Furnace repair, replacement and tune-ups in Kanata

Beaverbrook was laid out in the late 1960s and 1970s as a planned community, and the houses there, along with Glen Cairn across the Queensway, are on their second or third furnace by now. The ductwork is reasonable for the era but the replacements were often sized by copying the old label, so oversized furnaces and short cycling are common. Katimavik-Hazeldean followed in the 1980s with split-levels and two-storeys that heat unevenly when the blower is set too low or the dampers were never balanced.

The bigger volume of work is in Kanata Lakes, Bridlewood and Morgan's Grant. Those subdivisions went up from the mid-1990s through the 2000s, and a builder-grade furnace from that period is now fifteen to twenty-five years old. The usual pattern is a flame sensor or igniter first, then an inducer motor or a control board a few years later, and the second repair is where the repair-or-replace question becomes real. A high-efficiency furnace from the late 1990s that has reached its second control board is rarely worth the part.

Kanata sits on the western edge of the city with open farmland beyond it, and the wind across that ground makes exposed houses in Morgan's Grant and north Kanata Lakes lose heat faster than the same house would downtown. We allow for it in the heat-loss calculation when we size a replacement, and we check the vent terminations on west-facing walls during every tune-up, because drifted snow over a high-efficiency intake is a common cause of a furnace that quits on the coldest morning. Kanata is on Enbridge natural gas throughout.

• Beaverbrook and Glen Cairn: 1970s homes on replacement furnaces, often oversized
• Katimavik-Hazeldean: 1980s split-levels, uneven heat, balancing and blower settings
• Kanata Lakes, Bridlewood, Morgan's Grant: original builder-grade furnaces at fifteen to twenty-five years