Six weeks a year
Furnace Repair and Replacement
Pilot light failures, ignition faults, and the point where a furnace stops being worth the repair. Most Cypress furnaces sit quiet for nine months and then get asked to run cold mornings in a hurry.
What sitting idle nine months does to a furnace
A Cypress furnace spends most of the year doing nothing. Nine months of dust settling on the burner assembly and the flame sensor, then the first cold snap in December asks it to fire on command. That is when a pilot light that will not catch, or catches and drops out again a few seconds later, shows up. Sometimes it is the flame sensor itself, a thin rod that reads the flame and shuts the gas off if it cannot see one, and a season of dust on it will make a perfectly good furnace act like it is failing. Sometimes it is the ignitor, corroded from sitting unused, or a control board throwing a fault code nobody in the house knows how to read. We check the sensor and the ignition sequence before we talk about anything bigger.
Why we look at the heat exchanger before anything else
Underneath the burners sits the heat exchanger, the metal chamber that keeps the flame separated from the air blowing through your ducts and into the house. A crack in it lets combustion byproducts mix with that air instead of venting outside, which is a genuine safety concern and not something we patch or ignore. If we find one, we tell you plainly and we do not keep running the furnace to prove a point. On an older unit, a cracked exchanger is usually the moment repair stops making sense and replacement becomes the honest answer, and we will say so instead of chasing smaller fixes around it.
Air City, Licensed and insured, TACLB00114911E. Call (713) 804-7005.
Before you replace a part
A furnace that will not stay lit is not always the furnace
Plenty of the “my furnace is broken” calls we get turn out to be somewhere else entirely. A thermostat with a loose wire or a dead battery can read as a dead furnace from the hallway. A gas valve that is slow to open trips the same safety lockout as a bad ignitor. Even a blocked intake or exhaust vent, easy to happen in a Cypress attic that has not been checked in a year, will shut a perfectly working furnace down rather than let it run unsafe. We trace the actual fault before replacing parts, because a swapped ignitor does not fix a wiring problem, it just costs you twice.
Furnace work sits alongside our broader heating service and often turns up questions that are really thermostat questions in disguise.