April 12, 2007
Got home tonight and one room was down to 59 degrees. hmm.. furnace wasn't working for some reason.
An odd little water mess...
Here's how a modern high efficiency furnace works.
Air enters the opening as per the red arrows into the combustion chamber.
The green arrows indicate further back where the air is drawn down through the heat exchanger. Drawing it downward helps get more of the heat energy out of the fuel.. Keep following the green arrows and you get to the blower that's doing all the moving of the air. It is pushing air that has had 94% of the heat extracted into the home out that white pipe to the outside of the house.
This causes condensation in that white pipe. The pipe is tilted on purpose for this condensation to drain back into the furnace... (why? ) I'm not sure.. what would it hurt for condensation to run outside the house? It's code that it comes back....as per the purple lines... Must be quite a bit too because all that water on the earlier picture is from that condensation.
I think it's supposed to get caught in that little hose thing and drain down into that white pipe. I'm also pretty sure the fan housing had water in it as part of the problem.
We got heat now, so hopefully good for a while and this was a blip on the radar.
This is what controls everything. It's not your grandpa's furnace. Bottom row, we have Red Blue White Green to one thermostat, then Red White to the little solenoid that opens and closes the 'zone' for that end of the house. in the middle, same for the other thermostat and zone 2. We could have a third zone, but we don't.
