Since 2011 my fairly Lennox furnace (installed in 2006) began to work unpredictably: sometimes would fail to start, then shut down after several unsuccessful attempts to start for an hour or so; then would work again without any problem just to fail starting next day.
I called other companies about the issue and they were offering various remedies: replace the control board, diagnose the furnace, etc. and all these remedies would have cost me hundreds of dollars without any guarantee of success. I decided to wait till annual maintenance in October and see if the issue would be alleviated thanks to some simple solution. Alas the maintenance didn’t solve anything.
In November 2012 when the new heating season started the problem re-appeared again and in December the furnace shutdown cycles extended to 3-5 hours with temperature in the house going down to 16ºC. I called AFG Heating and Cooling, and described the issue. Sometime later Rafi from AFG called me while on the way to my house with the most likely cause of the problem – dirty flame sensor in the furnace. He came to my house, opened the furnace, cleaned the sensor and within 5 minutes the furnace was up and running; and it has been heating the house since that day without a glitch. Rafi mentioned that cleaning the sensor is a part of maintenance procedure that he follows (obviously it wasn’t followed by the other guy in my case). It goes without saying that from now on I don’t want anybody but Rafi to maintain and fix HVAC in my house. In my 20 years of being a homeowner, experienced, knowledgeable and smart technicians are a rare commodity.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $0.00