We want to be clear about this from the start: Only a trained, licensed HVAC professional should repair a gas furnace. This is a matter of safety—although even if it were safe to tinker with a gas furnace on your own, you’d still only want a trained professional to touch the system to make sure the repair is done right. In many jurisdictions, it’s illegal for anyone without a special license to work on an appliance connected to a gas main.
In this post we’re making a distinction between trying to repair a gas furnace and going through basic troubleshooting steps when a furnace isn’t working properly. There’s nothing wrong with making checks on a furnace before you call us for heating repair in Plattsburgh, NY. Often, the problem with a non-working furnace is something simple you can correct on your own. Just don’t take any steps where you need to get tools and open up the furnace! That’s the point where you’ve gone past troubleshooting and might get into actual trouble.
When a furnace first turns on for the winter season, it emits a burning odor into the air from the vents. This is normal. It’s odor of the dust along the heat exchanger or heating elements burning off as the unit heats up. The smell will subside after a short time and the furnace will get into the regular groove of warming the house.
What sort of home appliance do you think is most likely to corrode? You’ll probably think of the water heater, or shower heads and other water-using fixtures. You probably don’t think about your gas furnace rusting. It doesn’t use water to warm your house, after all. It applies heat to the air through a metal heat exchanger that contains hot combustion gas.
If the heating system in your home is still working the way it should during the last few cold days of spring, you can probably shut it down for the summer without much worry. As long as you remember to schedule maintenance for it in fall before the first cold settles in for the end of the year, you shouldn’t need further 
If you’re asking this question, this is probably the first winter you’ve spent with a heat pump providing comfort for your home. You made a change in spring or winter to your HVAC system and replaced it with a heat pump. This is a great choice—heat pumps are able to deliver excellent cooling in hot weather and energy efficient heating in winter. Thanks to advances in heat pump technology, heat pumps operate in cold temperatures better than ever before.
The recent rains should serve as a strong reminder: it’s definitely fall, and we’re on the road to winter. Air conditioners will soon turn off for the rest of the year and furnaces and boilers will fire up (or heat pumps switch over to heating mode).
The middle of the winter is the point when you may have concerns about the performance of your home’s furnace. It’s wise to be on the lookout for potential problems. It’s not only the coldest time of the year, but the furnace has done a half season of work and has another half ahead of it.
A boiler is a great way to provide warmth during a stormy and cold winter—and we’re in the middle of one of those right now! The heat coming from radiators and baseboard heaters is cozy and spreads evenly through a room, without having to blow around any dust from ductwork. A boiler also has a great advantage over a furnace, which is that it usually needs fewer repairs over its lifetime. A boiler contains fewer moving mechanical parts that can break down. As long as you remember to schedule heating maintenance for your boiler each year (
There’s a good reason natural gas furnaces are common for 
