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I thought it might be helpful to put together a brief troubleshooting guide for folks who find themselves with an oil burner not starting, at the most inconvenient time, like a holiday weekend when your local service company gets a premium for an "emergency" service call. So my experience is...

You might want to read through my posts from a couple of years ago about the decision making around replacement or repair of an oil burning furnace: Replace heat exchanger or entire furnace? Suffice it to say, I found nobody wanted to replace the heat exchanger and only quoted prices for an...

I know a civil engineer in California who tells me that by state law, all new construction will only have electric appliances, including heat. Do you know if this applies to retrofits?

OK, I learned something useful today. If you are burning up snowblower belts, you might want to get some 40 grit sandpaper and burnish the drive pulley(ies) with it. I went through 2 sets of belts in the past two snows, and was beside myself on why the belts kept sliding on the pulley, even...

SFLman So obviously from your first post, your problem lies with either or both of the wires to Jack1. One thing you don't mention is when you got Comcast...I hope that didn't coincide with the problem (I know of plenty of people who would fail to make the correlation or mention that...and they...

I'm trying to use an old Goulds well pump for an irrigation project, but the 3/4hp G.E. 240VAC motor has 117VAC on the case, so something is connecting one of the hot legs to the case, and it's going through a path with some resistance since it doesn't blow the circuit breaker; but the motor...

That's interesting 68Bucks, thinking about what PJones wrote, if I used a thermostat with programmable circulation, and I wanted to use the low speed leg on the blower for just the circulation mode, I'd still need a relay setup to switch between two legs of the blower motor.

Yes, oldognewtrick so far so good...I did all of this about a year or so ago.

Thanks PJones; the reason I have the relay as part of the circulate circuit is so that the furnace can over-ride the circulation function and put the blower on high. If I ever buy a new thermostat, I will look for one where I can program circulation intervals, but at the time I did this, I had...

When I decided to tackle my forced air, oil furnace problems (see my "Replace heat exchanger or entire furnace? ", thread) I got to thinking about my HVAC system as a means to not only condition the air inside my home, but to enhance the air quality if I could. So I did three enhancements that I...

He's gone. You can generally tell by the question if someone is engaged, or just trolling for a quick-fix answer. I have to complement the folks who take a chance with newbies, that the newbie will actually value the effort that people who read their posts and give their time to offer...

Aaronadr, Did you solve the problem? Anyone reading your post can't begin to help you with so little information. The brand of your furnace makes very little difference, and is probably the least important peice of information. Is this furnace gas or oil fired?; is it forced air, hot water or...

An update: During the 2018-2019 winter, my Beckett oil burner was tripping out, and in the past it would happen here and there, but this time I couldn't get the burner to fire up no matter how many times I pressed the reset button. So I took the burner out of the furnace, purchased a new pump...

Okay, I got the furnace running. I got the heat-exchanger yesterday and decided to get working on it last night. The welding quality on the new one doesn't appear to be as good as the old one, but it doesn't have a hole in it...and who knows, at 22 years old, this may have just been a "spare...

If your blower is not spinning when you switch the thermostat to "Fan On", then that is your first priority, because cleaning the coils won't make the blower spin! If you know how to use a voltmeter, you can see if you have line voltage (~120 VAC), across the wires connecting to the fan motor...

Pull the capacitor out, it's usually strapped to the blower housing. Look at how many microfarads and volts it's rated at or take it to an electronics store. Or look on eBay, just make sure you get a replacement with the same values. Thief melting frost on the a coil could have damaged the...

Here is a quick calculation I did, I'm using a theoretical 100% efficiency in all the numbers: 100,000 BTUs from Electric at $0.20 per kWh: 100,000 BTU/3412 BTU/kW = 29.30 kW/Hr 29.30 (kW needed for 100,000 BTUs) x $0.20 (price per kWh) = $5.86 per hour of heat. 100,000 BTUs from Natural Gas...

A heat pump is essentially an air conditioner that exchanges temperatures in the opposite direction; the condenser is inside the house and the evaporator is outside. I cannot imaging anything that runs on electric, to generate heat (I'm not talking about the pumps or fans needed in an HVAC...

I got the old heat exchanger out this morning, it took a little more than 2 hours, for the most part because I started taking apart the burner side more than I had to. The exchanger was easily removed from the opposite side (rear of the furnace), and this gives me the ability to thoroughly...

I'm glad you asked slownsteady; just looking at the AFUE numbers for the new unit confirms that, but on top of that, even if the new furnace were 5% more efficient, the question is, how many years would it take to recover the $3900 more spent on a new furnace? If I buy $2000 of oil per season...