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Ducane Gas Furance with Honeywell Ingnition Not Firing...

9K views 33 replies 4 participants last post by  BDPNA 
#1 ·
My Ducane gas furnace is refusing to light, and it's getting COLD in here! Would love to call a tech but all are on emergency-only service for the holidays and I just can't afford that right now. Any suggestions on getting it to light, even just once would be great!

Some background - 13 year old natural gas furnace, brand new with house. A couple months ago I noticed that the pilot was kicking on and I heard flame/heat for about 2-3 seconds, then I'd hear another noticeable click and it would shut off. Main circulation fan would never start. After disconnecting some cables and troubleshooting, it just sort of started working again. Fast forward to today...

The unit turns on but only the small fan in the middle, and I don't hear the honeywell ignition unit (upper center in photo) clicking or trying to fire at all now.



Last night, a friend advised that I look in the exhaust hose trap from that smaller black fan inside the unit (that t-junction down on the lower right), sure enough, sucker was full of water! I siphoned that all out of there and re-connected but still, no luck -- After that last night I did hear it attempt to fire up once again (the pilot) but now, when I turn the power back on, the inner fan runs, but I don't even hear the pilot attempting to light/click at all anymore.

Anything safe I can try to get some heat going for Christmas? I'd be most grateful.

Oh another question as well - Am I potentially doing harm to myself or the system to leave it running without the pilot lighting and heat flowing? Any gas risk by this happening? I don't smell gas but I assume it's flowing and without it being lit I'm not sure about the safety risk.

I'm not sure if this would have had any effect on why the igniter isn't even trying to start anymore, but a couple times I got lazy when I wanted to unplug a few things and shut off the unit using the red emergency shut off switch on the wall next to the unit. I've got it back on now, and am using the breaker to shut off power to the unit now when I am messing with it, but is it possible I have to reset something elsewhere since I had used that red emergency shutoff switch? Or a particular order I need to power/switch stuff back on? It's peculiar because yesterday, the Honeywell auto-ignite was at least trying to fire from the sound of it, today, it's not even trying at all.

Any help during this holiday weekend would be most appreciated!!!

B.
 
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#30 ·
Back from a New Years trip, and things seem to be working well again, though the night we left, we couldn't get the thing to light or stay lit no matter what we tried. We had the repair place set to come back again tomorrow, but now it seems that things are fully operational again, even on the few random checks from neighbors, things were lighting up. Guess I gotta strangely hope that things either start acting up again before tomorrow, or risk having it kick out on the weekend. I'm wondering if having my furnace in "away" mode and not needing to kick on quite so much was what allowed it to operate normally.

We'll see what happens, thanks for the line on parts, which I'll keep handy, though it sounds like a manometer hooked up will answer a lot of questions, next time it's NOT staying lit, so let's hope the repairman has one and is willing to hook it up the next time it's acting up.
 
#33 ·
Haha, true true. I just try and not offend repair people as it's their line of work, I'm no HVAC expert so I don't want to tell them how to do their job either. Funny enough, today I didn't see him try a manometer at all, he simply replaced both switches with new ones (one of them looks like a different model altogether) and so far, knock on wood, things are running perfectly. We'll see how it goes over the weekend though, it's worked this long before and then broken again. I did ask to keep all the old parts in case it didn't fix it, so they could be put back and the new parts returned.
 
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