By MyPros Staff

One of great things about being a Texan is that you don’t need to worry much about heat or furnace issues like our neighbors from the North.  Take, for example, gas furnace repair.  Houston residents, for the most part, probably don’t have a gas furnace at all.  Well, the natives don’t, anyway.  With average temperatures in the 90s and “winter” only getting down to about 60, it’s a sure bet your house was built by a Northerner if you even have a gas furnace.

 
Repair, Houston residents know, isn’t rocket science (that’s over at Johnson), but given the relative rarity of a gas furnace it can be tricky to get a technician who knows what they’re doing.  Before picking up the phone to call someone, try picking up the owners’ manual.  Most manuals have a nice trouble shooting section that covers everything from pilot lights to noisy blowers.  However, once you read through the manual, you may prefer to just have a technician come out and take care of the problem for you.  The most common repair in Houston is changing the filters in the furnace.  While the experts recommend changing the filter once a month, a lot of folks think that because they never turn it on, they can get away with using the same filter for years.  This is simply not true.  While once a month may not be necessary in Houston, a dirty filter will cause most gas furnaces to shut down automatically.
 
Also, if you shut off the gas as part of your hurricane preparations, you may have inadvertently left yourself without a pilot light.  This little light is what gets and keeps the larger heating unit going.  If it’s out, the heater won’t run.  Most owners’ manuals have a step by step guide to relighting the pilot light without the aide of a technician.  However, if you can smell gas but think it should have been shut off, be sure to get a technician out to investigate and relight the pilot light for you.