Getting Your Squamish Heating System Ready for Winter: What to check in September

There is a short to-do list of things you want to take care of in September to get your heating system ready for winter, and very little of it costs money. Some of it you can do yourself, and some of it needs a technician with the right tools, so this post covers both: what a Squamish homeowner can check at home, and what a fall maintenance visit finds that you cannot. We also cover what happens when a problem waits until the first cold snap to show itself.

One of the most common problems we get called about is a room that will not warm up, and the fix is often simpler than a new furnace or new ductwork. We worked on one Squamish house where the far bedrooms had been cold for a long time. The owners had given up on those rooms, put a space heater back there, and figured the furnace could not push heat that far or the ductwork to those rooms was too small. When we looked, the furnace was fine and so were the ducts, and the problem ended up being in the main living space where the thermostat was installed: it was getting too much air.

That living space opened onto the kitchen, which is of course where everyone gathers and the cooking happens, so between the stove, the people, and the electronics it warmed up fast. The thermostat reached its setting early and shut the furnace off before the far bedrooms had warmed. Here was the solution: we turned the airflow into the kitchen and living area down, the back of the house warmed up, and nothing was replaced.

What you can check yourself before the cold arrives

Put the filter in properly. A clean filter matters, and so does a tight one. A lot of furnace filters sit loose in their slot, and when a filter can move around, air slips past it instead of through it. Every time air bypasses the filter, dirt bypasses too, and that dirt ends up on the internal components of the furnace. When you change the filter this fall, make sure it fits snugly and is not rattling around.

Turn the system on. Run it for a while on a cool morning and confirm it is producing heat. It sounds too simple to write down, and it is the check that most often gets skipped until the first cold night.

Check your carbon monoxide detector. If you have a gas furnace, a quality carbon monoxide sensor is one of the most important things in the house. Smoke alarms are often as old as the house itself and get ignored for years, so if yours is a single-purpose unit from another decade, a smoke alarm with an integrated carbon monoxide sensor is worth the upgrade.

Look at where your furnace breathes. Every gas furnace needs air coming in to feed the flame and a way to get exhaust out. If yours has a metal chimney, it draws air from inside the house, and there should be a vent on an outside wall letting fresh air in to replace it. If it has plastic pipes, follow them to where they end on the side of the house or up through an older chimney: one is the exhaust and the other, usually with a screen on it, is the intake. Make sure nothing is blocking that intake, whether wasp nests, cottonwood, leaves, or anything else that has moved in over the summer.

If you have a heat pump, look at the outdoor unit. It performs best clean, and if it has not been cleaned since June there is a good chance it is carrying cottonwood, pollen, and dust from a whole Squamish summer. You can gently brush the fins in the direction they run. Do not use a pressure washer, anything abrasive, or a stiff brush.

Look up. Modern side-discharge heat pumps are clever about snow: they read temperature and humidity, work out when it is likely snowing, and run the fan to keep snow from piling against the coil. What they cannot do anything about is a load of snow sliding off a roof or out of a tree and burying them. We can go three, four, or five winters here with little snow, or only the heavy wet kind, and then get a season that moves very differently, so while it is still pleasant to be outside, check what hangs over your outdoor unit and your intakes. A tree that has grown since the install counts.

Think about your thermostat. If you are still running an older one, a modern Wi-Fi thermostat gives you scheduling and the ability to warm the house before you get home, which is pleasant. The part that matters in winter is the alert. If something fails while you are visiting relatives over the holidays, it can tell you the house has dropped below a threshold before anything has frozen, and a neighbour, a relative, or one of us can get in, figure out why the system stopped, and get it running or put temporary heat in. The difference is a phone call and a space heater instead of a burst pipe and a water damage claim.

What a fall maintenance visit finds that you cannot

Most heating systems do not have a great deal of maintenance a homeowner can do themselves, and that is the plain truth of it. The list above covers what you can see. The failures that cause the most trouble start where you cannot.

The heat exchanger. This is the part that keeps the fire and its exhaust separate from the air in your house, and it is the one component we often cannot repair when it goes. Every time a furnace turns on and off, the metal heats up and cools down, expanding and contracting, and over many years that repeated cycling fatigues the metal until cracks can begin. If the furnace has ever run with a failed fan motor or heavily blocked ducts, the overheating can change the metal itself, leaving it harder and more brittle. We have inspection tools that let us look inside the heat exchanger for the small developing signs of a crack long before it becomes the kind of failure that puts carbon monoxide into a home.

The igniter. Hot surface igniters live in heat, and heat is what eventually destroys them, which makes them close to a consumable part. They are the most common nuisance failure we see, and our recommendation is to replace one that is more than two years old rather than wait for it to quit. A nuisance failure on a Tuesday in October is a small job. The same failure while you are out of town in January, with nobody noticing, is how a small part becomes water damage.

The motors. A modern furnace has several motors, and a worn bearing in any of them heats up the longer it runs, expands, and eventually seizes. The furnace locks itself out, and by the time someone arrives it may have cooled off and started running again, which makes the fault hard to catch. During a maintenance visit we listen to those motors and check the amperage they are drawing, and both give us early signs of a bearing on its way out.

The refrigerant charge, if you have a heat pump. A heat pump that is low on refrigerant still produces heat through the mild part of fall, so nothing seems wrong. When the first cold week arrives and the system has to work hard, it does not have the capacity to keep up, and the first sign for many homeowners is a much higher electricity bill. There is no getting that money back from BC Hydro once the power has been used, so finding a low charge in October is worth a great deal more than finding it in December.

