Everything You Should Know About Heat Pumps
How Are Furnace Maintenance And Overheating Related?
Jessica Jimenez
Your furnace may be responsible for heating your home, but that doesn't mean that it's impervious to the effects of heat. Overheating is one of the most dangerous conditions your furnace can experience since high heat levels will likely damage the heat exchanger. A damaged or cracked heat exchanger won't just ruin your furnace, it can also expose you to toxic and potentially fatal exhaust gases.
The good news is that your furnace has a substantial amount of safety equipment to prevent these failures. More importantly, overheating and heat exchanger cracks don't often happen without an underlying cause. In many cases, the likelihood of your furnace overheating comes down to your maintenance habits.
The Importance of Airflow
Your furnace generates heat by burning fuel in its combustion chamber and using its heat exchanger to extract heat energy from the exhaust stream. As a result, the area around the heat exchanger can become exceptionally warm. Your house blower motor pushes this warm air throughout your home, providing heat to keep you warm through the winter.
Without adequate airflow, heat will tend to accumulate around the heat exchanger. This excess heat creates a situation known as a "high limit" condition. In other words, your furnace detects that the temperature near the heat exchanger is much too high and shuts down to prevent damage. While the limit switch helps avoid a catastrophic failure, repeated overheating events can stress the exchanger.
It's crucial that you don't attempt to override your furnace's limit switch or reset it when experiencing repeated high limit conditions. Each time you allow your furnace to overheat, you place more stress on the heat exchanger, reducing its lifespan and risking significant damage.
The Airflow and Maintenance Connection
While your furnace can potentially overheat for several reasons, poor maintenance is one of the most likely causes. For example, failing to change your air filter on time can result in a significant airflow restriction. Your furnace will struggle to pull air across the heat exchanger, placing extra stress on the blower motor and allowing the furnace to overheat.
Other maintenance issues can also cause your furnace to overheat, including soot build-up on the heat exchanger. While these problems may indicate that something else is wrong with your furnace, they're the kind of issue that a technician is likely to discover during a routine maintenance visit. Noticing these problems early on will allow you to fix them before they cause more damage.
Damaging your heat exchanger can shave years off the life of your furnace and create a potentially hazardous situation in your home. Keeping on top of your furnace filter changes and scheduling routine annual maintenance visits are two of the best ways to avoid this situation and ensure your furnace can operate reliably and safely. Keep these tips in mind when looking for furnace maintenance services near you.
Share
Hello. My name is Josiah. I am a 44-year-old married dad of three. I work in the automotive industry and love what I do. Recently, my heating and cooling unit stopped working. I did a lot of research on what type of heating element I should install in my home. I wanted something energy efficient, yet reliable and lasting. After a lot of research, I settled on a heat pump. A heat pump is a great heating and cooling element that many people don't yet know about. I created this blog to help educate other people on heat pumps and answer questions related to it. If you need a new heating or cooling device for your home, I hope my website helps explain to you what a heat pump is and how it can be beneficial.