PRODUCTS —
 What is a Furnace?
Austin Furnace Service and Heating Repair
We all know we HAVE to have air conditioning in Central Texas. Believe it or not, we need heaters in Austin too. A gas furnace is the very common and affordable way to heat your home in central Texas. Natural gas is used to heat the air being circulated through your home or business. It's a safe, clean-burning fuel and a system with plenty of safety checks so that you know your family and home are safe and cozy.
A Gas Furnace Offers Many Benefits
It gets cold in Austin. A furnace warms your home or office with affordable natural gas. It puts out an air temperature that is considerably warmer than heating from a heat pump system, making sure your home gets cozy quickly and stays that way.
Fewer mechanical parts means there are fewer things that can fail on a gas furnace, providing reliable operation when you need your heater the most. Heating repair isn't something you want to find yourself in need of over Christmas or New Year's!
A furnace helps provide cleaner air circulating through your home because it's not pulling air in from outdoors. As air is taken out of the rooms inside by the return air ducts it is pulled through the air filter, to remove airborne pollutants like dust and lint. Some filters may remove microscopic pollutants, as well. Filtered air is then sent back to rooms through the ductwork.
How does a gas furnace work?
A gas furnace consists of a heat exchanger and an indoor blower fan. When your thermostat calls for heat, the indoor combustion fan comes on first, which closes a safety pressure switch that ensures that the fan is working and the vent pipe is clear and unobstructed. Next, the gas jet burners are ignited and checked by the flame sensor to make sure that the jets are all ignited and operating properly. The gas jets then heat up the metal heat exchangers. Flames and the resulting flue gases are kept separated from the air stream. Finally, the indoor blower comes on and blows air around the heat exchangers where the air is warmed before it enters the ductwork and exits through the vents.
Facts About Furnace Maintenance and Heating Repair
- Gas furnaces should be serviced annually to ensure everything is working properly, and that your heat exchanger is not leaking deadly carbon monoxide. Every home and business should also have an operating carbon monoxide and smoke detector as added insurance and safety. Be sure to check the batteries every year!
- Most gas furnaces manufactured since the early 1990's have an integrated ignition control board that has a self-diagnostic LED light that blinks a combination of different codes to identify different faults. It is very important to retrieve this code by looking through the sight glass on the blower compartment before removing the blower door or turning off the power. Interrupting the power resets the fault codes.
- With lots of safety measures present to protect your family and home, following the sequence of furnace operations often exposes the location of the system fault. Most furnaces in operation today follow a very similar sequence of operations which are as follows:
- Combustion gas fan comes on for 30 seconds and a pressure switch closes, ensuring that the flue pipe is clear and unobstructed.
- The gas valve closes and the burners ignite. This must be sensed by the flame sensor within 3 seconds or the gas valve will open and extinguish the flames
- The heat exchanger heats up to approximately 150 degrees, and then the indoor blower fan comes on to distribute the air through the ducts.
- Additional safeties that engage if the blower fails to come on or the temperature inside the unit or the burner box is too high.
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