- 60 Hartsdale Rd, Rochester NY 14622
- 7am to 7pm · 7 days a week
- Call an owner: 585 454 8422
No heat, but the thermostat screen is lit and the app still connects? Do not rule the thermostat out because of that. A smart thermostat can look completely healthy and still fail to call for heat, and it is one of the more common no-heat causes in newer homes. Justin or Colby will find out whether that is your problem or the furnace itself.
No heat in winter, no cool in a heat wave, busted lines. We answer the phone day or night, weekends included.
A smart thermostat needs constant low voltage power to run its screen and its wireless radio. That comes from a common wire, usually called the C wire. Plenty of homes never had one, because older thermostats did not need it, so the smart thermostat borrows small amounts of power through the heating wire instead. Most of the time that works well enough.
When it does not, the failure is a peculiar one. The screen stays on, the app still connects, and it looks entirely healthy, but the battery has drifted too low to reliably send the signal that actually calls for heat. So the homeowner rules the thermostat out, because obviously it is working, and starts wondering what is wrong with the furnace. Cold weather makes it worse, because that is when the system runs hardest and the thermostat has least to borrow. We check it as a matter of course before assuming anything about the furnace.
Justin VanCassele and Colby Baker run AmeriHeat together. Colby is a veteran. Both owners are on jobs every week across Rochester and Monroe, Wayne and Ontario Counties.
Give them a call. They actually pick up.
Two of these you can check safely yourself. The rest are ours.
If the screen works but no heat ever arrives, this is worth suspecting rather than dismissing. The fix is usually running a proper common wire or fitting the adapter kit that creates one. What we would ask you not to do is start moving wires at the thermostat yourself. A brief short there can blow the fuse on the furnace control board, and that turns a simple job into a much longer one.
There is a switch on or beside the furnace that looks like an ordinary light switch, and it gets knocked off during basement work more often than anyone expects. Check that, then the breaker. Those two take a minute and account for a genuine share of no-heat calls.
Classic flame sensor. The burner lights properly, the sensor fails to confirm the flame, and the board shuts the gas off as a safety measure. It films over with combustion residue over time. One of the cheapest parts in the furnace and usually a short visit.
If it vents through the side wall in white plastic pipe, go outside and check those terminations are not blocked with snow or ice. A blocked intake or exhaust shuts the furnace down deliberately, and a frozen condensate line does the same thing.
Most furnaces flash a diagnostic code through a small window in the front panel. Count the flashes and the pattern. Telling us that on the phone points straight at a fault category and often means the right part is on the truck when we arrive.
Leave the house first, then call from outside. A cracked heat exchanger or a blocked flue can put combustion gases into the living space. No amount of cold justifies investigating that one from indoors.
Victor has a lot of recent housing. The town has been converting farmland into subdivisions since the Thruway arrived, Eastview opened in 1971, and the population is up around twelve percent since 2010 with more approved this year. Newer homes are far more likely to have a smart thermostat, and a good share of those were fitted by the homeowner rather than an installer. Nothing wrong with that, plenty of them go in perfectly. But it does mean the thermostat is a genuine suspect here in a way it would not be in a house still running a simple dial.
One thing worth not doing yourself. If you are poking around the thermostat wiring, kill the power at the furnace breaker first. Those wires carry low voltage, so they will not hurt you, which is exactly why people are casual with them. Brush two of them together though and you can blow the fuse on the furnace control board. That leaves you with no heat and a repair that is considerably more involved than the one you started with.
If we find that fuse blown, replacing it is the easy part. The question is what shorted, because fitting a new fuse without finding the cause just means blowing another one. Usually it traces to a wiring fault, a pinched cable, or something that happened during a thermostat swap. We track it down rather than papering over it, which is the difference between a repair and a return visit.
We find the actual fault and give you a straight price before touching anything. No trip charge games, no quoting a replacement when a part has failed.
The make and model from the data plate inside the front panel, which is worth photographing now rather than hunting for by torchlight later. Whether the blower runs at all. Any blink code on the board. And whether you have a smart thermostat and roughly when it went in, because that last one genuinely changes where we look first.
Need someone out? Call 585 454 8422 or request service. Justin or Colby will get you on the schedule.
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Call the owners directly. We run a real diagnostic, check the controls as well as the furnace, and give you a straight price before any work starts.
Call, email, or send the form. Not a call center. We will get your Victor furnace diagnosed and the heat back on, gas or oil.
