How to finish your furnace - without doing anything at all

I inspected a house the other day - very nice home in one of Utah's best cities to live. It was one of those million dollar plus sort of homes - the kind that makes you wonder what the guy does. Turns out that this particular breadwinner was really good at buying and selling businesses, but not so outstanding at changing his furnace filter. 

There's a filter in there?

He had been in the home for 7 years, and never thought to consider that there might be a furnace filter in there somewhere. So after 7 years of use on one filter, I show up. I go to the furnace, and there it is - oddly located - about seven feet up off the floor and above the furnace. Needless to say, when I pulled it out, it was a tad dirty. 

The guy was all kinds of embarrassed, but perhaps he didn' t need to feel quite so bad - I see filters in that sort of condition commonly. Maybe once or twice a month. Renters are especially bad at completely forgetting about their furnace until it doesn't work. If you're a landlord, there's something to learn from that - but I won't belabor the point. 

The $10 / $10000 rule

So how does the $10 / $10000 rule work here? This one's pretty obvious. A furnace filter costs a few bucks - I like the cloth ones you can get at home depot or most other hardware stores. Yeah - the 30 day mesh ones are pretty lame - don't use those at all. Ideally, you'll use the 4 inch filters, placed on the side of the furnace so you can get to them easier. 

My experience is that the easier it is to get to the filter, the more often it is that the poor thing gets replaced. 

So why not just leave a filter in there? After all, they cost money, so if you don't replace them, you save money - right? Yeah - no. Here's a couple of reasons why you don't want to do that. 

     1: Efficiency is  all about air flow. Stop the flow, kill the efficiency.

     B: It fills up the combustion chamber, the computer and moving parts with dust - and it ages all of them very rapidly. Filling a furnace with filth is a surefire way to empty your wallet on a brand new furnace. 

      III. It's a good way to kill off yourself and your family. When the burn chamber fills with dust, it causes different parts of the chamber to heat differently. Then things age more rapidly, and you get a crack in the chamber. Then you get carbon monoxide in the home. Then you start buying coffins for those who didn't survive. 

Yeah - that's the $10,000 fix. 

Here's just a few pictures I thought I'd share with you. Got them all at my inspections

watch for corrosion from condensate leaks

Yeah - these filters pretty much qualify as officially nasty

This is what happens when the filter isn't there - or isn't installed properly

No furnace deserves to be abused like this, but here's a promise - it gets even