Looks like we’re going to end up with a new furnace! The people from TroubleFree Heating and Cooling came out to inspect our furnace and found that it was so caked with soot and buildup that his telescoping camera couldn’t make out whether or not our heat exchanger was cracked or damaged.
He said that cleaning the unit would cost between $600-$800 and take 4-6 hours, and he said that then they would have to inspect the furnace again after it was cleaned in order to determine if there was any structural damage. He said that there were indications of a crack that had been fixed once with the unit, and his recommendation was to put the 36 year old furnace out to stud.
He said you could conceivably drop $1000 easily in getting it cleaned and re-inspected, and that’s a pretty good down payment on a new furnace.
I must say that this is a bit of a setback for our debt repayment, as the first time we’ve ever had to kill our emergency fund. Luckily, they do financing through Cefcu so we should be able to get the balance handled but hopefully we will be able to scrape together enough to make the financed portion somewhat negligible. That value will go right into our debt snowball and we hopefully won’t miss much of a beat.
I’m thankful to have found this problem before it involved any injuries/deaths, and I’m thankful that we have our emergency fund to help offset the pain of getting a new furnace. Here’s to hoping the cost isn’t going to be all that astronomical!
I have to say I’m very pleased with the service that I’ve received from TroubleFree so far… the guy even went back to their shop and provided some space heaters so we didn’t freeze overnight. The technician was also extremely thorough in explaining what was wrong, where the cost was coming from, and what our options were. We’ll know more tomorrow!
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