Heating · Chicago & the western suburbs
No heat, weak heat, or a furnace that keeps shutting itself off.
Furnace repair, boiler work, heat pumps, thermostats, and full replacements. A Chicago house loses temperature fast once the furnace quits. Call and tell us what it is doing, and we will tell you what that usually means and how soon we can be out.
Do not flip light switches and do not go looking for the leak. Get everyone out of the house, then call your gas utility's emergency number from outside. They will come shut the gas down. Once that side is safe, call us and we will deal with the furnace.
Carbon monoxide has no smell and no color. If a CO alarm goes off, get everyone outside and call 911 before anything else, including opening windows. A cracked heat exchanger, a blocked flue, or a burner running badly can all put CO into the living space.
If the house does not have a working CO alarm on every level, put one in. It is the only thing that can tell you.
What we work on
Heat is the one system you cannot wait on.
Cold snaps here run for days, and a house with no heat starts risking frozen pipes on top of everything else.
No-heat calls
The furnace is dead, locked out, or running without making heat. We find the actual failure instead of guessing at parts, then tell you what it takes to get heat back.
Furnace repair
Ignitors, flame sensors, pressure switches, inducer motors, gas valves, limit switches, blower motors, and control boards. Most no-heat calls come down to a short list of parts.
Furnace replacement
When a unit is done, we size the replacement to the house instead of copying the old label. An oversized furnace short cycles and still leaves the far rooms cold.
Boilers and radiators
Plenty of homes in Chicago, Oak Park, and Berwyn still run hot water or steam. Circulator pumps, zone valves, expansion tanks, low pressure, and cold radiators.
Heat pumps
Heat pump service, defrost problems, and backup heat that never comes on when it should. If yours is paired with a furnace, the handoff has to be set up right.
Thermostats and controls
A blank screen, a stat that will not hold a setting, or a smart thermostat wired into a system without the wire it needs. Some no-heat calls never touch the furnace.
Symptoms
Call if the house is doing any of this.
You do not need to know what is broken. The symptom is enough for us to know what to bring.
- No heat at all while the thermostat is calling for it
- The blower runs but the air out of the vents is cool
- It lights, runs a few seconds, shuts down, then tries again
- It starts and stops every few minutes and never satisfies the thermostat
- The blower never shuts off, even when the burners are done
- Bedrooms upstairs stay cold while the first floor is comfortable
- Banging, booming, squealing, or grinding when it fires up
- A burning smell that is still there days after the first cold night
- Radiators that stay cold or only get warm at the bottom
- The furnace trips a breaker or the switch on the side keeps cutting it
- A thermostat that is blank, frozen, or ignoring the schedule
- Gas bills climbing with no change in how you run the house
What is usually wrong
The short list behind most no-heat calls.
Furnaces fail in patterns, and knowing the pattern is the difference between a part swap and a long guessing bill.
The ignitor
Most furnaces light with a hot surface ignitor, a small element that glows orange and lights the gas. They crack, usually on the coldest morning of the year, because that is when the furnace has been running hardest. You hear the inducer spin up, then nothing lights.
The flame sensor
Lights, shuts down five to ten seconds later, tries again, locks out. That is the flame sensor, a thin rod that proves to the board there is a real flame. Once it is coated, the board assumes unburned gas and closes the valve. Cleaning it is quick. Recognizing it saves you a control board.
Blower problems
Burners light and no air moves. That points at the blower motor, its capacitor, or the board driving it. A furnace making heat with no airflow hits its high limit and shuts down, which is what it should do. Running it that way cooks heat exchangers.
Short cycling
A furnace that runs three minutes and quits is usually being stopped by a safety, not by the thermostat. A clogged filter, a blocked return, a failing limit switch, a plugged flue, or a unit oversized for the house will all do it.
Uneven heat between floors
Upstairs running five to eight degrees off the downstairs thermostat is almost always air, not heat output: undersized returns, unbalanced dampers, or leaky duct in an unconditioned attic. It does not always mean a new furnace.
Noises that mean something
A boom a few seconds after the call for heat can be delayed ignition, which means gas is pooling before it lights. Get that one looked at. Squealing is usually a bearing. Grinding is a motor with a short future.
The honest math
Repair or replace.
Every homeowner asks this and most contractors answer with a sales pitch. Here is how we think about it, including when the answer means we sell you less.
A repair is usually the smarter money when
- The unit is well inside its expected life and has not been failing repeatedly
- The failed part is a normal wear item like an ignitor, a sensor, or a capacitor
- The repair is a small fraction of what a replacement would run
- The heat exchanger and the venting check out clean
Replacement is the better call when
- The heat exchanger is cracked. That one is not a judgment call, it is a safety issue
- It is past the typical fifteen to twenty year mark and this is the third repair in two seasons
- The repair cost is creeping toward half of a new system
- Parts have gotten scarce, which turns a one day fix into a week with no heat
Efficiency belongs in the math too. Many units still running here are around eighty percent efficient, so a fifth of the gas goes up the flue. Current condensing furnaces run in the nineties, and over a Chicago heating season that gap can tip a borderline repair toward replacement.
Before winter
Maintenance is boring right up until the first cold night.
Most no-heat calls we take in January were visible in October. Fall is the cheap time to find them, because a part that fails during a tune-up gets replaced on a normal weekday instead of during the week everybody is buried.
Burners and combustion
Clean the burners and the flame sensor, watch the ignition sequence, and confirm the furnace is burning the way it should.
Heat exchanger and venting
Inspect the heat exchanger and the flue. This is the carbon monoxide check, and it is the part that matters most.
Airflow
Filter, blower wheel, and temperature rise across the unit. Bad airflow is behind a lot of short cycling and cold upstairs rooms.
Controls and safeties
Thermostat, limit switches, pressure switch, and gas valve. The safeties are what shut a furnace down, so they get tested instead of assumed.
Common questions
Heating questions we get every winter
The furnace lights and then shuts off a few seconds later. What is that?
Classic flame sensor pattern. The furnace lights, the board cannot confirm a flame, so it closes the gas valve, retries, and locks out. Sometimes cleaning the sensor fixes it, sometimes the sensor is done, and occasionally it is a gas pressure problem. Describe the sequence you hear when you call.
My furnace is eighteen years old. Do I keep fixing it?
Depends on what failed. An ignitor on an eighteen year old furnace that has otherwise been solid is worth doing. A cracked heat exchanger, or a third failure in two winters, is a different conversation. We put the repair cost next to a replacement and tell you which way we would go.
Do you work on boilers and radiators?
Yes. Much of the housing stock in Chicago and the older near suburbs is hot water or steam, and those systems fail their own way: circulator pumps, zone valves, expansion tanks, air in the loop, pressure that has drifted. Tell us what the radiators are doing and which ones.
It is below zero and I have no heat. How fast can you get here?
Call and ask. In a real cold snap every heating company in the region is running flat out, and an honest window beats a promise that falls apart. While you wait, open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls and let a faucet drip. Frozen pipes turn one problem into two.
Can a new furnace need electrical or plumbing work?
Often. A high efficiency furnace needs a condensate drain, and some installs need a dedicated circuit or a new disconnect. We do heating, cooling, plumbing, and electrical in house, so the whole job stays with one company instead of three.
There is a $125 service charge to come out. That pays for the trip and the diagnosis, which means finding what is actually wrong and telling you what it costs to fix. It is a separate charge and is not credited toward the repair. Once you have the repair price, nothing happens until you approve it.
Cold house? Tell us what it is doing.
Describe the sounds, the sequence, and what the thermostat says. You will get a straight answer about what it probably is and how soon someone can be out.