If you’re like many homeowners here in the Florence area, there’s a good chance that you use a gas-powered furnace to keep your home and family warm. Furnaces are a great choice—both powerful and cost-efficient when properly installed and well-maintained. Today’s furnaces have an even higher efficiency rating than ever before. In fact, the highest rating now available for a gas furnace is 98%.
But this efficiency doesn’t mean much if you aren’t using your furnace as safely as possible. Furnaces are not inherently dangerous, but there are components within them that could cause one to become dangerous if it misses professional services, such as annual tune-ups.
The heat exchanger is one example of this. A cracked heat exchanger is definitely a potential hazard, and we’re going to dive into the “why” behind this below. While this problem is more common in an older system (10–15 years old), we encourage you to keep this information on hand and stay on top of your maintenance appointments even if you have a brand new system! Read on to learn more.
It can be easy to ignore some of the sounds coming from the systems and appliances in your home. This is because it’s easier to deny something that may be amiss, since fixing the problem can be an expensive inconvenience. However, there really are some noises that should never be ignored. While a rattle, for example, might signal nothing more than a loose panel on the cabinet that you can tighten yourself, it could alternatively suggest that you have a cracked heat exchanger—which is a much more serious problem.
