While repairing my home gas heater/furnace, the tech showed me a slight buildup of dust on the inside door of the main panel (the one with the fan, burners, wires, etc.) and said the dust buildup can cause damage, especially to the circuit board, which would cost 700.00 to replace. While I believe dust can cause damages and agree it should be cleaned, is this something that must be done by a tech? Can I just clean it myself? They want 122.00 to do it, but if they aren’t going to do anything that I can’t do myself, I would rather save the money.
The dust shouldn’t hurt the circuit board.
The main fan and the burner should be in different compartments, separated by the heat exchanger. If the dust is in the fan section, check that the filter is fitted properly and air can’t bypass the filter. The filter should keep dust out of this section.
The airflow though the burner section is much less, as it only needs to handle combustion air. If you have a high efficiency furnace, there might also be a smaller fan in the burner section for exhausting the flue gas. If the furnace gets combustion air (usually brought in from outside) that is dusty it could be a problem, but I’d suspect the problem would be in the burner or ignition system, not in the panel board. The legitimate service for this would be to clean out the dust, check the ingition system and burner, and perform a flue gas analysis for properly burner operation.
Call them back and ask them exactly what they will do for the $122. If they say “clean out the dust” then I suspect it’s just a scam and you could wipe up the dust yourself if you want to. If they say they will clean it up and tune the burner and a perform a flue gas analysis, then it’s probably legitimate. On further thought, I suspect a scam because the technician could have performed a flue gas analysis the first time and showed you the result.
Why was the tech there in the first place? A specific repair or a routine servicing?
Thanks for the response.
He was there to repair it- it quit working. I’m not sure what the problem was exactly, but the unit would sound like it would start up, but when the burners started up, the would not ignite, only a clicking noise (no pilot on this unit). He told me what he replaced (it looked like a wire with a small square black plastic looking box attached to it) but I can’t remember now and I don’t have the work order here. He specifically said the 122.00 was only for cleaning, that dust can severely damage the unit. He aslo said that the filter, which is on the bottom of the unit, needed to be clipped down because it was blowing up a bit and causning dust (?) to escape, but this also seems like something I could do myself.