Raped by the furnace repairman... (Long story Part 1)
Posted by Ferdinand
|
Arrrrrr... bend over Billy.
My natural gas furnace stopped working. It's cold in the house when we wake up in the morning. My wife calls the furnace repairman. He can't come until sometime between 10am and noon, which means someone has to take the morning off work, staying home to wait for the repairman. Meanwhile I go take a look at the furnace myself. The problem is immediately apparent. Normally, when the thermostat signals the furnace to turn on, it first starts a small fan to pull a draft through the burner and up the exhaust chimney, then a relay clicks on and the igniter starts to glow red hot. A few seconds later the solenoid in the gas valve thunks open and feeds natural gas to the burner element, where the gas is ignited by the red hot igniter element. A thermocouple sticking into the flame path then immediately starts getting hot, which confirms to the controller that we have a good flame, and away we go. Cozy warm house. But not this time. The thermostat is working fine. I hear it click when I turn the temperature up, and in the basement the fan starts up. Listening to the furnace, I can hear the thunk of the gas solenoid valve opening, then a second later it thunks closed again. End of story. No ignition. No heat. Open up the covers on the furnace to watch it run through the cycle again. Aha! The igniter is not glowing red hot like it should be to start the flame. When the gas solenoid opens, in the absence of a flame the thermocouple senses no temperature increase, so the computer immediately shuts the gas solenoid valve again, and the furnace safely shuts down dead cold. One (1) simple solitary individual lonely little, did I mention the number one (1), single philips screw holds the ignitor in place, with a handy easily disconnectable electrical plug. It literally takes less than 30 seconds to remove the igniter from the furnace. The igniter looks like this: 
On mine, there was an obvious crack in the blackened heating element of the igniter, breaking the electrical circuit. There's nothing wrong with the rest of the furnace. I just needs a new igniter. In the mean time, I cycle the thermostat one more time, the relay clicks in the furnace, the fan starts. Obviously, since I just removed it, the igniter is not going to start the flame, so I wait for the gas solenoid to thunk open and simply light the furnace with my barbecue lighter. The flame sensor thermocouple confirms we have a flame, and the furnace happily heats the house to normal temperature. Eureka! Of course after the furnace shuts down normally, it won't restart again automatically until I replace the igniter, or manually start it each time with my barbecue lighter. But the immediate emergency has passed. We're not going to freeze. Call the repairman, cancel the appointment. We don't have to miss work. We'll both get to the office on time and I'll run to the local Home Depot and buy a new igniter during my lunch break. How much could it possibly cost? It's probably manufactured in China for less than $5, so it'll cost $50 at Home Depot. I can live with that, as long as it avoids an expensive visit from the furnace repairman. I'm such a naive fool. Nothing is ever that simple. Continued in Part 2... |
|
i am on the edge of my seat. has part 3 happened yet? or is it coming up in the future?
|
We'll never find out...Ferd has frozen solid and won't be heard from until the Spring that 
I know what Ferd's going through though. The thermocouple on my furnace quit and the repair guy wanted way more than I thought it was worth. My wife's cousin works for the gas company so he sent someone over and it was fixed for free(well not completely free; I had to pay the original guy $50 for the call). I saved enough for a nice dinner out! |
|
I'm not allowed to purchase and install a new igniter by myself, so I'm forced to call the furnace repairman. It's winter. We need a working furnace.
