There are times when it’s clear that you tell your furnace to turn on and heat a room, and it doesn’t quite respond. Perhaps your thermostat keeps the house a bit warmer or a bit cooler than you’d like, or perhaps it doesn’t even come close to ratcheting up to the correct temperature. One of the biggest furnace warning signs and red flags that can come up is when the thermostat doesn’t respond to the input. When that happens, it’s necessary to get a furnace inspection in order to ensure that the unit doesn’t continue to waste energy and money.
Since a thermostat has to connect a digital line to a mechanical unit, there’s lots of room for a breakdown. Sometimes it’s a simple as the circuit breaker being placed in the wrong position, but much more often its a case that the thermostat cannot send the proper message to the furnace, or that a complication like an obstructed airflow keeps the furnace from projecting hot air. A dirty thermostat, or a dirty furnace, might prevent heating from running at full capacity due to the amount of particles preventing proper heat flow.
Common thermostat problems include the location of the thermostat itself. When the thermostat is in direct sunlight, it can affect the reading of the temperature and cause the unit to register a false positive. Likewise, if the thermostat is located too close to the heating ducts themselves, it might determine that the room is too hot, and keep it from heating up — even when you switch it to a higher temperature. Often, it may just be age; much like an older car has trouble telling you when the gas gauge is full, so too do older thermostats struggle with the right temperatures.
When you think that your thermostat isn’t giving your home the most amount of heat on a cold day, having a professional inspect the unit can get it back up to running at full capacity. Have Air Plumbing and Heating check out the thermostat and the furnace to ensure that each room in the house is heated to the perfect temperature.