As the temperatures eased into fall weather and the clocks fell back an hour, the dreaded time of year when it starts to get dark by 5 pm was upon us. Having just moved from early to mid-November, the focus on fall weather was quickly shifting towards winter weather at times. The temperatures dropped, and it became clear that it was time to focus on turning on my heating unit at my house.
I always try to abstain from turning it on as long as possible to avoid the large gas bill that inevitably comes with it in the colder months. But many times, my hand is forced. Recently, the temperature dropped into the 40s during the day, and I was forced to turn on the heater. I set the thermostat to heat and to around 68°F as my family and I went to sleep. When I woke up, the downstairs was reading 61° and the upstairs was reading 58°. I knew something was wrong but didn’t know exactly what was happening.
It took some trial and error to figure it out
My heating didn’t come on that day
I work from home, so it was easy for me to be around to check on what was going on with the heater. I have a single-zone HVAC system, so the heat has to do the best it can to rise in order to heat the house. It’s what the house had when I moved in, so I haven’t spent money on a new HVAC system. While I have a smart thermostat to try and keep energy costs down, it has to push the air up two stories to heat the whole house. I could hear the gas turning on, but never heard the igniter actually clicking on or the flames fire up.
Something was going on inside the heat exchanger, I thought, causing the heater not to turn on. When I opened the panel door, there was some water by the furnace draft inducer blower, which was surprising. I hadn’t remembered ever seeing water there before, and there are basically three pipes that lead into that area: one sending air outside my house, another dispelling heat into the house, and the other connecting to the whole house humidifier.
A friend of mine is an HVAC specialist, and he came over to take a look at it. As we were trying to deduce the cause of the water, he opened up the small return at the bottom of the heater panel. It was filled with water. From what he told me, moisture can build up there and then, once it hits a certain level, it empties out through a small pipe into my drain. We could see that the pipe was working because occasionally water was trickling into the drain.
But why was so much water coming into the unit? He took off the draft inducer blower and emptied out the water that had built up in it. By doing that, it allowed the furnace to kick on. We thought the problem was solved.
The cause of the problem became clearer
We added a band-aid to the problem
While the heater worked for about an hour, it shut off again and the temperature in the house plummeted. My friend came back over, and we took things apart again, finding more water in the system and a return that kept filling up. There was a decent amount of water in the unit somehow. We were going to have to pull it out of there to keep the heater running and stop more from building up.
There is a summer and a winter nozzle on the humidifier. One helps the flue stay open, and the other closes it. This dictates how much humidity is being added to the air in your house.
He checked the levels in the heat exchanger portion of the unit and found that there weren’t any leaks inside there, meaning there was no danger of carbon monoxide leaking or anything like that. That’s when I noticed that the humidifier was still switched to summer mode and the humidistat setting was still set to a humidity percentage conducive to hotter months. I didn’t know if this was the problem, but we quickly deduced that it likely wasn’t helping.
Shutting it off and continuing to empty the return helped pull the remaining water out of the heating unit. Longer stretches of having the heater firing up and running continued. There seemed to be no more issues with it failing to fire.
Properly maintaining the house humidifier
It’s important to know what to do
There is a summer and a winter nozzle on the humidifier. One helps the flue stay open, and the other closes it. This dictates how much humidity is being added to the air in your house. You typically want to add more humidity to the air when it’s cold out, as the air is drier. What was eventually deduced was that the setting was too high on the humidistat.
This caused more moisture buildup, which then fed back into the heating unit. That shouldn’t have happened, and there was a clogged filter that was also affecting the humidifier. I hadn’t cleaned it properly, and it backed up, leading to more problems. In order to keep your humidifier working properly, it’s important to make sure the setting is correct for the type of weather you have and that the percentage on the humidistat is adjusted to reflect the weather change as well. I scheduled a routine maintenance check on my heating unit as well to occur regularly every few months to make sure my AC and heating units are working well.
The humidifier isn’t something I really thought about
I’ve only owned my house for about two years and had lived in apartments for much of my adult life before that. I was never focused on the humidifier portion of the heater, and that’s my own fault. I should have kept an eye on all things heating related so that something like this didn’t happen at the worst time. Luckily, we were able to stop the issue before a larger one occurred, and getting it treated by a specialist helps maintain the unit to extend its life.