He's busy. He can't get to my house until 3pm. That's okay with me, because I'm calling him on my cellphone from the retail outlet which, you guessed it, is at the opposite end of the city from where I live and it'll take me a while to get home anyway before the repairman arrives to meet me there. I get there at 2:30 hoping to put the furnace back together and pack away my tools before he arrives. He gets there at 2:31. Damn. So I meet him at the door with the cracked and non-functioning igniter in my hand. He takes one look at it and says, "It's cracked. It won't work like that. Just a moment I'll get a new one from the truck." When he comes back with a new igniter, I explain how I determined the fault was with the igniter. He says the house call will cost me the standard $139 "diagnostic" fee, regardless of the fact that I have already correctly diagnosed the fault all by myself. Doesn't matter. It'll cost $139 for him to set foot in my house in any case. Damn. Okay. I figured I was going to get reamed for this anyway. But I really do need to have the furnace operating again, so let's do it. He's unpacking all his gear, all the while lecturing me on how I shouldn't be touching the furnace. I could blow myself up. I could blow the entire house up. I could blow the entire neighbourhood up! I just about choked trying to hold back any smart replies as to how you really don't need to be a rocket scientist to do this job, figuring I probably shouldn't risk offending the guy, since nobody else in the entire city, which I'd almost blown up, was willing to sell me the part I needed to fix the furnace myself. Then he insisted that I show him exactly what all I touched in the furnace while messing around in there. Well, gee shucks, I removed this here one single solitary retaining screw, and unplugged this here single electrical connector. (I thought it best not to mention though that I'd manually lit the furnace with my barbeque lighter.) Oh yes, I also cleaned the air filter for good measure while I was at it. Good enough? No, not good enough. He's not allowed to restart the furnace until he has verified that the entire system is in good operating order. No telling what sort of damage I, an untrained and unlicensed amateur, may have caused while poking around in this nuclear reactor core. So he spends exactly 30 seconds plugging in the new igniter, then wastes another half an hour measuring gas pressures, core temperatures, duct temperatures and whatever else, before declaring the furnace to be safe and operating properly. Let's go write up the bill. I had already agreed to the totally unnecessary but compulsory $139 "diagnostic" fee, and I guessed the new igniter would cost about $50. So I just about dropped dead of a heart attack when he presented me with a bill totalling... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $475.00 
What the..?!? You trying to tell me that igniter costs $300??? No, that was the extra charge plus taxes, on top of the $139 diagnostic fee and the igniter cost, for the half-hour safety verification. That's nucking futs!!! How can this kind of piracy be legal? The worst part was, I finally came to my senses today and did a Google search for that part number, which is what I should have done first. I discovered that I could have ordered the exact same part from this source and had it shipped overnight by courier. Cost of the igniter: $25. |
|
you should get certified and start providing your own services for people, beating the prices of others.
|
He would still blow people up if he wasn't in the union 
It's a nicely rigged system...to get certified you have to be in the union and you can't get into the union unless you apprentice and spend 4 years as a union member. Once you have 4 years union experience then you can take the certification program
|
|
Hindsight is always 20/20. You did what you had to do given the information you had. If you had known you could get the part overnight from the net you would not have called the repair man. We have all done similar things... if only we had known. That is life. No one likes to pay more for something than they should, but then again not everyone is as handy as you are. If you only really knew how much some things cost. That shirt you are wearing probably cost less than $1 to make, and you paid $20 for it. Does it make you sick to know that? If I could get 250 shirts for $250 I would buy them and have a supply for the rest of my life and hope I don't gain 100 pounds. Heck at that price I could wear a shirt once and not bother to wash it and throw it in the rag bin. Anyway the point I am trying to make is that you probably pay a lot more than you realize on many items you buy every day. It doesn't feel like you need to break out the Vaseline because you have no idea what that item really cost to produce. I think we would all go nuts if we had that mindset. Hope your behind heals fast
|
This news has really got to make Ferd feel good
|
What? A $25 igniter is 4x as expensive as a $100 BMW complete cylinder head?
alan |
|
Soo sorry Ferdy.
Did I tell you the reason I gave my old mechanics "the boot" becuase they charged me $378 to replace the postage stamp size gasket on the TOP on the engine. It's where the coolant pre-warms the gasoline. I'm sure you know it much better than I. Did you buy a spare ignigtor yet? Maybe a small fan motor too?  (I wish we had a dancing Smily.)
Long live the BBQ lighter, Kelly B) |
Sorry, only registered users may post in this forum.