No heat is an emergency. We treat it like one.

What we find most often

• Dirty flame sensor. Furnace lights, runs 4 to 8 seconds, shuts down, tries again. Cleanable in ten minutes.
• Cracked hot surface igniter. No flame at all, board flashing a lockout code. Common part, on the van.
• Failed pressure switch or blocked vent. Often a bird nest, an ice plug in the PVC intake, or a condensate blockage in a 90% unit.
• Inducer motor bearings. Loud whine or grind on startup, then a lockout.
• Short cycling on a dirty filter or closed returns. The limit switch is doing its job; the airflow is the problem.
• Cracked heat exchanger. The one we hate finding. We test it with a combustion analyzer and show you the reading. If it's cracked, the furnace gets shut off — that's a carbon monoxide risk, not an upsell.

What it costs

Diagnostic is $95 during normal hours. Flame sensor cleaning and minor adjustments usually finish at the diagnostic plus a small parts charge. An igniter runs about $220 – $290 installed, a pressure switch $240 – $340, an inducer assembly $550 – $900, a gas valve $600 – $950. Every one of those is quoted before we install it.

While you wait for us

• If you smell gas, leave the house and call UGI or your gas utility from outside first, then call us.
• Set the thermostat to heat and turn it up 5 degrees so the call for heat is clear.
• Open interior doors and keep the basement door open so warm air circulates.
• Below 20 degrees outside, open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls and let a faucet drip. Frozen pipes cost more than the furnace repair.

Repair or replace

Rough rule we use out loud with customers: if the furnace is over 18 years old and the repair is more than a third of a new furnace, replacement is usually the better spend. Under 12 years, fix it. In between, we lay out both numbers and you pick. See furnace installation for what a replacement involves.