The night our furnace almost died

Last winter our furnace almost died.

This is probably one of the top fears that anyone living in a cold climate has each winter. When the furnace starts up for the first time each autumn, if you are like my husband and I, you listen to make sure it sounds ok and that it’s working properly. You do this even if you took advantage of your heating or furnace companies offer to do a yearly check up on your furnace – as we do each summer.

I believe that it was late in the evening one day last January. The furnace came on, but it was making a noise that I’d never heard it make before. My husband and I went downstairs to take a look and neither of us liked the sound it was making. We called our furnace maintenance man. (We actually have his home number) He didn’t like what we were describing and he came over right away.

There was something wrong. We have a late 80’s oil furnace. Yes we should replace it soon .. but I don’t dare say that out loud or else the furnace will probably stop working! I can’t remember the name of the part we needed, but it was the main mechanism that helps the furnace ignite and produce heat.

As I said our furnace is getting on the old side and it’s hard to find parts. Our furnace man started searching for a replacement part right away and I think he found a rebuilt part about a day and a half later. It took a couple of hours to install. I’m keeping our fingers crossed that nothing like this happens again – at least not in the dead of winter.

Now, here’s something that’s kind of ironic. I just visited a site called FurnaceCompare.com. I only wish that I’d known about this site last winter as it was looking like we’d need to install a new furnace until they lucked into finding the part that we needed.

You see, you can go to FurnaceCompare.com and use the search function to look up furnaces by make and or model number. I know that we will probably get a new furnace in the next year or two so I’m going to bookmark this site so that when I want to do some research on the various furnace models I’ll be able to visit this site again and learn quite a bit about the brands and models that I’m interested in.

Just for the heck of it I decided to do a search for Carrier furnaces.

I hear that brand advertised often in my area so I thought that was a good place to start. When I selected Carrier and hit the search button I ended up with a list of 1914 furnaces! Beside each model number there was a brief description of what type of furnace it was (natural gas, horizontal flow, weatherproof), Condensing furnace and it’s electrical phase. You can also click in the furnace model area to get a detailed report about that particular furnace or compare it with similar makes and models.

The site is easy to use and organize but I was frustrated that I would have to purchase a subscription in order to read a detailed report about the furnace model that I choose to view. I think that a partial report should be available to people who have registered with the site but haven’t purchased a subscription. As a home owner just searching for information I found this frustrating. I did like the comparison information area though.

I think it would also be a great idea if the search results could be re-organized in the way that the searcher wanted to see them. For example – I currently have an oil furnace. I know that not that many companies make them these days but they are still out there. Rather than completely changing my whole heating system over to gas I might be interested in searching for only oil furnaces but I couldn’t define my search terms or re-order the search result list to suit my needs.

Otherwise I found the site fairly user friendly and there are a lot of resource articles for the consumer to read such as “Buying a Furnace” or “Buying Central A/C”.

There is also a large list of companies that make furnaces, Air conditioning systems and boilers which included information about the company and the products that they manufacture as well as contact information for each business. I found that to be extremely useful information.

I’m going to bookmark this site as it might be useful when the time comes to replace our current furnace. Visit FurnaceCompare.com if you’re looking for a new furnace, A/C or a boiler.