alright that's quite the introduction yeah a third generation to knocker so it's been in the blood for a while but i tried my hand at a couple of other things after college but ended up coming back to heating and cooling because it's just one of those things that i know so even when i was at my other jobs i constantly had people coming up to me asking me questions about heating and cooling in their house and so at some point in time it just made logical sense to go back and easy and our company actually put out a couple of coupons out there if you're in the city only did you get a special on those so please take advantage of those so a when our tech show up to do a tune up at  at a customer's house we're looking at a number of things the first and foremost is air filters are i'm sure our guys and i when i show up we sound like a dentist who's snagging people about  too often or point out air filters that are dirty plugs and just have debris in them it that right there is the easiest thing that you guys can do is homeowners to conserve energy and to prolong the life expectancy of your equipment when you have a plug filter it's the same thing as you trying to breathe i mean i pulled out a couple of dirty filters and handed it to somebody and it's like here you train breathe out of this and you get like the look on their face like you expect me to put my face up to that well i mean that's what's in your house and that's what the air inside your house is moving through so it's both disgusting because you've got dirt and dust stuck in there but at the same time all that debris is really constricting  airflow going to your furnace you're making your furnace run extra hard trying to pull the air through there and if you have an old style blower motor which will kind of dive into a little bit of p s c motor it's you use a magnet to spin and it actually starts flipping because it's trying so hard to try and pull that air through you're going to burn out your motor extra quick and at the same time you're not put enough air past your heat exchangers your heat exchanger is going to start running extra hot and over time could cause premature failure so air filters i'm going to try and hammer that home air filters are a must a good rule of thumb for a late peak usage like in the winter in the summer for every inch in width filter is should be and how many months it goes in between changing so if you have just one inch by sixteen by twenty years sixteen by twenty five in the dead of winter right now when your furnace is running near nonstop about once a month i mean three m and stuff like that who you would play by through myers or an archer something like that though push like three months that's a little extreme and  we strongly recommend just keeping an eye on it so a two inch filter two months four ensure a five inch filter should be about four months and you can get media filters which are very very good at pulling small particles out of the  those can go up to a full year so if you're not responsible and can't stand happier filter changes it's really a very good way to kind of bypass that irresponsible for changing it just once almost every homeowner can stay on top of that and it also is very very beneficial because it pulls out the smallest particles of dust or viruses and bacteria even  they are because at if you're replacing a one inch filter twelve times while in the fall in the spring when your system is not running very much you can stretch out a one inch filter to three months it's just that peak operating so  if you have a one inch filter i would recommend that you'd be changing it somewhere between six and eight times a year and so roughly speaking about six dollars apiece you're at about forty eight dollars for a year for all filters media  at least the ones that we sell by our shop aprilaire they we i think we charge fifty five so you're paying an extra seven dollars for a fire superior filter the next step in our furnace tuneup your exhaust motor and your blower motor are moving their star in that up and that can that will get caught in the burners those will get caught in the motors and those will cause those motors to run extra hot and burn up quickly and use more energy so it's if you guys are trying to do this at home it's really not a bad idea to just take a shop vac just vacuum out the inside of the furnace wipe it down just just try to make it look as amazing need as possible if it passes the  test or the glove test that's good i mean it's not going to be a huge energy saver but it's going to go a long ways towards keeping your system run and for the long period of time the next the salesman i would love to have the in your house every year but as a realist the new your furnace is no longer you can go in between check ups on the brand new furnace generally has like a minimum of a two year labor warranty plus all the parts so for the first two years if we were to install a system i want expect to go in there you're not getting out a very good value when we show up within two years after two years i recommend somewhere between your three and five having somebody come in just clean it up  the likelihood of us finding anything as far as weak weak parts for stuff that are worn out is slim but it's still good to get a clean bill of health get it all cleaned up and weight down and then between your five and ten i'd recommend every other year and then as soon as you hit your ten do it every year so the next step and is a week clean and adjust your burners so furnace is now have two types of burners the most more common through the eighty's and up to the ninety's and you still see a couple of them today they're just not they're not used quite as much are the ribbon burners and the gas travels it's shot through the here and they come in you can see just very lightly all the little slits in there and that's where the gas comes up in combusts you know the jet fighter burners those are pretty hard to gum up in clean i mean you're dealing with a hole about a couple of centimeters in diameter and those generally are pretty high maintenance free the ribbon burns on the other hand have a tendency to corrode over time and they can collect and you can see kind of the difference between a new one on the bottom and one pulled out on the top and you can see how that corrosion starts taken place and if you have a ribbon style burner it is very very helpful to pull those out maybe every five years and just use a