This article was written by senior furnace tech Benoît (Ben) Mongeau. Ben hails from the frozen tundra of Ontario, Canada, where high-efficiency gas furnaces are commonplace. While some codes and practices may be different from the US, I find that most of it is common sense and translates pretty well. One glaring difference between Canada […]

If you don’t have a gas furnace or fireplace in your home, your unit’s reversing valve is probably your best friend during the winter months.  As their name suggests, reversing valves reverse the refrigerant flow to send the hot, compressed vapor to the indoor coil instead of the outdoor coil. The system releases heat into […]

The first law of thermodynamics is an extension of the law of energy conservation. The latter states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed but converts from one form to another. Thermodynamics is the study of heat’s relationship with mechanical work, and it establishes heat as a form of energy that can be neither […]