Your Home’s Heating System Won’t Turn On? Try This!
You can bet on it, eventually the winds of fate will throw you a curve ball on the coldest day of winter. You’ll wake up, notice it’s a lot colder than usual, and darn, your furnace won’t turn on. (It’ll probably also happen just when you’re about to have company come to stay, or when you’re about to go out of town for a while – it never fails.)
This is extremely frustrating, and of course, you’ll want to get your broken heater fixed as soon as possible.
When it’s time to call your HVAC company for help, we’ll be here, and we’ll be ready to take care of the problem, whether it’s big or small. But before calling your go-to local HVAC repair service when your heating system isn’t running, there are some DIY troubleshooting tips you can try for yourself. Even if you can’t get the heat pump or furnace to turn on yourself, you can at least collect some useful information for your HVAC service company, which can help to narrow down what the problem is, saving the technician some time (and you some money) on your heater repair.
Heating System is Off? Try These Ideas Before Calling in an HVAC Pro
Check to make sure the furnace blower is getting power:
- Is there an on-off switch?
- Has the circuit breaker for the furnace or heat pump tripped?
- Look at the thermostat and make sure it’s set to “heat” and that the temperature setting is higher than the room temperature.
- If the thermostat is battery operated, does it have a fresh battery?
All of these things are issues you can check, address, and possibly even fix on your own. You don’t want a furnace repair technician to show up and discover in the first five minutes that someone accidentally flipped the off switch, the circuit is blown (though that still might warrant a call to your heating service company if the cause isn’t apparent, or if it happens again once you reset it), or someone miss set the thermostat.
If the furnace breakdown was preceded by a banging or rattling in the compartment for the blower motor, this might signal loose or broken machinery, and that can be helpful information to convey over the phone when you call your HVAC repair company for help when your heater won’t turn on.
Sometimes burners get clogged with soot or ashes. When this happens, it’s not unusual to hear small explosions in the furnace as gas accumulates at the opening before it ignites. If a burner gets totally clogged, there’s a good chance your furnace won’t turn on (which is actually a good thing – we need to get in there and clean out the system before getting it going again).
If You Can’t Find the Problem
If your troubleshooting doesn’t uncover anything obvious, or if there are possible issues concerning furnace burners or gas lines, it’s always better to call in an HVAC professional, such as the experienced, certified technicians who work for Jansen Heating & Cooling. Those types of issues aren’t DIY problems, and you’ll need to call in the pros to get your heating system from not running to humming again.
If you have no idea what’s causing the heating system to malfunction, call us. Your Jansen technician will inspect your system, diagnose the problem, explain the issue clearly and comprehensively, then provide a quick-as-possible fix. Anytime your heating system isn’t working, we can be there to help you deal with the headache and get things warm and toasty again ASAP.