There is nothing worse for a technician than to get dispatched to a no heat call and then upon arrival finding out the furnace is working correctly. He will run it through all its cycles several times and find absolutely nothing wrong with the furnace.
Furnace Control Board
And of course if the technician leaves without finding the issue the customer will call back within days and complain the furnace is not working again. This is very frustrating for both the technician and the customer, especially if he shows up for the 2nd time to find the furnace is still working just fine. We have found under these circumstances that the furnace control board is more than likely the issue. The picture above shows what appears to be a perfectly good control board.
Furnace Control Board under.
Its after you flip the board over and inspect it that you will see a hot spot on the board. Its hot spots like the one above that will cause intermittent issues with the furnace operation. Sometimes the furnace works great .. other times it short cycles and blows cold air. These issues will get gradually worse over time. Simply turning the board over can save a technician a lot of time.
The hard thing to overcome for a technician is being 100% confident that this is the issue with the furnace, after all it is a expensive repair. But in almost every case that we have changed the control board under these circumstances the erratic operation went away. And if you do not change the control board you may end up with a possible fire hazard as shown above.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler, Ductless, Mini-Split or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
OK .. I know I have posted this type of damage before, but just in case some of you don’t know what your crawl space looks like I thought i would post another picture.
Damaged Cross Over
In this case this is a mobile home located on a beach front, otters have been coming in under the home and having some fun with the crossover. The crossover delivers heat from one section of the home to the other section of the home. Cutting into a crossover will cost you dearly in energy costs if its not repaired. So we removed the existing flexible ducting that made up the crossover and replaced it with metal.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler, Ductless, Mini-Split or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
My new customer was referred to Alpine by several sources … referrals is properly 90% of our business, its nice to know quality still pays off in such slow times.
Older York 80% Gas Furnace.
As you can see the existing York 80% furnace sits on a base can located in the garage. The weird part of the existing system was that the sheet rock came all the way down to the top of the furnace. It made for a little uncertainty when bidding but realistically you can pretty much tell how the ducting ran.
American Standard 95% Variable 2 Stage with Filter
After removing the existing furnace and part of the base can we cut the sheet rock up to allow for the new American Standard 95% 2 stage variable speed furnace, heat pump coil and Honeywell 4″ filter bank. By adding a heat pump coil at this point and time it allows my customer to add on a heat pump or AC at a later date without making major modifications to the existing ducting.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler, Ductless, Mini-Split or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
This Payne 80% gas furnace was flooded out by a water leak from the floor above. Because of the extend of damages my customers insurance company decided to replace the unit.
Flooded 80% Furnace
The new American Standard 80% gas furnace slipped right into place with only some slight modifications to the supply ducting, everything else bolted right up.
American Standard NG 80% Furnace
We did add a filter access door in the existing return ducting to make it a little easier for the home owner to replace their filter. I really hate having to access a filter from inside the furnace.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler, Ductless, Mini-Split or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
This particular customer is simply upgrading from a junky old oil furnace to an American Standard 80% furnace so he could increase the value of the home so he can get ready to sell it.
Older Oil Furnace
The existing oil furnace was framed in and somewhat concealed in the home, normally this would be a big problem, but in this case the wall is going to be removed making it fairly simple to replace.
Framed in oil furnace
Above you can see where the existing oil furnace is somewhat framed in. This type of oil furnace is called a lowboy, big and bulky is what they should call it.
American Standard 80% NG
As you can see above the old oil furnace has been removed, the back wall sheet rocked and the new American Standard 80% gas furnace installed. We included a Honeywell 4″ pleated filter bank and lined the existing chimney for proper venting of the unit.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
One of my customers has a 2nd home in upper Skagit county. This particular home I believe was someday going to be their retirement home. Unfortunately the house is very isolated in a rural area, making it very attractive for thieves and vandals. Sometime during the last few months someone broke in and stole a lot of copper from the house, some of which was the copper lines/coils used in the heat pump system.
Existing coleman heat pump
Above you see the existing Coleman heat pump we installed years ago, what is missing is the refer line set that ran from the heat pump to the indoor coil.
Damaged service valves
As you can see the thieves didn’t exactly use a tubing cutter to remove the copper lines. The service valves where compromised, actually twisted behind the access panel. The damage they caused far out ways the copper they recovered.
Coleman indoor coil
When the thieves tried do remove the indoor coil they realized it was bolted into the unit, so they then destroyed the indoor coil, leaving no room for reconnection.
New Coleman Indoor Coil
As you can see above the difference between the old damaged coil and the new coil being installed.
Tech brazing in the coil
The new coil had to come from the factory so it took a few weeks to get, but it slid right in and my technician brazed it right up. While brazing always run nitrogen through the lines to make a nice clean internal weld. Any internal scaling will cause damage down the road.
Pumping down the unit.
After the lines had been purged and welded we then tested with nitrogen. After we pass a nitrogen pressure test we pump down the lines with a vacuum pump. We use a micron gauge to monitor how well we are pumping the system down.
We really kept our fingers crossed because we did not know the extend of the internal damaged caused to the heat pump. In this cause the unit fired right up and ran like new.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
This older Carrier gas furnace was starting to cost the home owner more money than what the furnace was worth, honestly it should have been changed out years ago but a dollar here and a dollar there doesn’t seem so much until you add it all up.
Carrier 90% gas furnace
The existing Carrier furnace sat in a utility room downstairs next to the hot water tank. So the furnace being a upflow model was not very surprising, but very helpful.
95% American Standard gas furnace
Because the existing gas furnace was vented with PVC it made swapping over to an American Standard 95% gas furnace very easy. We simply had to make a small supply transition for the top of the furnace and then reconnect up to everything else. We did add a filter access door on the return duct for better filter access.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.
Its not very often we get to install an American Standard 95% furnace in a manufactured home, mostly in part due to the sizing constraints of the equipment. A typical manufactured home furnace closet is not sized deep enough for the 95% gas furnace.
Manufactured Home Gas Furnace
One of the challenges of this particular project was keeping the air conditioning system. The existing furnace had a built in coil cabinet, the new American Standard 95% does not have this feature. So we had to make a custom AC coil cabinet that also doubled as a transitional base can.
New American Standard 95% Single Stage
Above you see the new American Standard 95% single stage gas furnace. Because we are in a manufactured home both the venting and combustion air has to be piped to the outside, this is optional in a standard home. The condensate line was tapped into the existing AC drain line. We added a Honeywell F100 4″ pleated filter bank for a filtration system and to top it off with also added a Honeywell Vision8000 thermostat.
Even though the furnace sticks out slightly into the utility room I think the payoff in savings and comfort will be worth it.
Heating And Cooling Skagit County
Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? We install them all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.