Gas furnace troubleshooting

[Home Guy]

Tony Hwang full-quoted:

You don't need electronic ignition in order to have an efficient heat-exchanger to give you 90+ efficiency.

That's the real crime here.

I drive an 11-year-old-car that gives me 28 mpg on the highway and still has it's factory-original battery in it. Do you know how much energy is used to build a new car? Tell me how much "carbon" that I haven't put into the atmosphere because of that.

My pilot light uses $10 PER YEAR extra natural gas.

I don't have kids.

Life's too short to have kids.

Tell me now how much I'm saving the environment because of that. Tell me how big my environmental footprint is because I don't have kids. Put that in your high-efficiency furnace and smoke it.

[Tony Hwang]

Hmm, Sounds like you are not normal human. Not main stream.

[Some Guy]

You mean that I don't follow conventional animal instincts (or religeous dogma) by procreating?

It's normal for any animal (including humans) to pollute their environment with abandon and with disregard to their own welfare or that of the environment or future generations.

Reducing energy usage, forced increases in efficiency by regulation, or recycling, is also "nor normal" for humans.

All of the environmental crises that the world now faces has it's root cause in human population growth. You fools think that simply driving a prius, putting your aluminum cans and newspaper at the curb for recycling, and spending thousands on new HVAC for your house every 10 years means that you can continue to pop-out kids and everything will be ok. Nobody wants to touch the issue of "too many people", especially in the insanely religeous USA where the thinking is "you can never have enough people because that's what god wants".

[jamesgangnc]

No, we think that doing those things is possible and changing the fact that we have 6 billion people on the planet is unlikely. So instead of pissing and moaning about it some of us try to be more considerate of our resource consumption. There is planty of resources if we go about using them more intelligently. Curbing the population is a good idea but there is always going to be billions of people on the planet so we have to start doing some of the other things as well. We will run out of fossil fuels. We're running out of many easily accessed raw materals. Now we have to reusing what we have.

[RogerT]

[trader4]

Most furnaces like this have at least a few LEDs on the control board that show error information. Have you looked?

[Bobo]

I found I could keep the thing running if it stayed warm between cycles. My habit is to turn the heat down at night and it would not work in the morning. If I heat it up with an electric heater it works fine. I ordered a new flame sensor which arrived yesterday. I put that in but it's so cold here now I don't want to mess with letting it get real cold and restarting. I'm hoping the flame sensor does the trick but the preheating business makes me think elecronics so I'll see.

[Bobo]

Yes the LED burns steady which is supposed to be all OK.

[RogerT]

Thanks. If you do get it figured out, let us know. I would be curious to know what the problem turned out to be.

[Bobo]

The new flame sensor seems to have done the trick. I've turned it down real low a couple of nights and it seems to be working fine. The old flame sensor looked almost new when I first took it out and was at least elevn years without cleaning. Cleaning didn't do any good though.

[RogerT]

Thanks again for the follow-up. It's always good to learn what the final outcome was. Glad it worked.