There are many perks to being a homeowner, but unfortunately there is no comprehensive guide that will address how to fix various household setbacks once they occur. There is no maintenance team that will march in after you have submitted a request to fix things within a matter of minutes. But hey, that’s part of the adventure, right? Once you find something “wrong” with one of various appliances, you’re forced to play both detective and handyman at the same time. This is when you figure out how resourceful you can actually be.
Sometimes, furnaces leak. A furnace is not something that monitor as closely as you do, say, your big screen, plasma television or your new Xbox One; however, it is important that you keep a watchful eye on the furnace, especially during the off-season, just to ensure that nothing goes awry without your knowledge. If, one day, you notice a small pool of water collecting at the base of the furnace, do not panic.
Furnaces usually begin to leak water due to condensation. What kind of furnace do you have? The type could determine a world of a difference. The first thing to do is to find out if you have a standard-efficiency furnace or a high-efficiency furnace. This information will give you a helpful clue as to what may be causing your leak, and will help you better understand what may be going on.
A leaky, standard-efficiency furnace may be fitted with an incorrectly sized exhaust pipe. What this means is, since the pipe is not the proper size, it is possible that the heat from the exhaust condensed and drained back out of the appliance. If, instead, you have a high-efficiency furnace, the exhaust will inevitably produce condensation. Functional models operating at top efficiency will guide that condensation directly into a drain on your floor. If you find water collecting near the bottom of your high-efficiency furnace, the tube that carries the condensation to the drain may be clogged.
These are the simplest answers. It is also possible that the humidifier in your furnace is damaged and leaking inside your furnace. When dealing with a leaky furnace, an untrained homeowner must usually resort to guesswork. We have a motto here at Air Handlers OBX: Better safe than sorry. Call our experienced repair technicians to service your furnace and get it back to working order before you develop another problem…like mold.
