Your Toronto area home has a forced air system installed in it. You rely on this for not only the heat but also for the air conditioning during the summer (did someone say ‘summer?’ It’s not like we had much of one). This requires a fan to move the air through the series of ducts in the house and to each room.
Many homeowners call into their HVAC professional when they hear the fan continuously running, especially during the winter and when the furnace is off. During the summer, most of us tend to associate the air conditioning unit outside, and the noise it makes when cooling the home to be normal and the fan noise gets lost in all of the outdoor noise we hear through open windows or just because we’re spending more time outside.
But in the winter you may hear that fan going and worry that something’s wrong with your furnace or another part of the heating system.
Relax. In the vast majority of cases, this is due to a simple oversight on the homeowner’s part. When you switched the air conditioning system off, or turned the furnace on for the winter, if you have a digital thermostat then you will notice that there are a couple of switches.
One is to turn the system from ‘cool’ to ‘off’ or to ‘heat.’ You’ll also notice another switch that controls the fan. Those options are generally ‘on’, ‘off’, and ‘auto.’ If you turn the switch to ‘on’ instead of auto, then the fan will be on all the time.
There’s no need to call out an HVAC technician until you check this switch. Nine times out of ten it will be this issue. If it’s on ‘auto’ and the fan continues to run even though the furnace or A/C unit is off, contact Mckinnon today.