Furnace repair, replacement and tune-ups in Ottawa

The old city is where a heating technician earns the fee. Centretown, the Glebe, Old Ottawa South, Sandy Hill, Westboro and Hintonburg are full of brick and frame houses from before 1930 that were converted from coal or oil to forced air long ago, with ducts squeezed into walls and floor joists that were never meant to carry them. The furnace that went in at the time was usually picked by guesswork and is usually too big. The result is a burner that fires hard, satisfies the thermostat in minutes and shuts down, while the third-floor bedroom never warms up. A fair number of these houses still run hot-water radiators, which we service and repair alongside forced air.

Alta Vista, Elmvale Acres and the other post-war neighbourhoods south of the Queensway are a different job. The bungalows and split-levels there date from the 1950s and 1960s, the ductwork is sound, and the common furnace is an 80 percent mid-efficiency unit from the 1990s that has quietly passed twenty years. Out in Riverside South and the newer streets along the river the houses came with builder-grade single-stage furnaces that are now reaching the age where igniters, inducer motors and control boards give out.

Ottawa is colder than the rest of southern Ontario and the equipment has to be chosen with that in mind. A unit under twelve years old is nearly always worth a repair. When it is time to replace, a measured heat-loss calculation matters more here than anywhere, because the furnace has to carry the house through a week at minus 25 without being so large that it short-cycles for the other five months. A September tune-up is the cheapest insurance against a no-heat call in February. The whole city is on Enbridge natural gas, and every gas job is done by a TSSA-certified technician and inspected to the Ontario code.

• Centretown, the Glebe, Old Ottawa South, Sandy Hill, Westboro, Hintonburg: century homes, retrofitted ducts, oversized furnaces, some radiators
• Alta Vista, Elmvale Acres, Carleton Heights: post-war bungalows and split-levels, mid-efficiency furnaces past their life
• Riverside South and the newer river streets: builder-grade furnaces at the ten-to-fifteen-year mark