This should be a much quieter winter! Pictured is the inducer for our gas furnace. The original was almost 10 years old and it would rattle the entire furnace when it started up. To be honest, my wife and I both expected it to spectacularly fail each time it ran. As somewhat expected, the centrifugal blower wheel had failed… more properly, cracked so that it would get out of balance when the inducer motor ran. I guess I’d get out of sorts if something failed while I was rotating at 3600 RPM. Maybe once I crack the assembly apart to be able to see more than peeking through the air ports, I’ll share some pictures in another post. It’s made so that the entire assembly must be replaced, not individual parts.
The original inducer has been discontinued, but the replacement is almost identical. The blower wheel is made differently, looking like it will last longer, and the new motor has a capacitor. I was glad to see that the manufacturer included an assortment of orifices for the input to the inducer as I wasn’t sure the original one would still be suitable. Everything lined up for mounting hardware. The assembly is made to be used with a few different furnace models and styles.
I could not get a good picture of the entire inducer assembly in place, so here’s the best for now. I had moved the control board out of the way before taking this picture.
Access wasn’t bad, just remove the control board mounts so it could hang down, rotate (after loosening the Fernco clamps) the supply air pipe, and remove four screws.
The pictures above show the work area. There wasn’t much to it, but something like this should only be done by someone with experience who has worked in this field before. The pressure switch mounts upside down to the original and the ground wire is attached on the opposite side of the motor from the original. The two-pin connector is a match of the original.
Basically it looks like the new inducer assembly is designed from lessons learned from the original. It runs noticeably quieter than the original did before the blower started to crack into pieces. There is almost no hum transferring to the cabinet. The original wasn’t noisy by any means (that is, before it started failing), just was a bit easier to hear around the house if things were quiet.
I was glad to see that they included the exhaust over temperature thermostat as the water shield for the old one had split. As you may have guessed, this furnace is a high efficiency furnace with a condensing burner. We use LP here to fuel it. Condensate from LP exhaust is very corrosive.
From start to finish, the project took maybe half an hour to complete, it just had a lot of steps to accomplish, but was straightforward. Posting the next few days may be more sporadic than normal as the weather is supposed to be nice and cool – helps a lot as I’m still trying to get over surgery and chemo for pancreatic cancer, there’s a ton of outdoor work to get done.
