So, winter is upon us, at least for the next few days, and after long months of neglect, we turned the heat on. When the heater kicks on, it’s blowing mostly cold air, though it’s been on all day and is now up to cool/room temperature-ish? I assumed it just need time to warm up after it’s been sitting for months on end, but my grasp of the issue is hazy, so I thought I’d ask here. So, what’s the deal?
Is it a furnace? Is the pilot light on? A lot of times the pilot light will get blown out over the course of the year.
Did you perhaps do some maintenance on it at the end of the season and have forgotten to turn some vital something back on?
We didn’t do anything to it. The only thing that’s been done in there is when the AC thingie started leaking water and we called maitenance to come fix it. They did something involving blowing lots of air.
I dunno what kind of heater it is. I know we get a gas bill, but that could be the water heater, I’m not entirely sure.
It’s an apartment, by the way.
Newer heaters don’t use a pilot light. They use a electric starter like you see on stoves and gas dryers. Our heater fan doesn’t start until the heat exchanger gets warm enough to trigger the fan. Its not hard to tell if it is gas or electric, just see if there is a gas line going to it yet it is not heating and probably should be reported to the manager so they can get it looked at.
Time to call management, methinks. For the curious: Yes, it is gas. I pulled the cover off the boxy thing in the little room with the water heater and there’s a little switchy thing with settings like “Off-On-Pilot-Set”. It’s still blowing out cool air, but I’ll get management to send somebody up tomorrow, as I’m going to assume the pilot light’s gone out and gas isn’t something I want to mess with.
A) It’s not that hard, and the instructions are usually printed somewhere on the unit itself. You light a match, set the control to Pilot Set (usually you have to hold it down), stick the match to the pilot area (if you can’t see it, wave the match around the burners until something catches), keep holding the control down for about a minute after the gas lights, then turn it to “On.”
B) If you don’t want to deal with it, make sure the control is set to Off, so that you’ll actually wake up tomorrow.
I don’t want to deal with it. Besides, considering how much I pay in rent, let the fix-it dudes fix it.