Furnace Inducer is leaking

[michigan_t]

Hello,

Today, I noticed that I have a puddle of water outside my furnace. After closer investigation, it seems that the leak is coming from the inducer. It seems that this must have been going on for a while, because there is a lot of surface rust on all metal below the inducer. Also, when the furnace shuts off, I can see water dripping down into the bottom of the furnace.

I don't really know how the inducer works, but I have disconnected all the hoses and poked around, and when I disconnected the hoses from the trap (I think that is a trap), water came GUSHING out of the hoses. This only happened one time. I tried it a few hours later (when the furnace was leaking again), and it didn't happen again.

This makes me think that the trap is messed up? But how does the trap break, there are no moving pieces? Could it get clogged? I took it off and ran water through it, and it seems to not be clogged.

Do I need that trap? Can I just take the two hoses that go into the trap and tee them into the drain hose?

What else could be wrong? (in case the trap is not the cause)? The inducer is a swirlwind, and the age of the whole furnace is circa

1991 or so.

Thanks in advance

[michigan_t]

One more item about my problem:

The hose from the exit of my trap connects to a PVC pipe that finally ends up in the floor drain. I just noticed that there are air bubbles pushing through the water that is trapped in the exit hose. (The trap is mounted on the side of the fan housing in the bottom of the furnace, and the hose leading from the exit to the PVC is almost horizontal - maybe only a one inch drop with a horizontal run of about one foot until it connects to the PVC.)

I put a drip pan into the bottom of my furnace to temporarily catch water until my problem is fixed. After doing this, I took the exit hose off of the PCV and put it into the drip pan which had collected a lot of water, and sure enough, it is blowing bubbles into the drip pan. Is that correct? I would think that a trap is supposed to stop exactly this from happening...

Also, I just noticed that there is a small leak from where the inducer is bolted to the sheet metal of the furnace (on the bottom left side). About one drop per

10 seconds is coming out of there. That explains the rust in that corner of the sheet metal. Does the inducer have a replaceable gasket? Is it supposed to be getting this full of water? There are two hoses into the black plastic cover of the inducer. One seems to go from the bottom of the fan into the inducer, and the other hose goes from the bottom right side of the inducer into the trap. Both hoses have water going though them, so it seems to be working correctly. (nothing is plugged). The hose from the fan into the inducer hardly has any water in it, but a lot of air flows out of it when disconnected, so it seems OK...

Can anyone help? I suppose I should just call someone to come fix it, but after reading a lot of other posts, it seems many people are getting screwed by people that don't know how to fix this sort of problem. At least if I can get some info ahead of time, I will know what to expect to hear...

[Bubba]

Just cut the trap out and get rid of it. That was only installed for shipping. Caulk the inducer housing and you should be good for another

20yrs. Hell, you dont need no stinkin repair man. Bubba

[kevin]

Um. Thanks Bubba.

Anyhoo. Yes, you need the trap (don't want exhaust in the house, do you). No it shouldn't leak. Yes, a lot of water is normal. I don't know about bubbles -- mine doesn't. Sounds like you had a leak (still) and a clog (maybe gone now).

-Kevin