Service
Furnace Repair in Ferndale, MI
Gas furnaces that will not start, will not stay lit, or will not keep up. Emergency no-heat calls answered around the clock.
A furnace that quits in a Michigan January is not a scheduling problem. The emergency line runs 24 hours for exactly this, and the shop is on Nine Mile in Ferndale, so the truck is not coming from another county.
What this covers
- No-heat calls on gas furnaces, any age, any brand
- Ignition faults: cracked hot-surface ignitors, dirty flame sensors, failed pilot assemblies
- Blower problems, including seized motors, failed capacitors, and bad control boards
- Short cycling, where the burner lights and drops out again in under a minute
- Limit switch and pressure switch faults, and the venting problems that cause them
- Heat exchanger inspection when there is any reason to suspect a crack
What it usually means when the heat goes
- The blower runs but the air is cool: the burner is not staying lit, most often a flame sensor or ignitor.
- The unit starts, runs briefly, then stops and repeats: short cycling, commonly a clogged filter, a failing limit switch, or a blocked flue.
- You hear a click and nothing follows: no call for heat is reaching the burner, which puts the fault at the thermostat, the transformer, or the board.
- There is a rumble or boom on start-up: delayed ignition, which should be looked at promptly rather than left to see if it repeats.
- The furnace runs constantly and the house still will not warm up: usually airflow, often a duct leak rather than a failing furnace.
Repair or replace
The question every no-heat call eventually reaches is whether the unit is worth fixing. There is no single answer, but there is a sensible way to think about it. A gas furnace generally has a service life somewhere around fifteen to twenty years. Before that, a single failed component is usually worth replacing on its own. After that, the calculation changes, because the next failure is rarely far behind and the parts get harder to source.
The exception in both directions is the heat exchanger. A cracked heat exchanger is not a repair, it is a replacement, regardless of the age of the unit, because it is a combustion-gas problem inside your house. If a technician tells you a heat exchanger is cracked, it is entirely reasonable to ask to see it.
What we will not do is quote you a new system on a unit that needs a sixty dollar part.
Ferndale, Royal Oak, Berkley, Oak Park, Madison Heights, and the rest of the south end of Oakland County. The shop has been at the same Nine Mile address for three generations, which is the short answer to how far we travel.
Furnace repair: common questions
How long does a gas furnace last?
Most residential gas furnaces run fifteen to twenty years. Units that were correctly sized, vented properly, and had their filters changed regularly reach the top of that range and sometimes pass it. Units that were oversized for the house tend to short cycle their whole lives and wear out earlier.
Why does my furnace keep turning on and off?
Short cycling has a handful of usual causes. A filter that has not been changed in a season is the most common and the cheapest. After that, a dirty flame sensor, a failing high-limit switch, a blocked or partly blocked flue, or a furnace that was simply sized too large for the house. The pattern of how long it runs before dropping out narrows it down quickly.
Is it worth repairing a twenty-year-old furnace?
Sometimes. If the failed part is a common one and the rest of the unit is sound, one more repair on a twenty-year-old furnace can be the right call, particularly if it buys you time to replace it in a shoulder season rather than in an emergency in February. If the heat exchanger is compromised, or if the repair approaches a meaningful fraction of a replacement, it stops being worth it.
Why does my furnace smell when the heat comes on for the first time?
A burning-dust smell on the first cold morning of the year is normal. Dust settles on the heat exchanger over the summer and burns off over the first few cycles. A smell that persists past a day, or any smell of gas or of something acrid or electrical, is not normal and is worth a call.
Do you answer the phone at night?
The emergency line runs 24 hours for no-heat and no-cooling calls. Regular scheduling runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm.