Aaarrgghhh

Brent'd furnace died. No heat. 240volts worries me a bit and all sorts of pieces I don't know what they do. Sucks having to call in someone to fix shit. Obsolete parts it seems so it's a find something and make it work or buy a new furnace.

I tried and tried and tried to sell our furnace. Perfect shape, just the builders had undersized the cfm on the blower motor and father in law insisted on buying us a proper one before the baby comes. Started out at $250. Six months later I had it listed at $50 or trade for anything of interest. Had one guy come measure it when it was at $100. Ended up taking it (and a perfectly fine washing machine that was also at $50) to the scrap yard.
If you do have to replace it, find a do it yourself type shop. The installed price of ours was like $2500 ( I would NEVER have paid that.) Search craigslist also. Did you search online for a repair manual or similar?

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Grant Hughes

I checked around a lot yesterday. Seems furnace was made in 1978. I have a customer that works on them looking at it today. It is still cold enough here to need it at night...

He needs a garage roof , we had planned for that, hopefully the furnace thing is not total replacement.

House quality stuff....ugh.
House type repair guys, double UGH.
Fawkin franchises hire anybody with a pulse who might pass a piss test---if they had one. Might. Hey instant _____________repair man (fill in the blank plumbing, roof, whatever)

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John Vanlandingham
Sleezattle, WA, USA

Vive le Prole-le-ralliat

www.rallyrace.net/jvab
CALL +1 206 431-9696
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is 3 hours behind Eastern Standard Time.

Efficiency has come a long way in 30 years. Might want to run the numbers on the gas bill and see if you would save in the medium term by buying a new unit.

He has LNG in the street. We intend on getting him an insert for the fireplace. Furnace might be fixble tho, friend says we'll know more Monday.

Electric heat is 100% thermal efficient - always. It was in 1978 and it is today. This does not mean 100 btu's of 100% thermally efficient electric heat is less costly than 100 btu's of 92% thermally efficient gas heat however. There may be a small improvement in fan efficiency but not in the heating its self.

The things are fairly simple, they have a set of restive coils that is the heating element if that is not burned out all you need to do is get it power. They often did this via sequencers, something that keeps all the load from coming on at once. In my very limited experience these are what goes out.

Basically a thermostat tells a relay to turn on, this starts the fan and sends power to the first sequencer that turns on the first coil, some time later the second sequencer will come on and the second coil with it and so on.

Often there is a 110v to 24 volt transformer, the system uses 24 volts for the thermostat and other controls. This could also burn out.

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In the long run reality always wins.

The contactors..has 4, 2 have failed and one limit switch. So I believe we can get a universal part and make it work again.

After he bought the house last year it went thru a spell of furnace not shutting off. We figured a relay/contactor was stuck on but then it fixed itsself (I hate when that happens) and has been fine until now.

Wish I could just send you some of the heat from around here. It was 85 degrees at 9 am this morning.

Well it was shirt sleeve weather here today, tho not 85.


Looks like a few hundred to fix the furnace. He was going to buy a project Toyota, now he gets to wait a few weeks or more. Life lessons ...not exciting.