Well, looks like we made the wrong choice when it came to not renewing the home warranty. We came back from Thanksgiving to find our house cold once again (good thing our cats have such nice warm coats!). The circuit board had been replaced, but the furnace didn't seem to be keeping up with the set temperature, and didn't get above 66 degrees on Monday. We called the service company back, and since I had taken the day off already, meeting them wasn't a big problem. I had planned on spending the day working on the blog, finalizing xmas plans and checking out the Cyber Monday deals. Instead I spent most of the day fussing over the furnace.
The service technician looked at the unit late in the afternoon and said that the motor for the blower desperately needed to be cleaned, and that's why it wasn't working, then left without fixing anything. He showed me where it needed to be cleaned, and it was pretty nasty.
(Sorry for the bad focus, we had to squeeze into the furnace to get an angle on the fan. Please note that this looks dusty and nasty--you should have seen the interior of the fan housing when the fan was replaced. Our house, the rest of the furnace and the utility room are all quite clean and well-maintained. It's like a nightmare was hiding in the furnace.)
Since we're new to this household management thing, and the manager wasn't calling us back, we were beginning to feel like colossal idiots who were getting screwed. We used a shop vac and a damp rag to clean off the motor as the tech had shown me, and the dang thing still wouldn't work.
I called them up this morning, and they were getting ready to send someone out to clean the unit for free, so it looked like we were on the right track. He arrived, and said the furnace and motor looked fine, and couldn't figure out what wasn't working. After some examination of the ducts, we discovered there was cold air coming out of the return vents. Since the motor was running in the correct direction, that didn't make any sense.
He did some more digging, and finally opened up the top of the furnace and found an unholy mess on the evaporator coils of the A/C portion of the unit. The interior of the evaporator coils was completely caked with dirt and cat fur and who knows what else. And it was baked on there too.
(Mesh-like metal webbing coated in who knows what.)
(This isn't the greatest picture, but it's the outside of the evaporator coils, and shows what the metal webbing should look like.)
He had to cut the freon line and who knows what else to get the coils out to clean them. He said that since our house is so clean (glad someone thinks so) and the newness of the unit, it was very unusual to see so much buildup on the coils. Due to the amount, he thought it had probably been accumulating since well before we moved in. Since the furnace blows the warm air past the coils, all of our problems lately had been cascading down from the warm air having nowhere to go -- melting the circuit board, etc. Watching him remove all that crud was fascinating to say the least. After a couple of hours spent figuring out the problem and taking apart the furnace, he got everything put back together. And discovered that the fan motor was shot. It would occasionally work, but would cut out for no reason.
Net of the story is that unless we replace the fan motor, we're going to continue to have problems. We haven't got the quote on the motor yet, but just with the work done thus far, the home warranty would have paid for itself, just 30 days into the term. D'oh! We didn't have to pay for the labor to clean the furnace today, but we already paid for the circuit board and we're going to have to pay to replace the motor.
Related:
Budget disaster narrowly avoided
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