You must have heard furnace services providers ranting countless times about the importance of keeping your furnace in top shape. When you drive a car thousands of miles without checking the oil and water, the engine will eventually give out.

The same thing applies to furnaces. Poorly maintained furnaces come with their risks. They include:

Poor air quality

When you aren’t properly maintaining your oven, you don’t pay attention to the furnace filters. These are the parts that regulate the quality of air in the house. When you go for a long time without cleaning them, they don’t filter the air getting into the house and the furnace.

If your guess is as good as mine, this leads to poor air quality as all the debris and dust blow right into the house along with the heat. If you suffer from allergies, the dust and debris heighten your condition.

For you to restore good quality air in the house, you need to clean the air filters. Sometimes they might be too dirty for cleaning and you have to replace them.

The fantastic news is you don’t have to hire a contractor to help you with the cleaning or replacement of the filters. You can do all by yourself.

Carbon monoxide poisoning

You risk suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning if you have a gas furnace. Gas furnaces use a heat exchanger to remove carbon monoxide and other harmful gases from the heated air. For the heat exchanger to do its work, it has to expand and contract.

When you go for a long time without inspecting the heat exchanger, it develops cracks that leak deadly gases into your home. Since carbon monoxide is odorless and colorless, you risk inhaling it and dying.

House

Plenty of things can go wrong in a poorly maintained furnace. The gas can leak, leading to a house fire, the loose wires and pilot light can develop problems starting fires or even an explosion.

Sometimes you are lucky to catch the fires early and put them out, but if you aren’t fortunate, the house guts down, and sometimes your loved ones are hurt.

By taking care of the furnace, you catch the cracks when they are still small and replace the pipes. Regular inspection also ensures you identify the faulty wires as early as possible and fix them.

High energy bills

A poorly maintained furnace works hard to heat the house. This forces it to consume a lot of energy, which translates to high energy bills at the end of the month. If you have a vented heating system, a lot of heat gets lost through the vents, which is a considerable loss of energy and resources.

Expensive repairs

In 90% of the time, poorly maintained furnaces stop working in the middle of a cold night. Due to this, homeowners have to call emergency furnace repair services Falls Church professionals that don’t come cheap.

Since you haven’t been taking good care of the furnace, most parts will be flawed; hence, you have to replace them. This dramatically pushes up the repair costs.

The heating system has a short lifespan

As mentioned above, a poorly maintained furnace works harder than it should. Just like your body, when you push the stove more than it’s designed to, it not only leads to extensive repair, it also drastically reduces the lifespan of the system.

While a properly maintained system will last over 15 years, it would be out of the ordinary for a poorly maintained furnace to celebrate its tenth year.