A deeper clean. A coil that looks clean from the outside can still be badly restricted deep inside, because it has been pulling air, and everything in the air, through itself all summer. That is why we recommend a professional cleaning even when the surface brushing looks like it did the job.

What is different about heating a Squamish home

Not a great deal, and we would rather say that plainly than invent a special local climate. Squamish sits in a very similar climate zone to North Vancouver. It gets a bit colder, and it gets significantly more snow, and the snow is what changes the job.

Fresh-air intakes that sit low on a wall can end up buried, so if yours is somewhere snow piles up, take steps to protect it before the season starts. The overhead hazards above outdoor units matter more here for the same reason, and the cottonwood that coats everything in June is a Squamish texture that heat pump coils do not enjoy. Whether you are in Valleycliffe, Brackendale, or up in Garibaldi Highlands, the snow load coming off a steep roof is the thing to plan around.

One more thing that comes up in this town more than most is the renovated house, because Squamish has a lot of homes that have been changed over the years, and some of that work happened without a permit. If you have moved into a house and found a small room that oddly has no window, one possible reason is that a furnace or water heater vents too close to where that window would be, and the room was closed up to keep combustion gases out. An exhaust that discharges near a window or a fresh-air intake is a carbon monoxide risk, and it gets more serious in winter when the windows stay shut. If something about your venting looks odd, it is worth having someone look at it, not to assign blame for old work, just so you know what you have.

A scheduled fall visit versus an emergency call in the cold

When the first cold snap lands and you discover the heating is not working, you are into an emergency callout, and you are into it during the busiest week of the year for every heating company in the corridor. A lot of people are not proactive, so when it gets cold we get very busy, and it can take longer to reach you. We triage and prioritize anyone who is without heat, and a house with young kids or someone vulnerable in it goes to the front of that line, but the line exists. If the failure happens over a weekend, the visit costs more than a regular service call on top of everything else.

The same problem found in September, October, or even early November is a different experience, because it is a scheduled maintenance visit at a maintenance rate. If we find something, the repair happens in an orderly way, on a date that suits you, with parts ordered normally rather than rushed in, and without anyone working overtime or leaving another job to get to you. You also get time to weigh your options, which matters most when the finding is a big one, like a heat exchanger nearing the end of its life. That is not a decision anyone wants to make on a frozen Saturday morning with the house cooling down around them.

A cold room might not be a heating problem

The house with the cold back bedrooms is one of the most common things we deal with, and it shows up most in the fall, right after summer. People push cooling upstairs during the hot months, where the main living area and the thermostat usually are, and downstairs ends up short on air. Coming into winter, most people remember to open the downstairs vents back up. Very few think to turn the upstairs air down, so the thermostat's floor gets most of the heat, satisfies early, and shuts the system off before the rest of the house catches up.

Everything in a ducted home has to be balanced in relation to where the thermostat sits. An air balance tells you exactly where each register should be set, and we can give you a summer setting and a winter setting so you can manage the change yourself each year. If you have a room you have written off as the cold one, it might be a damper adjustment rather than a new system.

Squamish heating readiness: the questions we get asked most

When should I get my furnace serviced before winter in BC?

September through early November is the window. The system gets checked while it is still a scheduled maintenance visit rather than an emergency call, and anything found can be repaired on a normal timeline before the cold arrives.

How often should I change my furnace filter?

Follow the interval for your filter type, and every time you change it, make sure it fits tightly in its slot. A loose filter lets air and dirt bypass it, which is what makes the inside of a furnace dirty.

Do I need a carbon monoxide detector if I have a gas furnace?

Yes. A furnace heat exchanger can fail slowly or all at once, and a sudden failure can release a significant amount of carbon monoxide. A quality CO sensor, or a smoke alarm with one built in, is the safeguard, and one that is as old as the house is worth replacing.

Should I clear snow away from my heat pump?

Most modern units keep drifting snow off the coil on their own by running the fan, so light accumulation around the base is usually fine. What you want to prevent is a chunk of snow sliding off a roof or tree and burying the unit, so look at what hangs over it before winter.

Why is my electricity bill so high when it gets cold?

If you heat with a heat pump, one common cause is low refrigerant. The system still makes heat but has lost capacity, so it runs long and hard without keeping up, and the bill climbs. A fall maintenance visit catches a low charge before the cold months put it on your bill.

Getting ahead of the season

If you would like a set of eyes on your system before winter, that is what a fall maintenance visit is for, and it is the kind of visit our Comfort Club members have on the calendar without having to remember it. If you are further along, weighing whether an aging furnace should be repaired or replaced, or thinking about a heat pump, an in-home consult is where that conversation starts. We come out, look at your actual system and your actual house, and lay out the options with the numbers attached so the decision stays yours. You can book an in-home consult five days a week, and nothing gets decided on the spot unless you want it to.

If cooling is part of your thinking for next summer, our post on why a hot Squamish house is usually a heating system question is a good companion, and our guide Thinking About a Heat Pump? Read This First covers what to know before you spend anything.

We are Porcupine Mechanical, a Squamish-based mechanical contractor working from the North Shore up through the Sea-to-Sky, from North Vancouver to Squamish to Whistler, on residential heating, cooling, and ventilation. Our whole thing is doing it efficiently and doing it right the first time.