imagine life to be difficult when the resources already exist on mars to make it, in many ways, better than earth? Certainly more room for growth and opportunity for business that hasn’t already been filled in most places on earth.

    1. Yes. The last few days have been around -25C, but, aside from old car batteries failing and the hamster getting grumpy, we didn’t really notice thanks to human ingenuity.

      Which is precisely why the left want to destroy the technology that makes life here possible.

      1. A couple days back, Mammoth Hot Springs, WY (where I am right now) hit a low of -32 C (-26 F). The lows aren’t near that now. I blame global warming.

      2. A lot simply do not grasp how important it is.
        Some years back, I was involved in a little budget planning exercise for my kids (private) school, here in the liberal greater SF bay area.
        We were simply asked to give 4 or 5 priority items to spend a possible surplus for next year. Examples like “teacher pay increase”, “upgrade soccer field” etc. were given, but we were encouraged to “think wide”.
        So, I don’t remember any of mine but my #1, which was “facilities maintenance”.
        My list was the only one with anything like that on it, and I was actually asked why I thought it was so important.
        I simply remarked that if the boiler stopped, the school would close immediately. For some reason (after all, these folk were all HIGHLY EDUCATED) this appeared to be a new concept to many of them.

        1. Very close to Chinese communism where they have grand show constructions that can hardly be lived in after just a few years.

  2. New years eve, a couple of years ago in Ottawa, Ontario….came home from work, and the house was COLD….the furnace wasn’t staying on – it would cycle, but then go off.

    Called the gas company because we smelled gas, and he diagnosed it as the air intake being filled with snow: It seems the government licensed installer screwed up and put it too close to grade, and the government inspector who signed off on it didn’t care.

    I dug out around the air inlet and all was good, thankfully. And the gas company guy (who was about 70 years old) got a nice little christmas gift as well.

    Government – what we do together.

    Glad I’ve move away from there.

    1. Same here. The air inlet for our furnace is too low, and gets blocked about once a year. I come home early to check it if there’s a big snowfall.

      Just another case of poor design in the search for ‘efficiency’. The houses around here that don’t have ‘high-efficiency’ furnaces don’t have that problem because the inlet is in the house and the outlet on the roof.

      But the worst problem is that the furnace is completely reliant on external power, so when we get a power outage we have no heat. I keep thinking about installing a UPS, but I’m not sure whether that would be more or less reliable than the local power company.

      1. This is a gas furnace? Umm…maybe? Have you concidered a backup generator like the ones Instapundit talks about?

        1. Yeah, we’ve never had a gas outage, but the furnace won’t run without electricity to power the fan and control board, and it usually goes out two or three times every winter. I may have to get a backup generator if The Boy King manages to get his ‘Carbon Tax’ through.

    1. Yeah, but I don’t think it will get that cold. It’s currently 66 in the house, and it’s unlikely to get much colder tonight than it did last night inside. We’ll be OK.

      1. With that temperature a duvet (you guys in the US might call it a comforter) to replace the blanket would probably be enough.

  3. This is why I’d like to install a wood stove. With a wood stove I can stay comfortably warm if the power goes off or the furnace goes on the Fritz. I can even do some light cooking and make hot drinks.

      1. Ah. An obvious design flaw in the house, in retrospect. 🙂

        I see you’ve gotten it fixed by now. Cool. I remember when I was a kid relighting the pilot light a couple of times. Nowadays I live in an apartment with a central HVAC system, which has its own set of problems: I’ve lived here for 6 years, and every year, I lose the AC the first really hot day of summer. It somehow usually winds up being on a weekend, too late to be looked at until Monday. Last year I found out from the maintenance guy that the previous maintenance guy wasn’t filling the system with enough Freon or R123 or whatever they use. This year, the compressor seized up, probably from being abused for so long, and I got a brand-new external radiator unit that’s twice the size of the old one (turns out the old unit, they don’t make spares for any longer). Hopefully I won’t have a problem next summer, for the first time.

  4. If you blow yourself up trying to save a few bucks by not hiring someone to do this for you, I don’t want to hear any complaints! Good luck.

      1. Geez. People afraid to do some of this work these days–it’s crazy. I don’t have nearly as much experience fixing stuff as you do, Rand, but I’m teaching my son what I know, like how to change a tire or replace a broken car door handle. He didn’t like doing it at first, but seeing a few people helpless stuck on the side of the road has made him realize the value of being able to fix stuff yourself.

    1. Rand is AFAIK a mechanical engineer from Michigan. If he couldn’t fix a boiler that would be pretty sad. Not that I haven’t seen computer engineers who don’t know shit about computers before. I still assemble my own computers but don’t ask me to use a soldering iron.

      Thankfully surface mounting technology and gluing components together (i.e. disposable products) hasn’t spread out of electronics segment…

      1. Remember the Cosmac Elf? Mine had so little memory it was shared with display so you would see your program memory blinking on screen. Programs were stored on cassette rape by modulating a single lead. I had the deluxe model with the hexadecimal keypad rather than just toggle switches.

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