Heating & Furnace
What to Check on Your Furnace Before a South Central Kansas Winter
A furnace spends half the year switched off and then gets asked to work on the first genuinely cold night. Most of what goes wrong in that first week is visible in October.
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Nothing about a furnace tells you it is ready. It sits through a Kansas summer doing nothing at all, and the first evidence you get either way is the evening you turn it on and want it to work.
Which is the argument for looking at it while the weather is still mild. Not because anything terrible happens otherwise, but because a filter, a blocked return or a flame sensor is a small job in October and a cold house in January, and the whole of the difference is when you looked.
What you can check yourself, safely
A fair amount, and none of it requires taking a panel off. Everything in this list is outside the combustion side of the appliance, which is where the line sits.
- The filter. Change it, and write the date on the edge of the frame so the next one is not a guess. In a house with pets or a lot of traffic, look at it monthly through the season.
- Supply vents and return grilles. A rug over a return or a sofa across a vent starves the blower, and people move furniture in the autumn.
- The thermostat. Fresh batteries where it takes them, and a schedule that matches how the house is actually used now rather than two winters ago.
- The space around the furnace. Boxes, paint and solvents stored against an appliance that draws combustion air is a bad combination and an easy one to fix.
- The terminations outside. High-efficiency furnaces vent through the wall through plastic pipe, and those pipes collect nests, leaves and drifted snow. They need to be clear.
- The first run of the season. Turn the heat on early, on a mild day, and stand there for the whole cycle so you find out now.
If you ever smell gas, that list stops applying. Leave the house and call the gas utility from outside — that is their call to take, not ours and not yours.
What belongs to a technician
The rest of it. Not as a matter of trade protectionism — as a matter of what the work involves: opening a sealed combustion appliance, reading it with instruments, and putting it back exactly as the manufacturer intended.
The combustion side
Burners and the flame sensor cleaned and checked. The heat exchanger inspected. Gas pressure read and set to specification. Draft confirmed, and carbon monoxide measured rather than assumed. This is the part of a furnace visit that exists for safety rather than for comfort, and it is the part no checklist on the internet can do for you.
Airflow and the blower
Static pressure across the system, the blower wheel and motor, and the temperature rise across the heat exchanger measured against the range on the data plate. A furnace running outside its rise range is being shortened whether or not anyone in the house has noticed anything.
Controls and safeties
The ignitor, the limit switches, the pressure switch, the rollout safeties, and the wiring and connections all of it depends on. These are the components whose entire job is to stop the appliance when something is wrong, so a furnace that runs is not evidence that they work.
Condensate, on the high-efficiency ones
A condensing furnace produces water all winter and has to get rid of it. The trap, the drain line and the pump if there is one are worth attention before the season rather than during it.
An old furnace is not automatically the problem
Plenty of the equipment we work on in and around Wichita is well past the age at which somebody has already suggested replacing it, and a good deal of it is running properly and safely. Keeping older equipment going is a real part of what we do — enough of one that it has its own section in our project gallery.
The questions that matter are whether it is safe, whether it measures where it should, and what it is costing to run and to keep. Age is an input to those, not a verdict on its own. If a furnace fails one of them we will tell you plainly, and if it passes we will tell you that instead.
If the house has never been comfortable, look past the furnace
There is a category of complaint that no amount of furnace work resolves: the back bedroom that is always cold, the upstairs that overshoots while the ground floor is still asking for heat, the room over the garage. Those are usually a distribution problem rather than an appliance problem, and replacing the appliance leaves them exactly where they were.
Ductwork, return sizing and where the thermostat is reading the house from are all worth putting on the table in that conversation. So, sometimes, is a different approach entirely for the one room that has never worked.
Common questions
- How often should a furnace be serviced?
- Once a year, before the heating season, is the standard the manufacturers themselves set — and keeping to it is usually a condition of the equipment warranty on newer systems. If the same system also provides your cooling, it is being asked to work in both directions and is worth looking at on both sides of the year.
- How often should I change the furnace filter?
- It depends far more on the house than on the furnace. A one-inch filter in a house with pets can be genuinely dirty in a month; a deeper media filter in a quiet house may go far longer. Rather than following a rule, look at yours after four weeks in the season and see what it looks like — that tells you your interval, and it does not change much year to year.
- Is it worth booking furnace service in early autumn rather than waiting?
- It is easier, mostly. Everybody in South Central Kansas discovers their heating in the same fortnight, and the schedule reflects that. Booking while the weather is still mild also means that if something does need a part, there is room to sort it out before you are relying on the appliance.
- What does a furnace tune-up include?
- On our visits: the combustion side cleaned, inspected and measured, gas pressure and draft set and confirmed, carbon monoxide checked, airflow and temperature rise read against the data plate, and every safety control tested. You get told what was found either way, including when the answer is that it is all fine.
How we do it
You Will Know Where You Stand Before the Season Starts
We have been inside this equipment for more than twenty years, on all makes and models, across the Wichita area. A pre-season visit ends the way every visit ends: you are told what passed, what is wearing, what can be left until next autumn, and what putting any of it right would involve.
No pressure attached to any of it. If your furnace is fine, the useful thing we can do is tell you it is fine and let you get on with your autumn.
Clear information before work moves forward — including when the answer is that no work is needed.
Where this goes next
What We Do About It
- Furnace HeatingRepair, service and installation on furnaces of every make and model.
- ThermostatsWhere a control upgrade helps, and where it will not fix a distribution problem.
- Project GalleryReal jobs, including the older equipment we keep running.
- Contact UsGet a pre-season visit on the schedule while the weather is still mild.
- Heating in DerbyWhat a furnace is up against by the decade the house was built.
- Heating in AugustaModern equipment in houses that predate it, and the ductwork in between.
More reading
Other Articles
- Commercial Boiler Start-UpWhat a proper boiler start-up covers for a Wichita-area church, school, office or apartment building, what to look at in the boiler room first, and how it differs from the state inspection.
- Make-Up Air in WinterWhy a kitchen or a shop goes cold and drafty when the exhaust runs in January, what a heated make-up air unit is doing about it, and what to look at before the first hard freeze.
- Radiant Floor HeatingWhat in-floor heat does well in a Kansas shop, barn or house, where it is the wrong answer, and the handful of decisions that have to be made before the concrete arrives.
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Arrow Heating and Air Conditioning, LLC · License# BUS2025-11907