The New York Times-20080125-Keeping the Heat On

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Keeping the Heat On

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AS with most things in life (appliances, your body, relationships), maintenance is the key to the health and proper functioning of your furnace. So the first thing to do at a seasonal home is to have the furnace checked annually. Especially if you're going to be away from the house for long periods of time, said Roger Fouche, owner and president of Schaal Heating and Cooling of Des Moines. The No. 1 most important thing is to do basic preventative maintenance.

No national certification exists for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technicians, but there are ways to evaluate a potential contractor, like reviewing the company's state licenses, looking into its reputation and checking with the Better Business Bureau to see if any complaints have been lodged.

There are some associations that certify, but there is no national certification; that's the problem, said Jim Wheeler, a contributor to HGTVPro.com, a home-improvement Web site. If it's a union company, these people have gone through an apprenticeship and, he added, have usually passed a reliable certification and licensing process.

One thing homeowners can do themselves in the meantime is to check the air filter monthly. Anything more than that usually requires a technician, Mr. Fouche said. The other important thing homeowners can do is to learn the age of the furnace. Not many furnaces go longer than 20, 25 years, Mr. Fouche added. If it's 15 or 20 years or older, you can assume it's going to go pretty soon.

Knowing that magic number will also clue you in to potential maintenance issues. In 1985 or '86, the government said all furnaces had to meet 78 AFUE, Mr. Wheeler said, referring to annual fuel utilization efficiency. Before '85, the efficiency rate averaged around 60, which meant 60 percent went into the house and 40 went up the chimney. Now some go to 98 percent. Besides being inefficient, old furnaces usually don't have the same safety mechanisms as newer ones, like an automatic shut-off if the ventilation pipe becomes clogged.

But there's a negative side to the new breed: they use more circuitry and engineering to keep those mechanisms working.

With a high-efficiency modern furnace, I wouldn't recommend someone try fixing it themselves, Mr. Wheeler said. With an old one, you can go down to the hardware store and get most parts. But you know how it's getting impossible to work on cars because they're so modern. That's what's happening to furnaces.

The big concern with broken furnaces is a leak of the combustion gases carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Both Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Fouche urge installing carbon monoxide detectors on every level of the house. Without those sensors, you might not notice anything is wrong -- a clog in the vent pipe, a crack in the heat exchanger -- until it's too late.

While an annual checkup will help keep you in the know, Mr. Fouche said: We don't want to assume that just because it's working now, it's going to be working all winter long. Sometimes you'll have a heads up, but not always. So, he suggested, if you hear something unusual for even just a second or notice that one time the furnace doesn't go on, that's a hiccup you should have checked out.

Though noises and rattles are a good clue that something's not right, you might not always have that warning. People associate a noise with something going wrong, but they're not going to find a lot of noises, Mr. Wheeler said. The only thing that makes noise is the lower motor that blows the air through the house. But, he added, if that cuts off, you'll notice right away. First of all, it'll start squeaking real loud and pretty soon the furnace will cut off.

Once you're into the realm of repairing, you'll have to decide whether to fix or to replace. We use a fairly simple formula, Mr. Fouche said. If you have a $300 or $400 repair, you might want to consider putting that money into a new furnace, because if you're putting that into an old 60 percent efficiency furnace and you can instead spend a few thousand on a 90 percent efficiency, you can make your money back.

[Illustration]DRAWING (DRAWING BY NANCY DONIGER)