If your house is cold right now

No heat tonight? Start here.

You have probably found us by searching at a bad hour. Here is the honest order of things — and if you can smell gas or an alarm is sounding, stop reading and go outside.

If you can smell gas, or a carbon monoxide alarm is sounding: get everyone outside first, and do not touch light switches or plugs on the way. From outside, ring 911, then Enbridge Gas on 1‑866‑763‑5427. That line is answered every hour of the year and the visit is free.

No gas smell, just a cold house? Four free checks, and how to keep one room warm
  1. The thermostat. Set to HEAT rather than AUTO or OFF, with the target a few degrees above the room. If the screen is blank, change the batteries — it is the commonest reason a furnace does nothing whatsoever.
  2. The switch on the wall beside the furnace. It looks like an ordinary light switch and it is usually at the top of the basement stairs or on a joist nearby. Anybody who has been down there can catch it with a shoulder.
  3. The breaker. Find the furnace breaker in the panel, turn it fully off, count to ten, and turn it back on.
  4. The filter. Pull it out and hold it up to a light. If no light comes through, the furnace is overheating and shutting itself down on purpose. Leave it out for tonight and buy a new one tomorrow.

That is as far as anybody should go without a licence. Do not take panels off, and do not keep pressing the reset button — every failed ignition leaves more unburnt gas where it should not be.

Do not wait for Enbridge. It is the advice everybody gives and it is wrong: they own the meter, not the furnace, and their own pages say they do not repair or service heating equipment. Their emergency line is for gas and carbon monoxide. Nobody is being dispatched for a cold house.

Getting through the night. A space heater plugged straight into a wall socket will hold one room — never an extension cord, and never the oven. If the house may drop below freezing and you are going to be out of it, open the cupboards under the sinks and leave one tap running in a thin stream.

What we can and cannot do

We install one home a week and those weeks are booked ahead, so we are not an emergency repair service — and we would rather say so now than at the end of your evening. Call us anyway on (519) 702-4725: if we can get to you we will, and if we cannot we will tell you who can.

If it is dead rather than broken — twenty-five years old, a cracked heat exchanger, a repair quote worth half a new furnace — then you are buying a furnace rather than a repair, and that is a far worse decision at eleven at night than at ten in the morning. Tomorrow, in daylight: what it costs is published to the dollar, the two days are described hour by hour, and the soonest week we have is on the front page.

Call (519) 702-4725
(519) 702-4725