A January FPL bill that looks like August means the furnace is doing all the work

The bill that gives it away

Florida Power & Light serves the city and most of St. Johns County, and in a St. Augustine winter the FPL bill is the furnace’s only honest witness. Most homes here heat with electricity, either an electric furnace or the heat strips inside a heat pump’s air handler, and both draw a great deal of current when they run. A furnace that’s short-cycling, running on a stuck sequencer, or carrying the load because the heat pump half of the system quit, can run up a January bill that looks like a July one while the house feels perfectly fine.

Gas furnaces on Peoples Gas lines, which serve the city, St. Augustine Beach, Elkton and parts of the unincorporated county, show it differently: a gas bill that climbs while the house gets colder, because the burners are cycling on and off every few minutes and never finishing a heat cycle.

Either way, the bill arrives before the breakdown does. That’s the moment to call.

This is not a heat pump tune-up

Furnace repair is a narrower thing than people expect, so it’s worth saying what it isn’t. It isn’t maintenance; a scheduled cleaning and inspection has its own page and its own purpose. It isn’t heat pump work; a heat pump that’s stopped heating is a different diagnosis even if it lives in the same air handler as the electric strips. And it isn’t a replacement conversation, though it can turn into one if the heat exchanger on a gas furnace has cracked or an electric furnace is burning through elements on a twenty-year-old cabinet.

What it is: a fault in the heating equipment, found, priced and fixed, with the system tested afterward under a real call for heat.

What furnace repair covers in a city with few furnaces

St. Augustine’s housing stock shapes the work. Electric furnaces and strip-heat air handlers dominate the block ranches of St. Augustine Shores and St. Augustine South and the boom-era subdivisions out at World Golf Village. Gas furnaces turn up in newer construction along Peoples Gas mains, in some St. Augustine Beach townhomes, and in dual-fuel systems where a homeowner wanted faster heat than a heat pump gives on a 35-degree morning. The historic districts mostly heat with the same mini-split heat pumps that cool them.

So the repair list splits in two:

Electric furnaces and heat strips - Burned-out elements and failed sequencers, the most common winter call. - Limit switches tripping from low airflow: a clogged filter, a slow blower, or crushed attic duct. - Breakers tripping under strip load, which can be the strips, the wiring or the breaker. - Control boards and relays damaged by a summer surge and not discovered until the first cold night. - Blower motors and capacitors, shared with the cooling side.

Gas furnaces - Ignitors that crack and flame sensors that oxidize over a long idle season. - Pressure switches and condensate traps on high-efficiency models, often blocked by the same algae that clogs AC drains here. - Inducer motors, gas valves and control boards. - Venting problems and heat exchanger inspection, with a carbon monoxide test on every gas call.

We repair every major brand. Lennox is what we install when the furnace has reached the end.

Call for furnace repair

What happens once we’re at the furnace

The visit runs differently for the two furnace types, but the shape is the same.

1. Call for heat at the thermostat and watch what the system does. Many furnace faults announce themselves in the first sixty seconds: a click with no ignition, a blower that runs with cold air, a strip that stages and drops out.
2. Check airflow before anything else. Filter, blower, static pressure. Low airflow mimics a dozen other faults and causes several of them.
3. Electric: measure voltage and amp draw on each heat strip, test sequencers and limits, inspect the wiring and the breaker for heat damage. Gas: inspect the burners and the heat exchanger, test the ignitor and flame sensor, check the pressure switch and vent, and run a combustion analysis with a carbon monoxide reading.
4. Find the cause behind the part. A burned element gets a reason, not just a replacement.
5. Write the price. You decide before the work starts. On a gas furnace with a failed heat exchanger, the honest answer is replacement, and you get a free estimate instead of a repair bill.
6. Repair, then test under load. Temperature rise across the furnace, amp draw or combustion numbers, and a full cycle from call to satisfied thermostat.

How to get the house ready

• Clear the closet, garage corner or attic hatch where the furnace lives. Townhouse utility closets in St. Augustine Beach are often packed around the unit.
• Leave the thermostat set to heat with the fault present, so the technician sees what you’ve been seeing.
• Have the last two FPL or Peoples Gas bills handy.
• Note any smell on startup. A dusty smell for a minute on the first cold night is normal; a persistent burning or chemical smell is not, and the unit should stay off until we arrive.
• If a carbon monoxide alarm has sounded, get everyone out, leave the furnace off, and call from outside.
• For dual-fuel systems, tell us whether the heat pump or the furnace seems to be running; the thermostat’s display usually says.

When and from where

Cook’s dispatches to St. Augustine from the Palm Coast headquarters, about 39 minutes to downtown and a little longer to Flagler Estates or Crescent Beach. Furnace calls get the same around-the-clock response as cooling calls and the same no-after-hours-charge pricing. On the handful of nights a year when the county drops into the 30s, we run the routes until the calls stop.