Most people don’t think about their heating system during the summer, and since spring is just around the corner, we want to put out some tips to keep from having some problems this coming fall.  The following tips may help save on your overall cost of maintenance on your heating system.

During the summer, you do not need to use the heat so most of your zone valves are just sitting there, not moving.  Unfortunately, this does and can cause problems.  Think of it like a person: if you don’t move for a long time you can get stiff.  This is the same thing that can happen with your zone valves.  They can get a small amount of rust or sediment build-up in the moving part when it sits there for three or four months so that they can rust in place and stop working.  We get a lot of calls every fall from customers telling us that their heat was working fine in the spring, but now that it has started to get colder, they could not get the heat to work in one part of their house. 

To keep this from happening if you have a furnace, turn the thermostat up so it comes on and runs until the blower comes on, then turn it back down to where you had it set previously.

If you have a hot water boiler system, you should go through, starting at one thermostat, and turn it up to where it will come on, then go to the next one until you have turned up all the thermostats in your house.  Go back to where you started with the first thermostat and turn it back to the setting it was at previously, then do the same thing to all the other thermostats you had turned up.  This is called exercising the heating system.  Again, this is like a person you don’t want to get stiff from sitting in one place for too long.

Doing this one small thing will save our customers a lot of calls on repairs that could be avoided.  It’s not that we don’t want to see you, but we just hate to have you spend your hard-earned money on something that could be avoided.  Hopefully, this will help keep your costs down.  We’ll give you some more tips next time.