Fantastic winter news!
Great news man! I’m so glad to hear that.
Happy for you. Good luck going forward!
Jeff! You cursed me!
My furnace just died today. Had a weird burning smell earlier.
Turns out, the fan won’t kick on when the furnace is running. I thought the fan was broken, because it wouldn’t come on, even in manual mode.
But when i turned off the heat entirely, then the fan did come on.
So, the motherboard send to be flaking out. Gonna need to deal with that. The furnace is now 21 years old though, so it’s gonna need to be replaced at some point. But we’ll see how things go.
Aghhhh. That’s terrible. Well, I wish you the best of luck and there’s plenty of info in this thread. Use it I know I did lol. Hopefully you don’t live somewhere where it’s freezing or below all the time.
It’s not so bad. The guy’s who work on it have always treated me right.
They’re like good mechanics… Once you find one, stick with them.
Yeah. When my central air went bad the first guy that looked at it tried to sell me on a $3000 replacement. So of course I got a second opinion. He said that I needed minor work that would come under a regular inspection charge. Then he gave me a reusable filter that I could clean once a month. That saved me from buying filters all the time. He has my permanent business now.
Jeff - did you get your money back from the first morons that ordered the wrong circuit board? If not, then if you paid by credit card, call your credit card company and explain the details to do a chargeback. Except for the emergency visit, you shouldn’t be out money for their lack of abilities.
We paid for the pressure switch which was $200 plus emergency/labor. Then they took the switch off as it didn’t resolve issue and ordered circuit board. We never paid for the circuit board as the wrong one was ordered. Got the pressure switch part cost refunded. Still cost $300 for absolutely nothing.
I’m guessing that they charged for labor?
Seems like we are back up and running. I called the same guys i have dealt with before. The motherboard was definitely shot… After taking it out, there were some obvious scorch marks on the back where some components had crapped out.
The dude put in a replacement, and things seem to be good to go again.
The guy was an old dude, Tom, who I’ve met before around 4 years ago when the pump died. Cool guy, always has fun stories and small talk while he does his thing. He’s worked on that furnace since it’s installation, so he knows it… There’s stuff written on the inside of the panels, by him, from over the years.
Anyway, it was a bit more expensive than normal, because it’s the weekend… I’ve never had the furnace die during the week. Only on off hours.
Tom’s cool though, so he said he was basically gonna knock the time down to the minimum, so in the end it won’t cost that awful much. Probably around $250 including the replacement board.
It always pays to hang out with repairmen. They often have good warstories, and they’ll usually cut you a break on cost if you’re cool with them.
Glad you’re back up and running. When it rains it pours, right?
Your repairman sounds like my old AC repair guy. Always quick to get to me, always honest and did great work, but man he was a talker. We’d spend 30-40 minutes sometimes shooting the breeze after he finished work (off the clock.) Really nice guy. Sadly he retired and wasn’t able to even take an apprentice for several years, none wanted the job. So I’m not even sure if he was able to sell his business out.
All of the good ones leave notes and markups for dates of things they change on the unit so the next person has a history.
What the deal with so many boards either burning out or having defects?
I was so angry last Christmas when it got cold our furnace would stop working 30 seconds after it started. Repair guy comes out and says the old board had mistakes in its programming and they had to replace it. Basically, when moisture dripped back it shut down the furnace. So I get charged $300 for the furnace maker’s mistake. With our old furnace the board kept getting scorched and burned out, once a year. It’s like they have zero quality control and no one keeping the manufacturers honest.
I have a carrier. Maybe it’s just a certain manufacturer?
I have a Bryant now (the one with the bad software/bios/board). Can’t remember if I had a Carrier or Bryant before that where the boards kept burning out.
It’s a circuit board that’s been powered on for 20 years, in a dusty metal box.
At some point, those things just fail.
Our current furnace has this amazing engineering defect where if there’s a bit of water on the basement floor, the fans can suck enough vapor onto the unprotected board to short it out. This has happened twice. Even better, the manufacturer’s warranty counts this as “water damage” as if one puddle plus a fan is the same as a foot of water in the basement.
Bryant and Carrier are both brands of Carrier Corporation.
Wow maybe that’s what was wrong with mine. I haven’t had real heat in years. The boiler worked unless it got cold outside (20-30 F), which you know, is kinda when I need the heat. I had dozens of visits, control board replaced, all sorts of deal. Finally just got rid of the fucker. It’s probably from back in the day when Reagan was in charge anyway.
That is exactly what was wrong. Our furnace would work just fine as well when it wasn’t super cold.