Furnace Repair in Phoenixville, PA
Furnaces here run from October through April. If yours quits, tell us what it's doing and a licensed contractor who covers Chester County will get in touch.
Tell us about the job
It takes about a minute.
Seven months of work, most of it at night
Furnaces in Phoenixville run from October through April. On the coldest nights, when the temperature drops to around 25°F, the burner cycles on and off for hours at a time, lighting and shutting down again and again to keep the house warm. That repeated cycling is what wears out an igniter or a flame sensor, and it usually happens in the dead of winter, not in the mild months.
Chester County has seen 32 winter storms and 478 damaging wind events over the past ten years. Wind and ice bring down power lines, and in Pennsylvania about 15% of households lost power for a full day or more in 2024. A furnace with no electricity will not start, even if nothing is wrong with it, and when the power comes back on, some furnaces need a reset before they will run again.
- 7 months
- October through April, your furnace is on duty
- 25°F
- the average winter night it heats against
- 32 winter storms
- in ten years, the nights a failure hurts most
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
A new furnace would cut about $130 a year off heating for a typical Chester County home.
Estimates for a typical Chester County home, compared with an older unit built to the previous federal minimum, from EIA household energy data, Pennsylvania fuel prices and NOAA climate normals. Your home will differ.
Repair makes sense when one part has failed and the heat exchanger is sound.
Replacement makes sense when the heat exchanger is cracked or the furnace keeps needing parts.
Pennsylvania requires contractors to register with the state.
That registration puts the business on file with the Bureau of Consumer Protection. Nobody tested the contractor's work to get that number, and the state does not track how the job was done, only that the company registered before taking it on. Cities and towns in Pennsylvania cannot add their own HVAC license on top of this, so the registration is the whole state record, wherever in Chester County you are.
For a furnace repair, the thing that actually matters is the gas connection, and registration does not touch that. A loose fitting or bad venting is what makes the job dangerous, not the paperwork behind it. Pennsylvania's registration does not include any inspection of the work itself, before or after it is done. In Chester County, more than a third of homes heat with gas, so this is not a rare case here.
Source: Pennsylvania General Assembly
- Why won't my furnace turn on?
- Start with the thermostat. Make sure it's set to heat and the temperature is set above room temperature, and check that the batteries aren't dead. If the thermostat looks fine, check the furnace switch, the one that looks like a light switch near the unit, and make sure it's on. A tripped breaker or a blown fuse will also keep it from starting, and so will a furnace filter so clogged it shut the system down as a safety measure. If none of that gets it going, the igniter or a safety switch inside the furnace may have failed, and that's a job for a contractor to diagnose.
- Why is my furnace blowing cold air?
- Most often this means the blower is running but the burners haven't lit. That points to an ignition problem, a bad flame sensor, or a gas supply issue. It can also happen for a few seconds when the furnace first starts, before the heat exchanger warms up, so short bursts of cool air at startup aren't necessarily a problem. If the air stays cold the whole time it runs, or you smell gas, shut the system off and have a contractor look at it.
- Why won't my furnace pilot light stay lit?
- A pilot light that won't stay lit is usually a sign the thermocouple has worn out. That's the small sensor that tells the gas valve the flame is burning, and once it fails, the valve shuts the gas off as a safety measure even though the pilot lit for a moment. It can also mean a draft is blowing the flame out or the pilot orifice is dirty. A standing pilot doesn't need power to run, so a power outage isn't the cause here. This is a repair for a licensed contractor, since it involves the gas valve.