Comfort Monster Service Bulletin — 10/1/2020 — Gas Pack Inducer Failures
Units Affected:
Residential Gas Package Units Between 2012 and 2017
Problem:
The inducer (blower) wheel is sometimes made of light steel and is not properly coated to withstand the external conditions and acidic moisture the gas furnace produces. The inducer wheel rusts prematurely causing the furnace to fail.
This picture is from a gas pack that’s less than 5 years old, and its inducer wheel is probably less than 3 months from complete failure. So not cool.
Comfy calls this the Yahtzee! repair.
Why? So, while Comfy has never played Yahtzee, he does like to yell “Yahtzee!” and pretend like he’s won something at all times day and night. Between us, he never wins but we put up with him because he’s furry and customers seem to like him.
(If you haven’t met Comfy yet and you’re thoroughly bored with working from home, take a minute to get to know him, then come back and do something productive like calling us to find out whether your gas pack is going to fail very soon.)
Anyway, in the game of Yahtzee, you roll a cup full of dice, and if the right numbers come up, you yell “Yahtzee!” — to the dismay of all your friends because you just won. On this gas pack, the flue vent looks like the cup you roll the dice from. When the rusted inducer wheel flies apart, the “petals” or blades of the blower fly off into the cup. When we come to diagnose the issue, we take off the cup and roll the broken pieces onto the ground (and then pick them up carefully). We don’t yell Yahtzee though. Because we’re not happy your unit is broken, and also because your neighbors might look at us weird, but you get the idea.
Checking Your Serial Number:
While it can be helpful to learn the manufacturing date from your serial number, it’s best to have someone trained take a look at your actual unit.
Your serial number can be found on the right hand side of your unit when facing your house with the unit in front of you. The nameplate will have a model and serial number. If the first 2 digits of the serial number are 10 thru 17, give us a call or book an appointment directly online for your free inspection.
130313596L
Units older than 2010 (first digit 2 thru 9) probably have this issue as well as other issues, but it would not be considered a premature failure. It still could make your heat stop working this winter though, and we’d like to fix it for you before it does.
Is It Under Warranty?:
If your serial number begins with 15 thru 20, it is most likely under warranty. If it’s 10 thru 20 then there is some chance it’s under warranty if you were the original homeowner that replaced the unit. We will be happy to check the warranty status for you.
What You Need to Do:
We encourage our customers to be proactive so that we can solve the issue for you early in the season to prevent it from failing during the winter when everyone else is calling us for issues that can’t be so easily predicted– So if you have one of these units and have not already replaced the inducer wheel on it, we would be happy to come to your home to check it out for you. We’ll even show you what we’re looking at so you can see for yourself.
Our visit will be free of charge if scheduled between now and October 15th, 2020. The inspection takes less than 5 minutes, but if you aren’t regularly servicing your HVAC unit, we recommend having us do a complete fall tune-up while we’re there. And of course we always look for issues like this any time we do preventive maintenance!