wire brush and really really scrape those clean so that the gas can get through and combust yeah yeah absolutely i mean your consumption is going to be a lot higher because you're not you're not burn in very efficiently at that point in time so you're using more resources more gas to get the same money heat when you're burning on a very corroded ribbon burner as opposed to a nice clean open  one if you take the top door off your furnace and let's go back to a nice little diagram and we can come to do a little walk through here if you take the top door off generally unless you have a counterflow furnace where the air most furnace is are in the operate blowing up and so if you take the top door off you'll see especially if it's running you'll see exactly you can pinpoint exactly where the flames are and so on a newer furnace up here like these carriers you do have all the jet or the fire burners and you can just see the cones and they're very very clear to see very few furnace is actually have them locked up anymore some of the older furnaces are in a sealed combustion but they will have a viewing glass where you can actually observe your flame so if you're curious you can just pull the top door off and just take a look during when it's running  let's take a look here we check your blower for balance a slang term for those are squirrel cages in the bottle the boiler is  a it's a direct driven motor and it's got it's hard to describe it's easier to show and it's not a very clear picture here but it is a it's a wheel and it's got in it's got the metal basically killed up and it just grabs the air and there we go thank you i appreciate the help there so those veins have a tendency to collect dust and dirt especially if your filters been out for any amount of time if  your subsequent homeowner you don't have no idea how well the previous homeowners stayed up to date on their filter changes or if they used a filter at all and so at that point in time if you have no filter to pull the dust out of the air you have a big tendency to accumulate all that dust and dirt on dane's and once those beams plug up it's not grabbing the air and pushing it through your furnace any more and so your furnace is going to or your blower is going to just run and run and run and it's you're not pushing any air so your  drastically reduced your furnace is going to be running extra hot your conditioning may run an extra cold and it's going to cost you a lot of money in the long run both in resources and utility bills as well as replacing or repairing all your equipment so that is a big key thing we always take a look at that and we we should start keeping a diary of horror stories because there are some that would make your skin crawl where the tech springs and stuff back and you get the rubber gloves because it's access it all the degree of difficulty there starts climbing up a little bit because you there's wiring that you have to take off from the from the motor itself and then there's usually two screws that hold it in place you have to take two screws so you slide the entire blower out of the bottom and then you've got anywhere between three and eight wires going back to the control board and if you're really good with wiring or in any time i take the blower off even though i've got experience i still snap a picture of the wiring before i start pulling wires off there's nothing worse than all of a sudden sitting there going i need to start from scratch and i need to figure out where each wire goes because even even with experience it takes takes a little bit at times so i guess the long story short i would recommend it but but yes you could do that with a usually a quarter inch not driver  sure generally on the inside of a furnace if you take every furnace a little bit different but probably in seventy percent of the applications if you take the top door off on the inside of the furnace here you'll have a sticker with all the information and if the manufacturer was nice they put an ace manufacture date on there generally not and so you'll have to use a serial number to figure out what date is and everybody except for training one x has just a real nice easy way to track that in so if your furnace is not a train or a linux generally the first four numbers indicate the week in the year that it was manufactured would be like forty to fourteen so the forty second week two thousand and fourteen so that would be a easy way to track that down but if you have a train or a lennox unfortunately you have to go online because they have it in a code and that code changes from model to model it's infuriating the next thing that will look for if it's an eighty percent furnace and all kind of cover the difference between ninety and eighty eighty percent furnace is use metal venting coming out of them and those that metal venting has a tendency to corrode over time and that corrosion flakes off and falls into the furnace and that can make its way into the inducer motor or the exhaust motor that's a move an exhaust gas and if that gets plugged up too much you will have you will occasionally have a high when fault or in your inducer motor which isn't a huge consumer of electricity but that will be working very inefficiently because it's trying to pull through all that gunk and debris thermostat i don't know almost every single thermostat out there has batteries of some sort and it like last week it's not a great feeling to shop somebody's house and change out two batteries and invoice them for it so stay up to date on your batteries changes out once a year i mean it's not a huge favor of  energy or efficiency but your thermostat will start acting a little wonky and will start dropping out if it doesn't have good strong batteries and so that's an easy way to avoid a service call the register if you have a an imbalance in the house if you've got rooms in most two story houses especially especially older houses that you'll see in the city aren't ductwork is extremely inadequate for a two story house back even before the ninety's even in the ninety's we were still struggling trying to figure out a size two story house as far as ductwork goes heat thankfully has a tendency to rise and so it's not a big deal in the winter but in the summer i'm sure a lot of people a two story houses can attest to it's impossible to cool a two story house in the summer and so i don't know what you'll see when you start closing registers is basically you are forcing