Prepare Your Heater for Winter Today!
Get your mittens ready, some hot cocoa, and get ready to hear all the holiday tunes on the radio because winter is coming! Okay, so winter is still a little ways off, but it’s good to start thinking about it now. Why? Cocoa and mittens are a lot less fun when your home is struggling to stay above freezing due to a malfunctioning heater. Your property and your health can seriously suffer when your furnace is having problems. That’s why proper furnace maintenance is absolutely essential to keep your heater working effectively through the coming months.
While we’d like everyone to schedule furnace maintenance in Wake Forest, NC with a trained professional from our team (which is obviously the best course of action), we know it’s not a perfect world and homeowners are always looking for some tips to check on the health of their furnace by themselves. So, we’re not going to swim against the tide, we’ve got a checklist that you can use to help you examine whether or not you need professional heater maintenance. Take a look below.
Furnace Preparation Checklist
It’s quite simple, furnaces are efficient machines. However, as issues compound in both your heater and your home, your furnace will begin to work harder and have a tough time keeping you warm this winter. So, dust off the cobwebs and turn your furnace on so we can see how it will work.
- Check the Effectiveness. Do you deal with multiple cold zones in your home? Uneven cooling could be a signal to leaky air ducts that are in disrepair, or a failing furnace. The problem with this, is that your furnace will start working harder to compensate for the uneven heating. These issues decrease efficiency and will cost you a ton of money in the future.
- Check the Age. We hate to break it to you, but if your furnace is 20 years old and it hasn’t been maintained in a decade, you’re going to run into a lot of problems soon. We definitely see our fair share of old furnaces that work just fine but the deciding factor is furnace maintenance. So if you’re not sure when the last time you had your 15-year-old furnace inspected or maintained, you should schedule maintenance ASAP.
- Sealing, caulking, weatherstripping. Have you ever seen plastic wrap over someone’s single-pane windows? This is a simple weatherstripping solution that helps (albeit slightly) until you can get professional window weatherstripping services. Basically, anywhere that hot air can escape, it will—and you’ll be the one paying for it.
Solutions
So, what are some lessons we can learn from this checklist? The first thing is that furnace maintenance is invaluable to the life and effectiveness of your heater. If your furnace hasn’t been maintained in a decade and your home isn’t sealed tightly to keep the hot air in, you’re living life on the edge this winter.
Here’s the deal. You can avoid all of these problems by contacting a professional technician today. Our team services air ducts by repairing those pesky leaks, we can perform furnace maintenance before the winter arrives in full swing, and we can give you options if there are any serious issues that come up.
Give our team a call at Raleigh Heating & Air to make sure your home stays cozy this winter!