You may think that this song is a summer song but when it’s the coldest night of the year and your furnace goes out and you are almost frozen, then you know why Glen is so happy that the heat is on. In the summertime if your air conditioning goes out at least you can cool down a little by getting in front of a fan. But when your cold in the middle of the night all you can do is put more cover on, wishing that the heat was on.
When I was growing up at the start of every winter my brother and I would help daddy start up the furnace. Maybe my brother and me were not much help when we were so little, but looking back now Mama and Daddy were teaching us that you should work for what you got. If you want heat then you don’t just flip a switch there is work to do before the heat comes on. Our furnace was in the attic, it took more work than just opening a door in the hall. The first thing to do is to change the filter, on our furnace this is not like today where there a filter that just slides into a slot, out furnace used a roll filter that was inside the furnace. To replace the filter you first opened up the panel on the inside was a curved metal frame with a filter wrapped around it. One side of the filter was clean but the other side was super dirty. To replace the filter we would remove the metal frame, take it in the front yard take off the old filter then take out the new filter out of the box and unroll the filter then we would place the old filter next to the roll filter making sure it would be the same length as the old filter, then we took a pair of scissors and cut the new to the right length. Next we when back in the attic and try to put the frame back into the slots that the metal glides which also held the filter in place. The problem was there was about 5 different ways to put the filter holder back together and by the time that I measured the new filter I forgot how it went back together. After I finally got the filter in place, the next thing to do was lite the pilot. In order to lite the pilot, we had a 2 foot long metal rod with a slot on the end of it. The slot on the end of the rod was there to place a match on the end of it then lite the match push the pilot lite button in with one hand and with the other hand take the rod with the burning match on the end of it, and put it where you think the pilot is before the match goes out. That is how we did it back in the good old days.
Today I have my own house but instead of the furnace in the attic I have what is know as a package unit outside. The contains both air condition and a natural gas furnace. The other day I was sitting in my chair which located next to a vent. I thought there was something wrong and when I put my hand over the vent there was cold air coming out which was not good. I then went outside to see what was wrong. To explain what was going wrong and why it was cold air instead of warm , I need to tell the big change in how today’s furnace works which is quite different from the good old days. How a furnace works is really simple. When the thermostat calls for heat, the gas valve opens the gas coming out of the burner is lite by the pilot. Then the blower goes on and you have heat. The air from the blower does not blow over the burner, that would blow out the flame, the burner heats up the heat exchanger, which is made out several sheets of metal, the air from the blower first goes though the heat exchanger into the ductwork which goes into the house heating the whole house. How could you improve on that? The answer was to change the way the burner works. In good old days burners inside a furnace looked and operated very much like a burner on a propane gas grill, little blue flames coming out of a bunch holes. The more little blue flames the more heat you would get. Today’s furnaces have what is know as an induction motor. What the induction motor does is what I Think is quite amazing. No longer does a furnace has a burner with a lot of little blue flames, today there are only 3 to 6 flames, but each of the flames are impressive. The draft from the induction motor draws the flames through a portal all the way into the heat exchanger resulting in a hot burning flame. This is far more productive than the old method of several small flames. I went outside and opened the panel and it was easy to tell what was wrong. My unit has 5 portals the problem was only one had flame. I thought I could get my long lighter and light the others, then I thought that may not be a good idea, then I came up with the idea of just blowing on the portal so I blew on it and a large whoos happened well instead of just scaring me the other 4 ignited since it was working and it was dark I closed the panel and went to bed. At about 3:30 in the morning I woke up and the house was cold so I put my shoes on, went outside, blew on the flame which once again ignited all the portals and I went back to bed. The next day after breakfast I took the panel off once again. What I thought could be wrong is there must be an obstruction somewhere that would interrupt the flow of gas for a brief moment, this would result in the 4 portals going out. I took out the induction motor and blew it out with compressed air from my air compressor, took apart each of portals where I could blow them out, blew air everywhere I could, I put everything back together and guess what it worked whatever it was that was blocking the gas flow must had blown out. I was very proud that my heat was once again on.