Keeping Your Furnace in Good Shape
While it’s best to work with repair professionals for most issues involving your furnace, sometimes there are situations where you can actually fix the problem yourself. Here’s a list of DIY fixes of that variety. Still, there’s a reason repair professionals are able to make a living: some things require a real pro.
Regardless, in this writing, we’re briefly going to go over four ways you can quickly put common furnace issues right.
GOAL: Get Out And Look
One safety trip for truckers is the GOAL approach. GOAL is an acronym that stands for “Get Out And Look”. Before you call repair professionals, have a look at your furnace. If it’s not functioning right, check to see that it’s on. It could be something really simple. Maybe your pilot light blew out for some reason. It happens. You might just have to relight it.
However, you might find there’s a much more serious issue that demands a repair professional even if you’re a pretty handy homeowner yourself. So before assuming the issue is something beyond you, or it’s nothing, be sure to GOAL.
Check the Thermostat’s Batteries
Next, check the thermostat. Most thermostats aren’t actually networked into the power grid of a given home. Newer thermostats are, older thermostats aren’t. If the batteries behind the little LCD display give up the ghost, then your furnace doesn’t have anything telling it when to turn on or off. Accordingly, it may stop turning on even though things are cold.
If that’s the case, simply replacing the batteries of your thermostat may be all you need to do. That’s a pretty simple fix that just about any homeowner is capable of!
Simply Contact the Repair Professionals in Your Area
If the thermostat is functioning as it should, you can’t tell anything is wrong by a cursory examination of the unit and its connections, and you’re at your wit’s end, it may be time to seek furnace maintenance by Mister Quik Home Services.
A repair expert will be sent out, and he’ll likely tell you some component or other has failed, he needs to order it in, and once it’s installed you’ll be back to normal. That, or he might be able to fix the issue on the spot. It will depend on the issue you’re dealing with.
Look For Areas Rodents May Have Chewed Through Wires
Wiring can be dangerous, but if you’re cautious and take your time, you can do things yourself that you might not have realized were possible. Look at the cords going to and from your heating apparatus. If there are rodents on the premises, they might have chewed through those wires. If that’s the case, simply replacing them could represent a fix.
However, you want to be careful here. If you don’t know what you’re doing, messing around with electrical wiring is a great way to injure or even kill yourself. That said, if you diagnose the problem and can’t personally fix it, at minimum, you’ll know what to tell the repair guy when he arrives.
Keeping Your Furnace Operable
Replacing wires that have been chewed through can fix furnace issues. Contacting repair experts certainly makes a lot of sense if you encounter things you can’t fix on your own—that’s likely, by the way. Also, be sure to check the thermostat; it’s no use calling a repair expert to come to change the batteries. Lastly, use GOAL principles to find anomalies.
If you approach the issue from multiple angles like this, you should be able to get things back to normal in due time.
