Tips to care for your heater

You may want to leave your Philadelphia heater repair to someone else, but it's just as much your responsibility as that of your HVAC technician. Although your repair service can come to your home as often as you like, you can take care of your heater too. Here are a few tips:

Your furnace, boiler or electric thermostat is a complex system. These devices are comprised of hundreds of individual components that all work together to perform the delicate task of moving heat energy from one place to another so that you can enjoy it. It's up to you to keep track of these parts and make sure that they're up to the task.

For instance, you may decide not to replace a backup temperature sensor after the thermostat control panel says it burned out because your furnace still seems to function fine. This is all well and good until the main sensor also goes; then, you'll have to shut down the entire furnace and sit on your hands in the cold until the repair service arrives. If you had just taken the time to correct the defective part when the issue originally occurred, you wouldn't find yourself in such an unpleasant situation after the fact.

Also, remember that one bad part can easily lead to the breakage of others. For instance, a system fan that isn't cooling a vital control circuit properly may allow the circuit to overheat in the hot space near your furnace. From there, the unregulated heating coils could cause other components to burn out or create fire hazards. Once again, the original problem was relatively simple, but the interconnected nature of modern heating systems means that a small issue always has the potential to create a myriad of others.

Some professionals even recommend that working furnaces shouldn't have parts that are more than a decade old. While this may not be the case for all models, it's important to get to know your system and familiarize yourself with its operating requirements.

Don't be afraid to crack open a manual and read the manufacturer's instructions. It may not be as entertaining as your favorite blog or magazine, but you'll probably pick up a few tricks on important maintenance tasks that you should have been doing all along. Many furnaces and HVAC systems include basic parts that homeowners can service safely, and taking care of these components (like a filter) goes a long way towards making your HVAC unit last.

Finally, remember to be timely about your repairs and preemptive maintenance. Don't delay checkups or assume that things will be fine this year just because they were good last season. For instance, it's critical to have a service person check your heater every year before the weather gets cold, and you start putting the system through its paces. Although this may represent an extra expense that you have to budget for, the cost of catching problems before they spiral out of control is generally way cheaper than paying for complete overhauls later.