This whole “owning a home” thing is a scam.

Well, maybe not quite that bad, but there’s plenty of annoyances. For example, my furnace decided to not work when I went to flip it on late last week. This was troublesome, because it was working a couple weeks before when the temp dropped down and I felt the need to kick it on.

So, I look at it myself a bit. I’m pretty handy, but I wasn’t able to figure out what was going on. Neither could my dad, so I didn’t feel too bad. It was clear that the pilot wasn’t coming on though.

Yesterday the furnace guy comes out and we look at it, and it turns out the flame rollback sensor had tripped. Easy enough to reset, but why would such a safety critical sensor trip? Oh, perhaps because the intake blower motor is starting to go bad.

At least that’s what the guy says. I could see what he was saying though, the motor did take a bit to get moving, a sign that usually means the windings are shorting out a bit. The part isn’t extremely common though, and therefore is expensive. Just having him out yesterday was $120. The part would cost $320, and then labor to install it. Ouch.

So I’m going to see what I can do myself. Ideally I can get Ducane to send me out a new blower motor, seeing as the furnace is really not that old. Other than that, maybe I can find one online for cheaper and install it myself.

At least the heat is back on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 9:32 am and is filed under Anything and tagged with annoyances, house. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.