Furnace Fun.......

Blogging has been a bit light of late, as I've been busy as all get out trying to get caught up on work, keeping all the guns running, shooting matches, and getting the last minute Gun Blogger Rendezvous stuff taken care of.

It's funny how things seem to fail at the most inconvenient times, and our oil furnace is no exception. It was smelling funny when it would start, and wasn't always starting up, needing the reset button to be pushed.

I phoned a friend of mine who's in the oil furnace business to see if he'd come have a look at it, but he's decided to retire, and his lease is up on the shop in two weeks, so he's busy finishing up loose ends and getting moved out of the shop building. The other furnace guy is a crook, so scratch him off the list. So now I have one more project to fix.

Fortunately I've been doing furnaces for forty years, so they aren't a complete mystery to me. Most of the basic stuff was in good order, as I had replaced the oil filter, the nozzle, and adjusted the electrodes late last Spring, so not very many running hours had elapsed since then, the furnace not being needed much through the summer. When the burner was running, the flame looked pretty normal, so the air adjustment seemed OK. I pulled the burner out and checked the burner tube and it's air vanes/slots, and they looked fine too. The oil burners like this one have a big high voltage 10,000 volt transformer that provides the spark to light the furnace oil and keep it burning. It's a Beckett burner, and W.W. Grainger's Industrial Supply carries the transformer on the shelf, so I had them ship me one. (You DO have a Grainger's catalog, don't you?)

Installing the new transformer is a simple operation, four screws, mount the flame sensor and it's gasket, a pair of wires with wire nuts, and it's installed. After turning the power back on to the furnace, I hit the reset button and it lit right up. After it came up to temperature the limit switch kicked on the blower fan, and heat was a flowin' ! This morning it fired up just like it should.

Heat is a good thing..........