cranberries wrote: I forgot to mention that the capacitor attached to the fan is bad too. Basically, I have to think about the next ten years of my life when making a decision about this furnace, and I don't like doing this.
It's a 300$ part called a "Hard Start Capacitor" and you can replace it very easily.
We could have replaced the fan, but the furnace probably will die regardless in the next couple of years, and now seemed as good a time as any to replace it (that's code for "my wife really wanted to replace it"). Let's hope she finishes her thesis and finds work this fall. The house feels more comfortable and the airflow seems more even and less drafty. Is that worth $6,000? I guess the market would say yet, it is.
Yeah, we told the HVAC folks to suck a dick. They wanted to replace my gas-guzzling furnace because it's very inefficient. I retorted that a Williamson Tall Boy was built before "the age of design-for-obsolescence", is 34 years old and has never failed to heat the house, and will likely continue to heat my house until the day of my death. The AC, however, literally exploded and it was never going to be fixable, so we had to get a new one.