This was the sound that greeted me Sunday at 5 in the morning. Our house was built in 1941, making it one of the last of the pre-war houses. As such, I’m used to hearing the occasional creak or soft thud, but a whole series of clicks is not something I should hear.<\/p>\n
Click, click-click-click-click-click. Then a pause.<\/p>\n
The sound appeared to come from the heating vent, and sure enough, it was the furnace making all the clicking, a sound furnaces aren’t supposed to make. (The furnace, by the way, is only about 20 years old.) It didn’t take long to figure out what was going on: the clicking was the electronic ignition, trying to ignite gas that wasn’t there. The gas wasn’t there because it won’t flow unless a small fan, called a draft inducer, is running. This fan, which is supposed to draw combustion exhaust up the flue, had stopped, and it was making that hum characteristic of a stuck electric motor.<\/p>\n
The Washington Consumers’ Checkbook<\/a> is a sort of Consumer Reports for local products and services. A few months ago, they reviewed HVAC repair firms, and cross-referencing the article with the furnace repair section of the Yellow pages revealed that pretty much any firm with a big yellow pages ad claiming “24 hour emergency service” was bound to have low ratings. The highly rated firms, of course, might come out on a Sunday, if you already had a service contract, but after a half-dozen calls it was clear that the only people answering the phones were answering service types who didn’t know a thing about furnace repair.<\/p>\n I actually spent most of the afternoon waiting in vain for one of these places to call me back; in the end they didn’t call until Monday at about 11am. I hadn’t ever tried to work on a furnace before, but experimental physicists like to believe that we can fix anything, so eventually I decided to start disassembling the draft inducer, hoping to find some obvious problem like a wad of leaves jamming the fan.<\/p>\n The one advantage of trying to fix things on a Sunday is that, if you need a new tool or something, you can time your trip to Home Depot to coincide with the Redskins game, at which point the store is pretty empty. I got the socket driver I needed, but none of the half-dozen employees I asked knew what duct mastic was, or where in the store I might be able to find it–perhaps the knowledgable employees were all watching the football game. (Turns out, I didn’t need mastic after all.)<\/p>\n Disassembly of the draft inducer revealed only that it was rusting and corroded and presumably worn. No leaves to clean out. I had hoped there might be some way to revive the motor, but as far as I can tell, that would take quite a bit more work. A bit of online searching revealed the part number for the replacement assembly, and I was much relieved this morning when R & B Heating and Air Conditioning<\/a> told me on the phone that they had the part in stock. Unlike most trade supply places, they didn’t seem annoyed to have a mere consumer wishing to buy replacement parts. It took perhaps a half an hour to install the new draft inducer, and then we had heat again.<\/p>\n So that’s what I did this weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This was the sound that greeted me Sunday at 5 in the morning. Our house was built in 1941, making it one of the last of the pre-war houses. As such, I’m used to hearing the occasional creak or soft thud, but a whole series of clicks is not something I should hear. Click, click-click-click-click-click. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diy","category-homeownership"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metcaffeination.net\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}