Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Furnace Failure - Arrrgh

Get a furnace from the wholesaler through your bud and pay cash to have it installed. Quotes are hilariously high. Markups are ridiculous.

A 95% gas furnace is considered poor nowadays.

Leave your existing AC. If it aint broke.....

Our AC is 20 years old as well & has suffered the ravages of salt air over that time. I believe that it can't be recharged anymore as they don't use that vintage type of coolant anymore - so it has to go.

From what I've been reading, the bleeding edge efficiency ratings seem to be accompanied by some flakiness & reliability issues, not unlike a high performance sports car...

TAM

Man that's a catch 22 then.

Too bad nowadays the price-performance ratio has nothing to do with long term reliability it seems. I just hope you can make out a little better than those quotes. I know as soon as you go through a big outfit their costs and margins are reflected in your price.

Dude, not ONE of the joints in you ducting is taped. I highly suggest you invest some time into doing this to increase efficiency. I've literally taped every joint possible; starting right at the furnace and continuing along the heat and return ducting.

That is a dated picture. Got many suspect joints especially ones in the crawl space taped this summer. I know what you mean though. The house could use all new updated ductwork actually but that went towards a 16KW whole-house generator instead.

On top of all this, my new 2014 Toyota Highlander (~1600 miles) wouldn't start on Friday so I missed my normal lunch with the guys at the pub. GRRRRRRRR.

I must say, these electronic cars do not like anything out of spec like a low battery. It protested so loudly that my neighbour across the street heard it - with some dismay. RoadSide Assistance came & boosted it & I drove it to the dealer. Of course, their fancy diagnostic gear found that it was less than half charge but other than that - no fault found. Why the low charge state - we don't know as nothing was left on in the car during the 6 days of no use.

I get it home & put it on slow charge (2 AMP) overnight & it never quite reaches full charge. Switch it up to 10 AMPs, & it fully charges in a couple of hours.

For my own interest, I thought that I'd track it with my trusty DVM. Keeping in mind that a fully charged battery should be ~12.6V with Min Charge of 12.4V, in the past 24 hours of not operating the car, the voltage has dropped from 12.58V, to 12.52V & tonight 12.4V.

According to several Highlander Forums, discharged batteries are not uncommon with this 2014 model - perhaps a bad batch?. Of course the service guys have never heard of such a thing. I pointed out an article in Edmund's.com where their long-term Highlander tester was stranded in a shopping center parking lot - along with many other similar occurrences. Their comment was - What is Edmund's?

In-frigging-credible...

TAM

Bad alternator?
Between that and a battery, it could be an easy fix and likely one you could get for free by complaining enough to the dealer esp. if it was bought brand new.

Dealership rule #1, admit nothing. I have been in the trade for 35yrs and one thing is for sure, you can not trust the dealer, just look at GM and ignition switch's . Thank god for the internet. There are so many little computers onboard acting like vampires sucking on the battery its not uncommon to see them go dead like this.

We have a mid efficiency Carrier unit. Looked into buying a high efficiency furnace as we were discussing an on-demand water heating system as well.
However, we would have to substantially change our ventilation for these units which unfortunately is not easy with our basement setup. The ONLY place to run a new exhaust tube would be through the existing rooftop chimney. That would entail replacing our furnace and hot water units at the same time.
Wasn't in the budget.
So we installed a second hot water tank with a recirculation pump instead and are keeping the furnace.
Our HVAC guy has assured us parts are not a problem for this 1991 Carrier unit and it has a lot of life in it yet and he highly recommended we just keep our existing furnace. I still expect at some point the main fan might be replaced.

It isn't about trust though i agree and don't trust any dealer farther than i could throw them, but it is about getting a fix done for free from those who sold you a unit that should be in working order. I would be banging on the dealer's door six times over if the problem kept re-occurring, along with raising hell directly with the parent company, over and over until there was a satisfactory response and fix.

Of course, if there is a design flaw in a particular model year, that is kind of hard to get around unless the parent company admits it is an issue and comes up with a fix. They won't do that until they get tons of complaints about the same issue and if it is safety related, they prefer to keep things quiet. However with the recent fines levied on manufacturers for not admitting to known safety issues, they might be starting to smarten up a bit.

Then there's also the 'law of chance' which is to say, you may just have bought a lemon vehicle. I've known people who have had Ford Rangers for years and loved them, yet my friend's father bought one years ago and it had so many major problems that he hated the thing, vowed never to buy Ford again. He was always buying GM trucks so this was his more limited experience with Fords.
The problem list included a CRACKED ENGINE BLOCK (what the hell are the odds of that happening??!!), broken seat adjust levers & mechanisms (had to prop up the seat from behind with a milk crate), sticky accelerator mechanism (replaced multiple times with recurring issue), failed heater, failed dashclock/radio and a few other things that just don't come to mind at the moment.
Ultimately the truck had its final death when the dashboard caught on fire (internally) one day as his dad was driving up the road from their house and the truck melted to the point it was a write off.
Why all these unrelated issues with this one truck?
Just chance.