Tried to fix my own furnace to save $400, and the part I bought made it worse
My furnace started short cycling back in early January, and every HVAC company in Cleveland quoted me somewhere between $350 and $450 just to come out and look at it. So I did what any cheap homeowner does and watched about six YouTube videos, then ordered a $38 flame sensor and a $22 ignitor off Amazon. Swapped them both out on a Saturday morning feeling pretty proud of myself. Furnace fired right up, ran for maybe 20 minutes, then quit again. Turned out the real problem was a cracked heat exchanger, which is a safety issue, and my 'fix' just masked it long enough to make me think I was a genius. A tech from a shop over on Lorain Ave came out and basically told me I got lucky the CO detector didn't go off. Now I'm looking at a full replacement quote of $4,800 and wondering if that $400 service call would have caught this weeks ago before it got this bad. Has anyone else had a furnace problem that turned out way bigger than the noise it was making?