Rheem to American Standard 95%

Again I find myself replacing a Rheem furnace, but with a twist. This customer was a referral, she wanted to make sure that she was being guided correctly by another company. Her complaint was she was smelling raw gas outside of her home, the furnace was running erratic and it was very noisy. The other company stated that the furnace needed a new control board, and keep in mind they just did a maintenance. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out that the burners where not providing a crossover from #1 to #2 burners. This will cause raw gas to be poured into the exchanger then of coarse outside, this will also cause erratic operation. Simply cleaning the burners would have solved this problem! And yes that is part of a maintenance!

After about 5 minutes of run time the furnace went out on a overheat high limit, we have good air flow, all grilles open and a clean filter … so based on the size of the home and the small duct design I determined the 80,000 btu furnace was over sized for the home and ducting.

So after going over several scenarios with my customer she decided it was time for a new furnace, she decided to go with a lower BTU American Standard 95% 2-stage variable speed unit with a Honeywell 4″ pleated filter system. In this home we would seldom see the 2nd stage kick in unless needed, and with the variable speed blower the furnace would operate much quieter and more efficient. And by down sizing we would help maintain a setpoint and not overshoot the thermostat.

Older Rheem Unit

Here we see the older Rheem unit, after looking deeper you could see where water was leaking from the inducer connection dripping down on the #1 and #2 burners, causing corrosion. This is typical of this model of Rheem. Again a simple maintenance would have solved this.

Existing Base Can Before.

Now after we removed the older Rheem furnace I found out what was contributing to the over heating of the furnace. The Rheem was incorrectly installed, the base can hole was cutting off air flow. Now I have known a lot of installers in my time, MOST would have just re-installed the new furnace and called it good. Especially how we are down sizing. I try to look at as if it where my home … so I decided to enlarge the opening just to be safe.

Modified base can.

Here you see I modified the base can to allow all the airflow to enter the supply ducting, this way I’m sure we will end the over heating issues and make for a better system.

New American Standard 95% Furnace

The new American Standard 95% 2 Stage Variable speed gas furnace installed correctly over a modified base can. After running the system it was much quieter and it did not blast us out of the home.

New Honeywell filter system

And of coarse I should not forget a picture of the 4″ pleated filter bank by Honeywell … A MUST!
Alpine Heating And Cooling

Need a Heat Pump, Air Conditioner, Furnace, Boiler or Tankless Water Heater? Or a complete heating system? We install them and all over Skagit county including Mount Vernon WA, Burlington WA, Anacortes, Sedro Woolley, La Conner, Stanwood WA, and on Camano Is.