more air because air is always going to take the path of least resistance and so on the main floor where it's pretty easy to cool you might close a register to unlike the main down or living area and by doing that you are restricting the airflow there and you're making it easier for the air to find its way to the up stairs and so that is generally why you would close a register it doesn't do it as much as fires energy efficiency but it does go a long ways towards balancing the house and trying to get heat or cool in areas that you need you if you're not using the rooms yeah absolutely but there is he thing is closing too many registries two rooms isn't a big deal but if you close more than a quarter of the registers in your house then you'll start you'll start bottling heat up on top of the furnace and that's that's going to hurt you in the long run thermostat programming is a big one and we don't program people thermostats warm because everybody is different but we do offer that while we're there older houses with poor insulation they should be programmed but you have to be a lot of people have this concept that if they drop their temperature ten fifteen degrees at night or when they're gone they're saving a lot of energy the problem is especially on days like today where we have a very strong negative wind chill your furnace just can't keep up when it's negative twenty when i woke up this morning the best you can hope for is that your furnace can maintain temperature asking it to gain any temperature any degrees in this kind of weather it's not going to happen so we've dealt with a couple of calls where people are saying hey my friends have been running for four hours and it's only  three degrees that's normal on a day like today so general a five degree difference is a as drastic as we'd recommend for dropping it at night or during while you're gone i mean if you're gone for twelve hours during the day feel free to drop it a little bit more but if it's six to seven hours five degrees is about about max or else you're going to start losing the energy efficiency of that so the final thing is a visual inspection of the heat exchanger i'm sure everybody has heard the horror stories of heat exchanger cracks and everything like that what he did changer is it's a sealed metal tube essentially so after the  flames kick in on the burners it travels through a series of tubes and basically there's a lot of bends through these tubes you're basically trying to trap this heat in this sealed container as long as you can so that as the air is moving past a sealed container picking up that heat and the keyword there is sealed you don't want exhaust gases mixing with the air flowing through your house and so this heat exchanger what we're seeing in a high efficiency is we have a primary and a secondary heat exchanger so the heat the exhaust gases which are burning at four to five hundred degrees are traveling through in there are the primary heat exchanger is very very wide open usually about inch and a half tubes and it got about three to ben's here and then you can see a kind of zig zags a little bit it's restricting that that flow as much as possible and then it enters the secondary heat exchanger where all of a sudden you're going down to very very minute tubes and capillaries that zigzag further and further and so when you say that you have a ninety six point three percent efficient furnace at that point i ninety six point three percent of all that heat that you're producing staying inside your house and only three and a half roughly three and a half percent of that is actually moving to the outside of the house and so you want to maintain the integrity of that heat exchanger because once you have a crack you will it's a huge safety issue it's not necessarily it's not necessarily poisonous if the heat exchanger cracks because if your birth furnace is still burning clean you're not producing a ton of carbon monoxide but it's still something that needs to be addressed immediately p ok so our guys we do big basic visual inspection because it's supposed to be sealed a flame looks very nice and straight and you can see a good burning flame as soon as you have a crack in your blower motor kicks on so you've got a sealed container in the air when the blower motor kicks on there should be no effect on the flame whatsoever because it's completely sealed off from the air moving through the house if there's a crack you can start to see the flames start to waddle a little bit because that blower motor is forcing air into the heat exchanger and so our guys are trained to look for that immediately and if they see even a little bit of a wobble yes  camera that we can slide through there and we can take a close look and there is also a combustion analyzer will turn the furnace on and we can put a probe into your exhaust and it gives a full readout of the how of your exhaust gases in the temperature  if it's bad yes your furnace will trip out on high when it generally if there's a crack there's a it will cause flame rollout and there are safety sensors installed in every single furnace to avoid a hazardous situation and so if you or your furnace dies out for whatever reason then at that point time it's a good idea to give us a call so that we can come out and we can take a look and sometimes it's something simple just like a flame sensor but  like possibly so i carbon monoxide nothing to sneeze at it's very dangerous odorless and that's exactly if you are waking up if you're sluggish you get headaches nauseous there those are all signs carbon monoxide poisoning it's very it's very rare with the construction of furnace is nowadays to get that but if you have an older like one nine hundred sixty s lowboy or something like that it's not quite as uncommon and those can burn very foul and they don't push enough air in so that carbon monoxide can very very easily collect and cause health issues so please keep it on questions that me i'm exchanger and so only eighty percent of the heat is actually staying in the house and because of that you've got twenty of that twenty percent heat is still very very hot and there's enough heat to carry that up and out of your house in it before condenses where is a high efficiency and ninety plus percent furnace at ten percent there's not enough heat to get it out of the house and so it starts to condense as it's traveling through those pipes and it creates water and you can't have water in a metal