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"Kept hearing a thumping sound in the house this morning. Thought it was squirrles landing ..."


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Gas Furnace Problem
Old 12-16-2007, 09:38 PM   #1
Motxla
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Default Gas Furnace Problem

Kept hearing a thumping sound in the house this morning. Thought it was squirrles landing on the roof until I heard a loud noise in the furnace.

Assume it was due to an accumulation of gas due to some cause of slow ignition. Have a call into a tech. Erratic problem. Looked at the burners , those that were burning were burning clean, but the second rack (six dual racks of burners) wasn't burning hardly at all. Do the burners ignite in sequence and due to the second rack out, this could cause the delayed ignition of all burners? Clogged orifice?

Anyone got any thoughts? Yeah, it's shut off until service guy arrives.
 
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Old 04-13-2008, 03:19 PM   #2
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Did you find a solution? I am having the same problem and my furnace repairman who has always been quite good can not fix it and does not know what to try next.
 
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Old 04-14-2008, 02:02 AM   #3
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Yes, if you see a "rack" of burners that are not igniting your getting a delayed ignition from the raw gas this set of unlit burners is dumping out. Some times they set the pilot to just ignite one of the burners initially, then well before a delayed ignition can occur the flame jumps off the burner closest to the pilot and onto the rest. Some times to further avoid delayed ignitions a manufacturer will run like a pilot tube across all the burners.

When you're looking at it if you see something that looks like a small gas line running either above or below all the burners and having a lot of small holes in it this could be your problem, part of it may be plugged with soot or rust, just wire brush the surface and poke out all the little holes.

If you don't see anything like this then you'll need to pull the burner that isn't lighting and is closest to those that are, the very small orifice on that one is likely plugged (doesn't take much). This allows the gas to build up in the combustion chamber until there is just the right amount of gas air mixture to create the delayed ignition and sometimes get the other burners to light, or flash out all of them and causing this cycle to repeat itself.

Many people and even techs get lazy and just try to poke a small piece of wire into the orifices to clean them. This isn't the correct way to do it, all you end up doing is pushing what ever was causing the plug in the first place (plus more stuff) back into the orifice where its eventually just going to plug again. Make sure you or the tech unscrews the orifices out of the burner manifold and cleans them, don't let the tech get away with just pushing the debris back in, it will work likely long enough for his labor warranty to run out, then you'll be right back at this same problem.
 
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Old 04-14-2008, 02:09 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoC View Post
Did you find a solution? I am having the same problem and my furnace repairman who has always been quite good can not fix it and does not know what to try next.
That's kind of scarey, if an actual service tech, even a mediocer one, is physically looking at it and can't figure out the problem then I'm not sure anyone over the internet who can't even see it is going to be much help to you. If it has an electric spark ignition you could be getting an intermittent failure from the spark module.

Is the problem just that everything is working while your tech was there and only failing when he's gone (I hate this more than anything), or is it actually not working while he's there and he still can't figure out the problem. If its not working while he's there and he can't figure out the problem then fire the guy and call a different company.

If it is working when he's there, its tough to find a problem when everything is working. Hard to fix something that isn't broke (while he's there looking at it), and very expensive to have him move into your house to watch the thing for days waiting for the failure to show up. If it is an electric ignition I'd probably at some point make a wild guess and just replace the module, clean and reposition the spark electrode.
 
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Problem solved
Old 04-16-2008, 01:18 AM   #5
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Smile Problem solved

Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoC View Post
Did you find a solution? I am having the same problem and my furnace repairman who has always been quite good can not fix it and does not know what to try next.
It apparently was a clogged orifice. Didn't actually find anything, but pulled the burners out, cleaned everything, and it worked pefectly with nice balanced flames across the burners. The tech was on the job about 45 minutes.
 
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Old 05-14-2008, 03:00 AM   #6
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Please tell me he did a "CO" test before he left. It is the silent killer.
 
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