Waking up in the middle of the night to find that you’ve got a broken gas heater in Arizona is never fun. With the fact that most nights in the desert are below freezing, having your heating unit break down not only impacts your comfort, but it can significantly affect your health as well. It’s for these reasons that being able to self-diagnose a problem with your broken gas heater is vital. To help you figure out what’s wrong with your system, when and if this occurs, here are a few tips for diagnosing a broken heating unit that is gas powered before you contact the repair guy to fix the problem.
Determining What’s Wrong With Your Broken Gas Heater
Tip #1 – Find out Why the Furnace is Not Delivering Heat
The first step in diagnosing any problem is determining the actual problem. For example; if you’ve got a gas powered heating unit that is not delivering heat to your home, there can be a multitude of issues going on including:
- The thermostat might be set too low and is not delivering heat inside the house
- The thermostat might be broken which is not sending a signal to the heating unit to turn on in the first place
- You might have a circuit breaker or fuse that controls the gas powered heater that is tripped and simply needs to be reset
- The gas line control valve might be partially closed or clogged
- The pilot light is not functioning or not lit
- You might have an electrical issue with the heating system
The first thing you need to do is to determine exactly what the problem might be – or at least, reduce the factors that are NOT impacting the problem. A great way to accomplish this is to check each of these potential problems and eliminate ones that are working correctly. This will give you a good idea as to what the issue might be – and how to start diagnosing the correct issue.
Tip #2 – Consider a Few Possible Easy Repairs
Before you make the phone call to the gas heater repair guy, here are a few things you can do on your own to try and fix the problem:
- Check the thermostat and verify that the settings are correct. One major yet simple solution is that several people forget to click their thermostat on HEAT from cool in the summer.
- Try moving the thermostat dial up a few degrees until you hear the system turn on. If you turn your thermostat all the way up, and your heating system is not operating, then the problem might simply be the thermostat that needs to be repaired or replaced.
- Check your circuit breaker or fuse box. If you see any tripped circuits or blown fuses, reset the breaker and replace the fuses. Even if the heater fuse is not tripped, an ancillary breaker or fuse could impact the operation of the system.
- Relight the pilot light. If you notice that your heater is not turning on, and the pilot light is ‘off’, follow the instructions on the broken gas heater for relighting the pilot light to see if this fixes the problem.
Tip #3 – Contact a Professional Gas Heating Repair Company
If you’ve tried all of these steps, and can’t find or fix the problem on your own, the best solution is to contact a licensed and reliable gas-heating repair company. Many of the best HVAC repair specialists work in and around Scottsdale, and you can find a dependable company rather easily. Make sure anybody you hire has the following credentials:
- Must be licensed, bonded and insured
- Must be certified in gas heating repairs
- Should have several referrals that you can contact
- Must have a positive BBB rating
Diagnosing a problem with a broken gas heater can be very easy and fixing the system can be even simpler. If you’ve got a broken gas heater that isn’t working up to snuff, follow these easy three steps to get heat back into your Arizona home as soon as possible.
