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Jan. 23rd, 2007 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSo I'm sitting here after supper, contemplating what to say to you people today. Before I could make a whole lot of headway on the subject of winter apples or the discussion in the Economist about world economy winners and losers or the music for DDR or how I successfully returned the (wrong) dishes today despite poor parking by the Fish and Game Commission, the phone rang.
The nice tenants (don't sell drugs, don't fight with other tenants, park responsibly, do not maintain pets, are not trashing the apartment, DO pay the rent) back of 321 bought another five gallons (really more like twenty) of fuel oil. Their furnace, it no workie. In fact, the girl on the phone allows as how when she pushes the red reset button, nothing happens. Right.
So I drive in. The red reset button, she is pushed in already. However, I know the secret of the wee lever BESIDE the red reset button and I make the red reset button be all outened again. And THEN I push the red reset button. It stays pushed in. Nothing happens. No click-y, no whirr-y, no nothing.
Hrm.
I toddle over to the fuse box and inspect it. There are no fuses blown. Ergo, the electric is probably still working from the last time I traced wires and checked it all out, back when I replaced the controls for this furnace sometime a lot earlier in the heating season.
Perhaps nothing is happening because the furnace, she does not feel that there needs to be heat? Tenant's house is not horribly cold. I take trusty screwdriver (the one for prying-and-electrics, not the one for screwing) and jump the wires labled T (there are two of them) on the side of the control box. Voila! There is clicking and whirring. I take screwdriver off. Furnace stops again.
Aha! The thermostat is not calling for heat. (This explains why the furnace isn't TRYING to fire when we push the red button. One mystery solved.)
I tell tenant to go up stairs and turn the thermostat pretty high.
I push the red reset button. The furnace clicks and whirrs, but there is no firing. Right. I fetch out my 7/16 wrench (on my work keys, along with the 3/8 wrench, these being the sizes used to bleed furnaces in my world) and I go to bleed the furnace. Twice I push the red button and watch foamy fuel ooze out of the bleed valve. Each time, it starts spitting out pretty good and then oozes to a drizzle *before* the furnace quits. It never gets pretty and solid red like it should. The fuel pump pumps the same amount all the time. There's no reason that the fuel should start out pretty good and then ooze to a drizzle, except if the fuel pump does not have any fuel to pump.
I have seen this before. It is probably a fuel filter problem. Now, we just replaced the fuel filter in this exact same furnace not terribly long ago... January 3, as it happens. You can read about that instance here in case the memory isn't a blade in your soul like it is in mine. (Any more blades in my soul and I'm going to have to start having NCS with my older brother while letting my dykey pink-haired roommate fight duels for the right to remain engaged to me.)
While there is apparently no limit to the number of ways I can fail to fix a furnace, I do seem to be able to remember the ways I've failed previously and not-repeat-them so much in the interests of failure-reduction. (I believe most people call this learning instead of failure-reduction, but what the hell. It is what it is.)
I replaced the fuel filter on the furnace. It was heavy with particulate gunk. Lots of particulate gunk, there. I didn't think it would be all that crufty, but there was lots of particulate cruft in the cuppy holder thing for the filter, too, so I used some of the bleed fluid to rinse that out. I put everything back together. I bled the fuel line (again, since it was all full of air due to being opened up for the filter-replacing) and the furnace fired and ran. Huzzah!
The nice tenants (don't sell drugs, don't fight with other tenants, park responsibly, do not maintain pets, are not trashing the apartment, DO pay the rent) back of 321 bought another five gallons (really more like twenty) of fuel oil. Their furnace, it no workie. In fact, the girl on the phone allows as how when she pushes the red reset button, nothing happens. Right.
So I drive in. The red reset button, she is pushed in already. However, I know the secret of the wee lever BESIDE the red reset button and I make the red reset button be all outened again. And THEN I push the red reset button. It stays pushed in. Nothing happens. No click-y, no whirr-y, no nothing.
Hrm.
I toddle over to the fuse box and inspect it. There are no fuses blown. Ergo, the electric is probably still working from the last time I traced wires and checked it all out, back when I replaced the controls for this furnace sometime a lot earlier in the heating season.
Perhaps nothing is happening because the furnace, she does not feel that there needs to be heat? Tenant's house is not horribly cold. I take trusty screwdriver (the one for prying-and-electrics, not the one for screwing) and jump the wires labled T (there are two of them) on the side of the control box. Voila! There is clicking and whirring. I take screwdriver off. Furnace stops again.
Aha! The thermostat is not calling for heat. (This explains why the furnace isn't TRYING to fire when we push the red button. One mystery solved.)
I tell tenant to go up stairs and turn the thermostat pretty high.
I push the red reset button. The furnace clicks and whirrs, but there is no firing. Right. I fetch out my 7/16 wrench (on my work keys, along with the 3/8 wrench, these being the sizes used to bleed furnaces in my world) and I go to bleed the furnace. Twice I push the red button and watch foamy fuel ooze out of the bleed valve. Each time, it starts spitting out pretty good and then oozes to a drizzle *before* the furnace quits. It never gets pretty and solid red like it should. The fuel pump pumps the same amount all the time. There's no reason that the fuel should start out pretty good and then ooze to a drizzle, except if the fuel pump does not have any fuel to pump.
I have seen this before. It is probably a fuel filter problem. Now, we just replaced the fuel filter in this exact same furnace not terribly long ago... January 3, as it happens. You can read about that instance here in case the memory isn't a blade in your soul like it is in mine. (Any more blades in my soul and I'm going to have to start having NCS with my older brother while letting my dykey pink-haired roommate fight duels for the right to remain engaged to me.)
While there is apparently no limit to the number of ways I can fail to fix a furnace, I do seem to be able to remember the ways I've failed previously and not-repeat-them so much in the interests of failure-reduction. (I believe most people call this learning instead of failure-reduction, but what the hell. It is what it is.)
I replaced the fuel filter on the furnace. It was heavy with particulate gunk. Lots of particulate gunk, there. I didn't think it would be all that crufty, but there was lots of particulate cruft in the cuppy holder thing for the filter, too, so I used some of the bleed fluid to rinse that out. I put everything back together. I bled the fuel line (again, since it was all full of air due to being opened up for the filter-replacing) and the furnace fired and ran. Huzzah!
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 02:29 am (UTC)Come fix my fridge if the spouse fails to do so.
Of course, I'm hoping he will do it, and I can fawn all over him.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 11:47 am (UTC)Learning from prior issues
Date: 2007-01-24 03:20 pm (UTC)The key here is that when you acquire knowledge the hard way (method 3), that you do not make the same mistake twice. Once is ignorance, which is forgivable. Twice is stupidity. The decision tree for furnace fixing will be ever-expanding.