Furnace Repair & Installation in Nanaimo & Vancouver Island

Most furnace calls arrive as one of a few stories. The furnace is silent and the house is getting cold. It fires, runs for a minute or two, and shuts down again, over and over. The blower runs but the air at the registers is cool. It lights with a thump, or a whiff of gas hangs around the unit before it catches. There is a new noise. Or it runs for hours and never reaches the temperature on the thermostat.

Each of those points somewhere different inside the cabinet. On a gas furnace the usual suspects are the igniter, the flame sensor, the pressure switch and the inducer motor it watches, the gas valve, and the limit switch that shuts the burners off when the heat exchanger runs too hot. On an electric furnace the heat comes from banks of elements staged on by sequencers, and a house that is warm but never warm enough is usually one bank that has stopped coming on. On either, the blower motor, its capacitor, and the control board account for most of the rest.

A furnace repair stops being the sensible answer at a fairly predictable point. Gas furnaces are built for something like fifteen to twenty years of winters, and past that mark the failures stop arriving one at a time. One fault ends the conversation on its own: a cracked heat exchanger, the part that keeps combustion gases out of the air the blower moves through the house. It is not repaired, it is replaced, which means a new furnace. If a technician tells you yours is cracked, ask to see it — a crack can be shown. Short of that, the question is arithmetic: a capacitor, a flame sensor, or an igniter is worth fitting to almost any furnace, while a blower motor or a control board on a twenty-year-old unit starts to favour the new one, because the parts that have not failed yet are the same age as the ones that have. We put the repair and a replacement in the same written quote and say which we would choose.

The replacement does not have to be another furnace. For a house with ductwork, a ducted heat pump uses the same ducts, cools in summer, and is what the CleanBC Better Homes and BC Hydro rebate programs are built around, where a new gas furnace is not. What a household qualifies for depends on the program terms in force and the equipment chosen, never on a single published amount. A furnace is still the right answer for plenty of homes; we make sure the question gets asked.

A new furnace is sized to the house, not to the label on the old one. Many Island furnaces were oversized when they went in, and an oversized furnace short cycles, wears out early, and leaves the far bedrooms cold while the hallway bakes. We work the heat loss out from the house — size, insulation, windows, and the ductwork already in place — and choose the capacity from that.

Nearly every gas furnace sold today is a high-efficiency condensing unit, and that changes the job. It vents through two plastic pipes to an outside wall instead of up the old metal flue, so where those pipes exit — clear of windows, walkways, and snow — is decided before anything is ordered. It produces condensate that has to drain somewhere, and on the Island's wet winters that drain line matters. All of that is in the quote, along with the permit: most Island municipalities require one for a furnace replacement, and pulling it and booking the inspection is our work, not yours.

We install Mitsubishi Electric, Daikin, Fujitsu, Carrier, Keeprite, Goodman, and Trane rather than one house brand, because the right furnace depends on the house, not on what a contractor stocks. The quote names the exact make and model.