HVAC Repair in Worcester, MA
Homes here need heat from October through May and cooling from July through August. If your system quits, tell us what it's doing and a licensed contractor who covers Worcester County will get in touch.
Tell us about the job
It takes about a minute.
Ten months of work, most of it in the cold
Your furnace is the one carrying this house. Worcester County needs heat from October through May, and on the coldest nights it is firing against an average low of 18°F. That kind of cold means longer burner cycles and more of them, and every cycle puts wear on the igniter and the ignition control board. When one of those finally gives out, the furnace won't light at all.
More than a third of homes here run on fuel oil, which adds the oil burner, the nozzle and the filter to the list of parts that can fail and leave the house cold. Summer asks less of the system, just July and August with afternoons near 79°F, but the AC still has to start reliably after sitting idle most of the year. And with storms knocking out power often enough that one in ten Massachusetts households lost it for a full day last year, a furnace or AC that won't restart on its own after an outage is a problem worth checking before it happens.
- 8 months
- October through May, your system heats
- 2 months
- July through August, it cools
- 18°F
- the average winter night it heats against
- 79°F
- the average summer afternoon it cools against
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
- Why is my heat not working?
- Start with the thermostat. Make sure it's set to heat and the temperature is set above the room temperature, since a setting bumped by accident is a common cause. If that's not it, check your breaker panel, because a tripped breaker will shut the furnace down with no warning. Fuel oil furnaces also need oil in the tank, so if you heat with oil, check the gauge. When those check out and you still have no heat, especially with winter nights here averaging 18°F, a contractor should look at it the same day.
- Why is my system running but not cooling the house?
- Check the air filter first. A filter clogged with dust blocks airflow across the coil, and when that happens the coil can ice over and stop cooling the air even though the system keeps running. Check the outdoor unit too. If the coil outside is covered in leaves or grass clippings, it can't release heat the way it needs to. If the filter is clean and the outdoor unit is clear, the system likely has a problem a contractor needs to diagnose, such as a refrigerant leak.
- What can I check before calling for HVAC repair?
- Check the thermostat settings, the breaker panel, and the air filter. A thermostat set wrong, a tripped breaker, or a filter so dirty it's choking airflow are common reasons a system seems dead when it isn't. If you heat with oil, check the tank gauge as well, since oil furnaces will not run on an empty tank. If all of that checks out and the system still isn't working, a contractor will need to look at the equipment itself.