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Start with the carbon monoxide question, then we will talk about money
Most furnace problems are an inconvenience. A cracked heat exchanger is not, and it is the one thing on this page we would ask you to take seriously.
The heat exchanger is the metal wall between the burning gas and the air you breathe. When it cracks, combustion gases can cross into the supply air. The symptoms are vague and easy to dismiss: headaches that clear up when you leave the house, a soot mark near the furnace, a burner flame that flickers or rolls out when the blower kicks on. If a technician condemns a heat exchanger, get a second opinion, because it is also a claim that conveniently sells a furnace. But get that second opinion quickly, and in the meantime run a carbon monoxide alarm. They cost about $25 at any hardware store on Fourth Street and there is no version of this where owning one is a bad idea.
A cracked heat exchanger is not repairable. Anyone who offers to weld or patch one is telling you something important about himself. That furnace gets replaced.
Your furnace runs about 300 hours a year, and that changes everything
Long Beach barely has a winter. A January night here might touch the mid-40s. Your furnace runs a fraction of the hours a furnace in Sacramento runs, let alone one in Denver, and that fact should reframe every decision on this page.
Furnaces here rarely wear out. They sit. They collect dust, the flame sensor oxidizes, the igniter finally gives up after twenty years of thermal cycling, and a mouse gets into the burner compartment. This is a machine dying of neglect rather than use, which is good news, because the failures of neglect are the cheap ones.
It also means something we will say plainly: a $200-a-year maintenance plan on a furnace you run 300 hours is a poor purchase. Pay for a real tune-up every second or third autumn and skip the subscription.
The most common failure in this city, and it is trivial
The furnace fires up, runs for about five seconds, then shuts down. It tries again. Same thing. Maybe three times, then it locks out.
That is a dirty flame sensor almost every time. It is a thin metal rod that sits in the flame and confirms to the control board that there is actually a fire, so the board can shut the gas valve if there is not. Over years it develops an oxide film and stops conducting. A technician cleans it with an emery cloth. The whole thing takes ten minutes.
You will pay $150 to $250, which is really the price of the visit. That is fine and it is worth paying. What is not fine is being told this is the beginning of the end for a fifteen-year-old furnace, or having it turned into a replacement quote.
Repair costs
- Flame sensor cleaned or replaced: $150 to $250
- Hot surface igniter: $200 to $350
- Thermocouple on an older standing-pilot unit: $150 to $250
- Inducer motor: $500 to $900
- Control board: $500 to $800
- Blower motor: $600 to $1,000
- Gas valve: $500 to $900
- Heat exchanger: not a repair. Price a furnace instead, $3,500 to $6,500 installed and permitted
The wall furnace and the floor furnace
A large share of the pre-1940 housing in Rose Park, Carroll Park, California Heights and Bluff Heights never had a central furnace at all. It has a gas wall heater in the hallway, or a gravity floor furnace with a big iron grate you learned not to walk on barefoot as a child.
These can be serviced and they can be replaced, and a wall furnace swap runs $2,000 to $3,500. Here is the honest part. A gravity floor furnace from the 1940s has no blower, no filter and no safety controls that anyone today would recognize as adequate, and parts are scarce. If yours has a cracked exchanger, do not spend money chasing it. That is the moment to ask whether a ductless head, which heats and cools and filters and does not burn anything inside your house, is the better purchase for a bungalow. Frequently it is, and it costs less than adding ducts.
Questions we get
The furnace blows but the air is cold.
Check the thermostat is on Heat and the fan is on Auto rather than On. With the fan set to On it runs continuously and blows room-temperature air between heating cycles, which feels like a failure and is not one. If that is not it, the burners are not lighting, and you are back at the flame sensor or the igniter.
Who is my gas utility?
The City of Long Beach. Long Beach runs its own municipal gas utility rather than SoCalGas, which surprises people who move here from anywhere else in the county. It matters when you smell gas, when you need service at the meter, and when someone quotes you a rebate program, because most of the rebate advice online quietly assumes SoCalGas. Ask which program the number came from. If you smell gas, leave the house and call from outside.
Repair the old furnace or replace it?
Under fifteen years, repair almost anything short of a heat exchanger. Past twenty, put the repair money toward the replacement, and make that a conversation about a heat pump rather than a like-for-like furnace, because in this climate the heat pump is genuinely the stronger machine and there is a federal credit attached to it. In between, it depends on the part and on whether the air conditioner is the same age. If both are old, replacing them together costs less than replacing them separately a year apart.
Do I need a permit for a repair?
No. Replacing the furnace does, through Long Beach Development Services.
Send your Long Beach furnace repair details
Tell us what it is doing, roughly how old it is, and whether it is a central furnace, a wall heater or a floor furnace. Related: AC repair, AC installation, duct cleaning, or the Long Beach HVAC overview.