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Hello,

Though cars area great place to think about maximizing economy, what about the NG burners in our homes?

Without designing fancy recuperators or other equipment, it maybe tough to do this, but keeping them humming perfectly should be a worthy task...

Ive seen cleaning jobs done on oil burners in home furnaces, but what about the equipment in natural gas furnaces and hot water heaters???

The season is nearly upon us, might as well assume that my heater and hot water system furnace are running as well as they can. What needs to be done to do this? Is a furnace or hot water heater tune-up a DIY job? Whether or not it is, what is involved in doing the job right, so that the unti works as well as it possibly can and maximizes its efficiency????

Thanks!

JMH

Most NG burning devices should be checked for combustion efficiency with a combustion analyzer. Do you have a good low level CO monitor in your home? Most standard CO detectors have poor designs in that by regulation they actually wait too late before setting themselves off.

I just take the cover off and use compressed air to dust off the internal and external components, and have never (I only have about 15 years experience with them) had one fail.

Hi All:

___Yet another good article about our homes vs. transport that sort of fits this threads content.

Your Home: Heating the earth and not in a good way. (http://www.nj.com/business/ledger/index.ssf?/base/business-7/1191559523217180.xml&coll=1)

___Good Luck

___Wayne

Most NG burning devices should be checked for combustion efficiency with a combustion analyzer. Do you have a good low level CO monitor in your home? Most standard CO detectors have poor designs in that by regulation they actually wait too late before setting themselves off.

I like the compressed air idea above, but am unsure if that is the end all for maintenance... You mention combustion efficiency, which also gets checked on oil burners from what Ive seen.

That said, when one determines combustion efficiency, they can correlate it to the owner's manual for the furnace to see if it is on target by design. if it is not, what are the best remediation steps to ensure that it is working properly? Does a professional only blow out / vacuum out the inner and outer parts, or would they do other PM and repacement PM?

NG burns clean, but there still is a good amount of sulfur compounds in it, which can cause corrosion, and Ive seen some flakiness inside of the burner tubes. There likely is scale on the heat exchanger surfaces, etc., which reduces heat transfer coefficients and effectively then efficiency.

Thanks for the insight!

JMH