Furnace repair in North Vancouver

Signs your furnace needs attention

Furnaces rarely fail without warning. The ones we get called to on the coldest night of the year were usually giving hints for weeks. Worth calling about:

• Short cycling — turning on and off every few minutes instead of running a full cycle. Often a dirty filter or a flame sensor, sometimes an oversized unit.
• Blowing cool air — the blower running while the burners don't light, or shutting down partway through a cycle.
• A new noise — grinding, squealing or a bang on start-up. A bang at ignition means gas is pooling before it lights, and that one shouldn't wait.
• The pilot or burner flame is yellow rather than crisp blue. Yellow means incomplete combustion.
• Rooms that used to heat evenly and no longer do, which points as often to ductwork or a failing blower as to the furnace itself.
• A rising gas bill with no change in the weather or your habits.

What we check on a service call

A furnace call starts with finding out what actually failed, rather than swapping the part that most often fails and hoping. We go through the ignition sequence, test the flame sensor and igniter, check gas pressure at the manifold, inspect the heat exchanger, test the limit and pressure switches, look at the blower motor and capacitor, and check the venting and condensate drain.

On the North Shore, a good share of the faults we find trace back to damp. Furnaces sitting in unheated crawlspaces and garages corrode faster than the same unit in a finished basement, and condensate lines on high-efficiency furnaces block up with the sort of growth that our climate encourages. Those are cheap fixes when caught early and expensive when they aren't.

Repair or replace?

This is the question worth thinking through before spending money, and the honest answer depends on three things: the age of the unit, which part failed, and what the repair costs against a replacement.

A gas furnace that's been properly maintained will typically run 15 to 20 years. Under about 12 years, repair is usually the sensible call. Past 15, it depends heavily on the part. A flame sensor, igniter or capacitor is a modest repair and worth doing on almost any furnace still running. A cracked heat exchanger or a failed control board on a 17-year-old unit is different — you're spending a meaningful fraction of a new system's cost on something that may not see another winter.

A cracked heat exchanger is the one case where we won't recommend a repair at all. It's a combustion safety issue, the part is expensive, and on an older furnace the replacement rarely makes economic sense.

If you're near that line, it's also worth asking whether a furnace is what you want at all. Plenty of North Shore homes replacing a dying furnace are better served by a heat pump, which handles both heating and summer cooling. We'll price both and let you compare.

Makes we service

We work on all common residential makes — Lennox, Carrier, Trane, Goodman, Rheem, Bryant, York, American Standard, Napoleon and others. Parts availability is occasionally the deciding factor on older or discontinued models, and we'll tell you upfront if a part is going to be slow or unavailable rather than leaving you without heat while we wait.

Keeping it from happening again

Most no-heat calls are preventable. Change the filter on schedule — every three months for a standard one-inch filter, more often with pets or during construction. A restricted filter is the single most common cause of the overheating that trips a limit switch and shuts the furnace down.

Beyond that, an annual service before the heating season catches the wear items while they're cheap and confirms the combustion and venting are safe. If your furnace is over ten years old, this is worth the money every year rather than every few.