Fall Furnace Maintenance Tasks

It can be tempting to think that your furnace doesn't need the same kind of upkeep as other home appliances. Unfortunately, this line of thought often leads to the need for expensive emergency repairs. A much better idea is to hire an HVAC repair person to attend to some basic maintenance tasks. If you would like to learn more about what needs to be done, read on. This article will discuss two important things a furnace technician can do for you.

Inspect your flue for holes and cracks.

As you likely realize, a furnace generates a good deal of exhaust as the result of combustion. These by-products (dead carbon monoxide gas among them) are vented safely out of your home through the flue pipe. There the condensed exhaust gases are able to disperse harmlessly in the air.

Problems arise, however, when your flue pipe becomes compromised by such problems as holes, cracks, and split seams. Any of these things can allow dangerous gases to escape into the air of your home. There they pose significant threats to the health of your family. Thus it is vital to have an HVAC technician periodically inspect your flue pipe, to ensure that it remains structurally uncompromised.

Should they detect any major problems, the appropriate sections of the pipe will need to be replaced. This may also be the case if a yet uncompromised flue pipe shows signs of excessive corrosion. Smaller instances of damage can often be repaired by covering them up with foil HVAC tape.

Scrub the combustion chamber clean.

At the heart of your furnace lies the combustion chamber, where fuel and air come together and are ignited to produce heat. Yet, as noted above, heat isn't the only by-product of this process: there are also a host of different exhaust gases, as well as things like water vapor and soot. The problem here is that, over time, such substances accumulate along the inside of combustion chamber.

Eventually the corrosive substances present in this type of buildup will lead t the formation of rust inside of the combustion chamber. As you can imagine, this can severely compromise the safety of the chamber. To reduce the risk posed by such buildup, a furnace technician will employ a sturdy wire brush to thoroughly scour clean the walls of the combustion chamber. Once the resulting debris has been vacuumed up, a thorough inspection of the chamber walls will be made, to ensure that the buildup had not been acting to hide any unwanted corrosion. 

For more information about furnace and air conditioning repair, contact local HVAC contractors.