Life is busy especially at this time of year! With all of the running around shopping, cooking, and preparing for parties, furnace care often falls to the wayside. Months may pass without ever thinking about the heating system, and suddenly there is a breakdown. You travel down to the unit, pull the filter, and find that it is packed with debris and dust. This seems to be the cause of your breakdown. Unfortunately, you haven’t stocked up on replacements, so you figure that for the time being you will just let the unit run without a filter until you can get to the store.
The furnace starts back up and everything seems to be working fine. The only problem is you never do remember to replace the filter, and in a matter of weeks you have a very costly furnace repair on your hands. Running a furnace without a filter is like a death sentence for the unit’s internal components. It is one of the biggest heating mistakes you can make, and here at Four Seasons we find this mistake a lot more than we would like to.
Running the Furnace without a Filter
The filter does a lot more than just clean the air in your home. It also protects the furnace from the dust and debris that is in the air that is circulated through the furnace. When the furnace is ran without a filter, all of those particles that would have been caught by the filter are allowed to come into contact with some of the main parts of your furnace like the blower motor and the heat exchanger. Depending on the level of particles in the air, it could take a couple months or maybe even a few weeks before these components are completely coated in particles.
Clogging the Blower Motor
For a component like the blower motor, the fins that spin to circulate air through the home will become clogged. In the best case scenario this will reduce airflow throughout the home which will lower the systems efficiency and drive up the energy bills. In the worst case scenario, the motor will break and need to be replaced completely. That is one costly repair that can be avoided with a simple, low cost filter replacement.
What Should I Do?
If you have been running your furnace without a filter and have been lucky enough to not have any problems yet, you need to call Four Seasons. The sooner you have one of our servicemen out, the better the chance you have of saving your furnace from major repairs. Our serviceman will need to do a full inspection and 20+ point cleaning and tune up to get the unit back in shape. He will expertly assess the condition of the system, and will even be equipped with replacement filters.
The best thing you can do for your furnace is stock up on filters. At the beginning of the furnace season, purchase enough filters to last you the entire heating season, and you won’t have to worry about remembering to buy one ever time the filter needs to be replaced. Couple this with a yearly tune-up from Four Seasons, and your furnace will be in the best condition possible to provide your family with reliable heat the entire winter season.
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Tags: blower motor, Chicago, dust, filter replacement, Four Seasons, Furnace, furnace cleaning, furnace filter, Homewood, IL, maintenance, Oak Lawn, Tinley Park
Heat systems will always be worth focusing on whenever you’re situated in the countries where the cold months play a very predominant part in the weather factors.