When the heating season has ended and the spring and summer starts, you probably more than ready to open your windows and get some fresh air. There is something that you are going to want to do before you are ready to settle into spring and summer. One of them is to prepare your furnace for its summer break to make sure that it's ready to go when you turn it back on for the next heating season. 

Get Rid of Soot and Scale

If you have a furnace that burns some kind of fuel, like natural gas, propane, or heating oil, your furnace is going to have soot and scale on it. This will be most obvious around the burner. Soot is the result of the combustion process and can actually be flammable. Scale is the residue of rust and minerals that might have built up in the burner. It's similar to the stuff that builds up on and around your faucets, if you have hard water. While scale may sound harmless, one problem with is that the scale can trap carbon monoxide in your furnace. Carbon monoxide is a dangerous gas that can be fatal in high enough concentrations. Cleaning that out of your burner is pretty easy, all you need to do is get a good stiff brush and brush the burner area, and then brush all the soot and scale out of the burner. The fact that it has stiff bristles will mean that the brush is strong enough to knock everything off easily. 

Deal With Your Air Filters

Your furnace has air filters to help keep dust and such from blowing through your house. If those filters are dirty, it makes your furnace have to work harder and it allows dust and such to blow through your house. If you clean the filters out or replace them as soon as you are done with your furnace at the end of the heating season, then you are ready to turn it on when the weather gets cold and you need some heat. That way you don't have to worry about remembering to clean the filter when you realize that you're cold. 

Making sure that your furnace is ready to go at the beginning of the next heating season means that you need to do a little bit of work at the end of the last heating season. These maintenance tasks makes sure that your furnace is in good shape and can help it last longer.  Contact a heating repair service for more help.

Share