In my house, the heater basically stops working every year and my dad put some like “bandaid” solution over it with manipulating some wiring, idk what they do. But like, every year, the heater would stop working like several times throughout the winter and constanly needs to be fixed. But this year it just stopped working completely. Like I google it and those heaters are like $2000 to $2500 brand new, so yea, I get it, parents want to save money, but like, having the heat stop few times a year feels like living in a developing country tbh 😓. So now I’m basically just relying on those portable heater things to stay warm, and my cat is feeling too cold so she’s staying in bedrooms most of the time because its where the portable heaters are at, when she normally just wanders the entire house.
I wouldn’t say normal, but also not uncommon especially if you’re someone that’s good with tinkering.
Basically if the furnace is fairly old, parts start wearing down and requires replacement or fixing. So you get to a point where you have to fix things more often because all the parts have reached end of life. Often it’ll be a small thing like maybe you need to clean the flame sensor, and then after that your negative pressure sensor goes out so you have to fix that. Those are all safety measures, so the furnace might be working perfectly fine but the control board thinks it’s unsafe, and shuts down, which is the correct thing to do. There’s a possibility the wire juggling is bypassing some of those.
But a lot of those items you can do for basically free or really cheap, so it’s not appealing to throw $2500 on a whole new one or to get a professional in to charge you $300 for the same fix. Furnaces also need to be services regularly, ideally yearly to check everything is good and prevent failures at inconvenient times, which many just can’t afford or don’t want to spend the money on. If $2500 is a lot of money for your parents, it’s just a small tradeoff that yeah it might go out every now and then and you fix it for so much cheaper.
Is not that $2500 is a lot of money, my parents are just cheap and anything the idea of spending money comes to mind, they just hate it. Just like getting an exterminator would get rid of all the pests, but they think its a scam. So they rather just living with having roaches. 🤷♂️
They don’t even like having a Co2 detector because “its a waste of money” so I just order it from Amazon. Yea I don’t got $2.5K so that ain’t my problem to fix lol it aint my house, I’ll just stay in my room and use a heater that use electricity from a wall outlet.
Sometimes it’s like that, especially if they grew up in poverty, even if they’re pretty well off now. It sticks, you’re just conditioned to save as much as possible. Which they very well could be: they could have plenty of income but be far behind on their retirement accounts and would rather put money for their upcoming retirement if they can. There’s a lot of factors there.
$2500 is on the very low end. Expect and budget double that.