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Gas Furnace Repair Serving Clarksville
Getting your gas furnace checked every heating season is the safest decision you can make. When using a furnace, you are using fire with an unlimited fuel source to heat your home.
Gas, either natural (city) or propane (tank), provides the source necessary to warm homes' cold air during the heating season. The furnace system makes the conversion and distributes the warm air into the homes' living spaces. Furnaces powered by both natural gas and propane operate much the same way.
With either system, the homes thermostat begins the heating cycle as temperatures in the room fall below the setting you chose. That in turn sends a signal to fire up the burners.
Understanding Your Furnace's Ignition System
Older gas furnaces used a manual pilot light as an ignition source. A regulator supplied a small flow of gas to keep a short flame burning so it would be ready to ignite the gas when it was time to heat the home. More efficient and modern gas furnaces use a “hot surface ignitor” made of silicon nitride as the ignition source. Electricity passes a current through the glow stick only when the furnace calls for heat. either 120v or 240 depending on the system.
Maximizing Efficiency with a Heat Exchanger
A heat exchanger mounts above the combustion chamber. This allows the exchanger to absorb as much heat as possible from the combustion process. The cold air inside the exchanger warms almost immediately as the heat from the combustion process rises into the exchanger. Once that air reaches a level preset by the furnace manufacturer, relay kicks in and powers a blower fan that forces the warm air into the home’s heating ducts and out through the registers. The combustion sequence ends before the blower motor stops. This allows the blower to distribute every bit of warm air into the home before the cycle is complete.
Safe Management of Combustion Byproducts
The byproducts of combustion include carbon monoxide and other harmful gases, as well as a small amount of unburned natural gas or propane. High-efficiency gas furnaces capture the exhaust gases and compress them before igniting them in a second combustion chamber. This squeezes every bit of energy from the unburned gases. Any remaining byproducts must be vented away from your home, typically through a flue.
It is important to have your heat exchanger checked annually to protect your family from breathing in unwanted co-gases.