Complete Furnace and Heating Repair

A furnace rarely fails without warning. It hints for weeks: a longer pause before ignition, a new rattle, rooms that never quite warm up, a gas bill that creeps higher for no reason. Our job is to read those hints correctly and fix the actual cause, whether that is a dirty flame sensor, a failing inducer motor, a cracked heat exchanger, or a control board throwing intermittent codes.

We repair natural gas, propane, electric, and oil furnaces along with boilers and heat pump heating systems. Every gas furnace visit includes a combustion analysis and a heat exchanger inspection, because the difference between a comfort problem and a safety problem is not something to guess about. Carbon monoxide is odorless, and a compromised heat exchanger or blocked flue is exactly how it gets into living spaces. When we hand you the invoice, you also get the combustion readings, so you can see the system is running clean, not just running.

Heating repair is also where honest advice pays off most. A 20 year old furnace with a cracked heat exchanger should not be repaired at any price, and we will say so plainly. When replacement is genuinely the smarter path, our HVAC installation team takes over with load calculations and options across every budget, including modern heat pumps. Curious how those compare? Read our breakdown of heat pump vs furnace heating.

How a Gas Furnace Actually Works, and Why It Helps to Know

You do not need to be a technician to benefit from understanding the sequence your furnace walks through on every heating cycle, because where the sequence stops tells us where the problem lives, and a homeowner who can describe that gets a faster, cheaper diagnosis. The chain runs like this. First, the thermostat calls for heat and the control board wakes up. Second, the inducer motor starts, pulling fresh air through the burner compartment and pushing exhaust toward the flue; you hear it as the small whirring that precedes everything else. Third, a pressure switch confirms the inducer actually established draft; no confirmation, no ignition, because burning gas without a verified exhaust path is how carbon monoxide ends up in living rooms. Fourth, the igniter glows or sparks, the gas valve opens, and the burners light. Fifth, the flame sensor must prove flame within a few seconds, or the board slams the gas valve shut. Only then, once the heat exchanger has warmed, does the blower start pushing air through your ducts.

Now the diagnostic value: a furnace that hums but never clicks or whirs has a control or power problem. One that whirs but never attempts ignition is usually stuck at the pressure switch, often from a blocked flue or failed inducer. One that lights and dies three seconds later is the classic dirty flame sensor, one of the cheapest repairs in the entire trade. One that runs but trips off after a few minutes of heat is overheating, which points at airflow: filter, blower, or ducts. When you call and say “it lights, then shuts off almost immediately,” you have already cut the diagnostic tree in half.

Electric furnaces replace the combustion chain with sequenced heating elements and their own failure patterns, blown elements, failed sequencers, and breaker issues, while boilers and hydronic systems add circulator pumps, zone valves, and pressure considerations. We service all three, and the diagnostic philosophy is identical: find where the sequence breaks, prove the cause with a measurement, and fix that.

Furnace Repair Pricing

These are typical national ranges for the most common furnace repairs. Every job gets a written quote before work begins, and our diagnostic fee applies toward the repair when you approve it.

If your furnace is over 15 years old and facing a repair above $1,000, pause before approving it. Our guide to HVAC system lifespans explains where furnaces typically fail on the age curve, and our new system cost guide lays out what replacement actually runs in 2026, including rebates that can shrink the gap dramatically.

Repair or Replace: Where Furnaces Differ From ACs

The repair-or-replace decision on a furnace has its own shape. Furnaces last longer than air conditioners, 15 to 20 years against 12 to 15, so age alone condemns them later. But the decision has a harder floor: a compromised heat exchanger ends the conversation regardless of the math, because the repair costs nearly as much as a new furnace and the risk of running it is not financial. Short of that, the same rules of thumb apply. Multiply age by repair cost, and past 5,000 lean toward replacement. Watch for repair clustering, since an igniter this year, an inducer last year, and a board the year before is a furnace announcing its retirement. And factor in efficiency: an 80 percent furnace from 2008 sends twenty cents of every heating dollar up the flue that a modern 96 percent unit would keep in the house.

There is also a fork in the road that did not exist a generation ago: the replacement does not have to be a furnace. Modern cold-climate heat pumps heat effectively far below freezing, cool in summer as part of the same package, and carry incentives that gas equipment does not. For some homes the right answer is still clearly a furnace, for others it is clearly a heat pump, and for many it is a dual-fuel pairing of both. Our comparison of heat pumps and furnaces walks the decision honestly, and when you want numbers for your own house, the installation team will run them without a sales script.

What we promise either way: nobody from our team will use a January no-heat call as leverage. If a $200 repair buys your 12 year old furnace three more good winters, that is what we will recommend, with the replacement conversation saved for a season when you can make it calmly.

Getting Ready for Winter: The Late-Fall Checklist

The busiest weeks of our heating season are always the first genuinely cold ones, because that first hard demand is when marginal furnaces reveal themselves. You can move your household out of that rush with an hour of preparation in October. Run the furnace for a full cycle on a mild day and pay attention: any new noise, any smell beyond the brief dusty odor of a summer’s accumulation burning off the heat exchanger, any hesitation in ignition is worth addressing while appointment calendars are still open. Replace the filter before the season starts, then keep to your schedule through the winter, since heating season runtime clogs filters faster than most people expect.

Walk the outside of the house and find your furnace’s intake and exhaust, which on high-efficiency models are the white PVC pipes exiting a wall. Keep them clear of leaves, snow drifts, and ice through the season, because a blocked intake will shut a perfectly healthy furnace down on the coldest morning of the year, a failure that costs nothing to prevent and a service call to diagnose. Confirm every register in the house is open and unblocked by furniture or rugs. Test the CO detectors. And if the furnace did anything questionable last winter that you decided to live with, this is the moment to have it looked at, calmly and on schedule, through a fall tune-up rather than urgently in January.