Furnace Repair in Hermiston, OR
Furnaces here run from September through June. If yours quits, tell us what it's doing and a licensed contractor who covers Umatilla County will get in touch.
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It takes about a minute.
Ten months of heat wears a furnace down fast here
Your furnace runs from September through June in Hermiston, ten months out of the year. Winter nights average 27°F from December through February, so the burner is lighting and shutting off again and again to keep the house warm. Each cycle puts a little more wear on the igniter and the parts that control the burner.
Most homes here heat with electricity, and Oregon households saw real outages last year, with 20% going at least 24 hours without power. When the power drops on a cold night, a furnace that was already working hard can fail to restart, or the blower comes back on but the burner won't light. This area has also logged 90 winter storms and 77 damaging wind events over the past ten years, so the cold and the power loss often show up together.
- 10 months
- September through June, your furnace is on duty
- 27°F
- the average winter night it heats against
- 90 winter storms
- in ten years, the nights a failure hurts most
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
Oregon requires HVAC contractors to hold a state license.
The Construction Contractors Board tests contractors before they're licensed, and the license stays tied to that contractor rather than being issued fresh for each job. So when you hire someone licensed in Oregon, you're hiring someone the state has already screened, not just someone filing paperwork for this one repair.
For furnace repair, that license is what stands behind the work. Gas connections are the part that matters most, since a poor seal or a bad line is what turns a repair into a hazard, and the licensed contractor is accountable for getting that right. Oregon does carve out an exception for work under $1,000, which may cover a small furnace repair, but anything beyond that falls under the licensing rule the state applies to this trade.
Source: Oregon Legislative Assembly
- Why won't my furnace turn on?
- Start with the thermostat. Check that it's set to heat and the set temperature is above room temperature, and if it runs on batteries, swap them. If the thermostat looks fine, check the breaker panel and the furnace's own power switch, which looks like a light switch near the unit. Many furnaces also have a door that has to be seated correctly against a safety switch, so make sure the panel is fully closed. If none of that gets it running, the igniter or a safety control inside may have failed, and that's a job for a licensed contractor to diagnose.
- Why is my furnace blowing cold air?
- First check the thermostat fan setting. If it's set to "on" instead of "auto", the blower runs even when the furnace isn't heating, and that feels like cold air. If the fan is set to auto and you're still getting cold air, the furnace may be failing to ignite the burners, or the flame may be going out shortly after it starts. A clogged filter can also starve the system of airflow and trip a safety limit that shuts the burners off while the blower keeps running. Either way, this points to something a contractor needs to look at directly.
- Why won't my furnace pilot light stay lit?
- This usually means the thermocouple has worn out. That's the small sensor that sits in the pilot flame and tells the gas valve it's safe to keep the gas flowing. When it wears out or gets coated with residue, it stops reading the flame correctly and shuts the gas off, even though the pilot lit just fine. A draft blowing across the pilot or a dirty pilot orifice can cause the same symptom. Replacing the thermocouple is a straightforward repair for a licensed contractor, and worth getting done soon since a furnace that won't hold pilot won't heat at all.