Keeping your furnace healthy during the cold

PEORIA, Ill. (WMBD) — The weather is getting cold and the houses are getting warmer.

Checking your chimney

When soot and other buildup in chimneys gets to be too much, it can be hazardous to the oxygen in the house.

“You run into the danger of possibly filling your home with carbon monoxide,” said Nate Rice, division chief of fire prevention for the Peoria Fire Department.

With a recent chimney fire in Peoria, Rice is urging chimney safety.

“The number one thing to do is make sure that your chimney is cleaned by a professional chimney cleaner,” he said. “What happens is soot from burning over the time period gathers in the flue of your chimney. That will catch fire if it’s built up too much within that flue.”

While checking your chimney is essential, what about checking the heat in your house?

Checking your furnace

“That’s very important, to check your filter and make sure you change it and date it because a lot of people think that it’s good, but you check the date and it was from two years ago,” said Jawaun Johnson, a service tech for Fritch Heating & Cooling.

With temperatures dropping, people are keeping closer tabs on their furnace.

Fritch Heating & Cooling in Peoria is starting to get more calls to do these furnace checks.

“The busy season starts actually right now,” said Joseph Milton, vice president of Fritch Heating & Cooling. “Right when that weather dips down into the thirties, and you have that first moment to where people have the ‘oh crap, I sure hope my furnace works this year. That’s really where our winter just skyrockets.”

The work being done ensures the circulation of air in the house is safe to breathe.

This includes changing the furnaces filter, even when you think it’s fine.

“What I would do is I will show them their filter because there’s been a couple customers being like, ‘Hey, I just changed the filter,’ and I come check it out, and it’s just as dirty as the one we just showed you,” said Johnson.

These furnace checks should be done once a year, and the maintenance usually takes about 45 minutes to an hour to complete.

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